When the Wetherills arrived in the Mancos Valley in 1879, they brought a humanitarian ethic that clashed with Native American policy, says relative and historian Harvey Leake.
Leake, whose great-grandfather was John Wetherill, gave a presentation at the Anasazi Heritage Center about his family’s adventures.
There’s more to the Wetherill story, he said, than just bringing attention to ancient ruins at Mesa Verde.
“I wanted to understand why the family’s respect and admiration of Native Americans was different from those around them,” Leake said, “so I set out on a treasure hunt of my family’s archives and interviewed elders.”
The family’s Quaker roots defined its attitude toward Native Americans and their ancestral connections to the Southwest, Leake said. The family lived and traded with tribes and rejected the U.S. government’s antagonistic view of Native Americans.
He shared some of that family history.
In 1907, John Wetherill witnessed a raid on a village on the San Juan River near Shiprock in which the U.S. Calvary arrested 10 Navajos and killed two others.
“My great-grandfather visited villages and tried to calm fears,” Leake said.
Leake expressed disdain for William T. Shelton, superintendent of the Shiprock boarding school, who, he said, helped instigate the raid to “take away traditional culture.”
“Reservations were a segregation tool so land could be made available for mining, farming and settling,” he said.
Leake also said that celebrated explorer John Wesley Powell also degraded Native American culture. In 1879, Powell was the director of the Bureau of Ethnology in charge of studying native tribes.
“Powell implied non-European cultures were intellectually and morally inferior, and that creating an artificial environment was progress, not living and adapting with nature as Native Americans did,” Leake said.
The prevailing attitude toward tribes contrasted with the Wetherills’ respect for them, Leake said.
The family patriarch, Benjamin Kite (BK) Wetherill, was a Quaker who lobbied for better treatment of Native Americans by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1860s. President Ulysses S. Grant hired BK Wetherill as a Native American agent charged with protecting cattle drivers from the Osage tribe.
“If you look at the letters, he actually protected the Osage from the cattle drivers and was there when the Osage made peace with 400 Pawnees,” Leake said.
His great-grandparents, John and Louisa Wetherill, embraced the frontier’s cultures, he said, and “had a house and trading post in Oljato, Utah, where their nearest white neighbor was 70 miles away.”
John Wetherill was the superintendent of Navajo National Monument from 1910 to 1938, and built a lodge south of Kayenta, Arizona, to entertain guests.
In Leake’s family’s collection is a manuscript by Louisa Wetherill that translates an oral history about adapting to nature by a Navajo man named Wolf Killer. A book about the story was published titled Wolfkiller: Wisdom from a 19th Century Navajo Shepherd.
A favorite quote by his great-grandfather is a lesson Leake holds dear.
“The desert will take care of you. At first, it’s big and beautiful, but you’re afraid of it. Then you begin to see its dangers, and you hate it. Then you learn how to overcome the dangers, and the desert is home.”
jmimiaga@the-journal.com
