On some great mysteries that symbolize the lure of the Southwest, then and
now.
There were a lot of reasons why Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park stood out
to me among the many amazing stops on my family’s National Park trip. Exploring
thousand year old cliff dwellings, hiking out to the site of long-preserved
petroglyphs, surprising a lone coyote at a sunset ruin—these are the kinds
of experiences that will hit a 13 year old AmericanStudier in a particular way.
But perhaps the most alluring aspect of Mesa Verde is its central mystery: the
question of why
the Anasazi people abruptly abandoned their cliff dwellings less than a century
into their time there, and what happened to them after their departure. Archaeologists
and historians have a variety of theories, but to some degree the Anasazi’s
fate will always remain a mystery—and will thus keep young AmericanStudiers
(and all the rest of us) coming back to Mesa Verde.
Even without an event as striking as the Anasazi’s departure, the dominant
features of the Southwest’s human landscape—villages atop isolated mesas,
dwellings in the sides of gaping canyons, petroglyphs carved in the rock and sand—lend
themselves nicely to the mysteriously inclined. No one capitalized on that element
more fully, nor more effectively, than Tony
Hillerman, the University of New Mexico journalism professor who wrote
(among his more than 30 total books) a series of 18 phenomenal mysteries
focused on Navajo policemen
Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. I may be misremembering for dramatic effect, but
I’m pretty sure I was reading one of the best novels in the series, A
Thief of Time (1988), during that family National Park vacation—and I
know that I won’t ever think of New Mexico’s canyons and ruins without thinking
of how Hillerman captures them in the hugely atmospheric, spooky, and
pitch-perfect opening to that novel.
Hillerman and his Navajo mysteries (as they’re usually collectively known) also
round out perfectly a series that began with Mary Hunter Austin. An Oklahoma
native and decorated World War II veteran, Hillerman moved to New Mexico for
his UNM job and, like Austin, found himself more and more deeply interested in
and attached to the region and its histories, cultures, and communities. (As
he chronicles in his wonderful memoir.) While I can’t say for sure how the
Navajo felt about Hillerman’s books, from everything
I have seen they recognized, as I believe would any reader, that Hillerman
treated his focal cultures and communities with the same abiding respect and
admiration he did his protagonist policemen and the landscapes they patrolled. Perhaps
the one thing that links every post this week is just how fully all of my focal
figures found themselves drawn to the Southwest—to its places, to its
histories, and, certainly, to its very American stories.
Special post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Southwest stories or histories you’d highlight?
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