Death
Richard Wetherill remained in Chaco Canyon, homesteading and operating a trading post at Pueblo Bonito until his controversial murder by gunshot in 1910. Depending on the source, Wetherill's death was murder in cold blood by a Navajo Indian debtor or the loser in a gunfight caused by his own cattle rustling. Local Navajo Chiishchilí Biyeʼ‚ charged with his murder, served several years in prison, but was released in 1914 due to poor health. Wetherill is buried in the small cemetery west of Pueblo Bonito. The cemetery lies just over a hundred meters west of Bonito behind a wooden fence, and also contains the burial of his wife Marietta and her uncle Clayton Tompkins.
To many modern archaeologists Richard Wetherill remains a villain -- an uneducated cowboy who plundered the ruins of the pre-historic civilization of the Southwestern Indians. To others, he is an honest man whose accomplishments, the first excavations of the great ruins at Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon, may outweigh his faults. Adding to the enigma of Wetherill is the manner and controversy related to his death.
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Famous quotes containing the word death:
“To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy Power, which seems Omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change nor falter nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan! is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“There is something antique, even, in his style of treating his subject, reminding us that Heroes and Demi-gods, Fates and Furies, still exist; the common man is nothing to him, but after death the hero is apotheosized and has a place in heaven, as in the religion of the Greeks.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“How many wives have been forced by the death of well-intentioned but too protective husbands to face reality late in life, bewildered and frightened because they were strangers to it!”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)