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:
“Men are fools that wish to die!
Is ‘t not fine to dance and sing
When the bells of death do ring?”
—Unknown. Hey Nonny No! (L. 2–4)
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)
“Sinks to the deep abyss where Satan crawls
Where horrid Death and Despair lies.”
—Thomas Traherne (1636–1674)