“Let it be a Woman’s Park”: Gender, Identity and the Battle over Mesa Verde

In an effort to more fully explain how gender shaped early environmental reform in the United States, this paper examines McClurg’s attempt to establish a state or national park at Mesa Verde that would be under the direction of women. When McClurg’s unprecedented aspirations for Mesa Verde became public in 1906, she was quickly denounced by several Colorado newspapers. In the nasty, public, and highly gendered debate that followed, newspapers declared McClurg and her fellow CCDA members unfit to manage the site. Unfortunately, neither Congress nor the public was any more sympathetic to her cause. When Mesa Verde became a national park later that year, park officials took steps to obscure McClurg’s role and diminish the CCDA’s legacy, aligning it more closely with the mission of other national parks, such as Yellowstone. This paper demonstrates that an unrealized, alternative future more attuned with feminine ideals existed both for Mesa Verde and the National Park Service, which was established in 1916