Santa Fe, New Mexico

Early Attractions

In the late 1800s professionals and amateurs came to study the native peoples of the region. There was particular interest in the Pueblos, whose terraced, multistoried earthen and stone buildings were often erected into, or reflected, grand landscape forms—as evidenced at locations such as Taos and mesa-top Ácoma. Numerous archeologi-cal sites, and particularly the Ancestral Puebloans' large abandoned complexes at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, were attractions as well. The work of individuals such as ethnologist Frank Cushing and archeologist Adolph Bandelier, and institutions such as the joint Museum of New Mexico/School of American Archeology (1909), headed by Edgar Hewett, and the Laboratory of Anthropology (1927), funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., turned Santa Fe into an early center for archeological and Native American research.

Native peoples, the distinct local Hispanic culture, Santa Fe's dramatic natural setting, and a climate thought to be healthy, also attracted artists, intellectuals, the affluent, and developers of health resorts and sanatoriums. By the 1920s, preceded by Taos, Santa Fe emerged as a full artist colony, home to photographers, painters, sculptors, writers, and many more who came for the creative environment, came to convalesce, or were brought by patrons. Of the painters, early pioneers such as Carlos Vierra were followed by countless others, from visiting modernists such as Marsden Hartley, to groups that established themselves locally such as Los Cinco Pintores, to contemporary icons such as Georgia O'Keeffe (who lived in Abiquiu). Of the writers, Mary Austin made her home in Santa Fe, Willa Cather used it as a setting for her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop, Governor Lew Wallace wrote Ben[Page 680]Hur there, and D. H. Lawrence used the region as a retreat.

Santuario de Guadalupe is an adobe-style mission in Santa Fe built in 1781 that is now a museum.

Source: Karen Wiley.

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