Gustaf Nordenskiöld

Nordenskiöld's North American segment of a world tour began when he landed in New York on 27 May 1891 aboard the SS Waesland of the Red Star Line.

9 from Charleston, North Carolina, he tells his father to address letters to the Swedish Consulate in San Francisco and on 27 June 1891 he wrote to his mother from Denver, Colorado, and included a request that further letters be addressed to the Swedish Consulate in Yokohama, Japan, so the world tour was still on his mind.

Three days later, on 30 June 1891, also from Denver, he tells his father that tomorrow he was going to Durango, Colorado, and the "Mancos Valley" where there are a "number of cliff dwellings".

When Nordenskiöld arrived in Durango he made arrangements to stay with cattle rancher Richard Wetherill at the Alamo Ranch in Mancos, Colorado.

[3] In the late 19th century, there were no laws against treasure-hunting or selling artifacts in Colorado;[4] in addition to the ever-present threat of vandalism and looting, scholars and tourists alike had the habit of taking valuable items from Mesa Verde as trophies.

[5] In this climate, Nordenskiöld loaded Mesa Verde artifacts into Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad boxcars in Durango, Colorado,[5] and headed for Europe, with most of the items eventually ending up at the National Museum of Finland.

In the December 9, 2005, Denver Post article, Electra Draper wrote: "...residents of Durango were beginning to think foreigners shouldn't be removing local artifacts.

Originally published in a Stockholm newspaper, and then later written in the preface to his 1892 book "From the Far West, Memories of America" Nordenskiöld states "The free roaming nomadic life, which this research forced me into, appealed greatly to my spirit and created a desire for excursions farther into the deserts of the American West.

Nordenskiöld's collections from Mesa Verde were bought by a Finnish collector who eventually donated them to the University of Helsinki.

The Riksarkivet includes letters to his father from Washington, Philadelphia, Charleston, Mammoth Cave (in Kentucky), Durango, Navajo Canyon, and other locations.

584–620 Publisher(s): American Geographical Society; Reviewed Authors(s): G. Nordenskiold; Source: The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol.