The Greatest Discovery in North America Found by a Rancher | Descriptive Audio

There is a remote landscape in the American Southwest that has a mysterious past. Back in the late 1800s, a rancher was searching these mountains for gold and precious gems. He described ancient stone houses hidden along the cliffs. He decided to search those ruins to see if by chance they contained anything valuable, but they didn't. Instead, he found something else. What he discovered compelled him to leave the mountains, travel to the nearest town, and eventually seek out experts. Those experts were archaeologists. Noah and I are out here looking for clues to see if we can get closer to a place that fewer than five people even know about. This quest started months ago when Noah and I were hiking. We'd been traveling a remote corner of a system looking for a cliff house when we stumbled upon a cave that had a name carved into it. We did not know about it at the time, but this place had a very dark past. The more we researched, the more we realized that we had stumbled upon something extraordinary. Now I'm going to tell you what that is, but first we're going to look for the cave the rancher found on the day he was searching for his cows, because this particular cave with this dark past isn't it. Not only do we know that this is connected to the significant rock art panel, we also know that it's likely connected to the modern-day dugout ranch. So what we want to do the next few days in this area is connect clues that have survived through newspaper articles and word of mouth to search for likely locations. And depending on terrain and weather, we should be able to narrow the search down. In 1896, this country looked very different. No GPS, no archaeological maps, just ranchers and miners and thousands of square miles of unexplored canyon country. One of those ranchers was Melvin R. Turner. He ran cattle here and like most people living on the frontier, he often stumbled across ruins. But nothing could have prepared him for what happened in the summer of 1896. While exploring with his nephew Ed Turner, they came upon a cave. When they stepped inside, it was immediately obvious people had once lived there. The ceiling was blackened with smoke, an old fireplace still remained, and near that fireplace they noticed something strange. A white fleecy material protruding from the ash. Curious, they pulled on it. At first, it looked like nothing more than a tangled mass of old fibers, but it wasn't. It had been carefully placed there, used as a stopper, and beneath it was a large pottery vessel buried beneath the cave floor, buried five feet deep. Mel and Ed carefully removed the vessel, and when they looked inside, they found something neither of them had ever seen before. To this day, what their eyes were looking at is still considered the greatest archaeological discovery in North America. Ranchers did not have a lot of cash, and Mel Turner needed some cash, so they rode across the border into the boomtown of Telluride, Colorado, and pledged the finding as financial collateral to local banker W.E. Wheeler. When the Turners fell on hard times and failed to repay the debt, the banker foreclosed on their collateral. The ownership of the treasure now belonged to W.E. Wheeler. What did they find? Well, I'm going to tell you, but first, why am I intrigued and why you should be too. The treasure remained with the Wheeler family through the early part of the 20th century. Then came the Great Depression. W.E. Wheeler's bank felled in 1929. When Wheeler died in 1935, his wife, Antoinette, packed up much of what she owned before leaving Telluride. Some of her belongings were stored inside Enio Pecorino's dry goods store. Years later, she wrote Enio a letter. She told him he could simply keep whatever she had left behind, and she never came back. Think about that for a minute. One of the greatest archaeological discoveries in North America was sitting inside a forgotten suitcase in an old dry goods store, completely unnoticed. The story should have ended there, and it almost did. Decades passed. Even the people living in Telluride had no idea what was sitting inside that locked suitcase. Then, something unexpected happened. In the early 1970s, a woman named Harriet Billings began helping Enio sort through the old building. She opened crate after crate, barrel after barrel, all kinds of forgotten belongings, but there was one container she couldn't open, a locked tan suitcase. After Enio's death in 1973, the contents of the building were given to the Telluride Historical Museum. When the suitcase was finally opened, the mystery began all over again. Inside was a blanket, a skein of cotton yarn, and an old photograph. Under that fleecy stopper, two ranchers had found a folded blanket, white with red, brown, and black stripes, still remarkably intact. As they unfolded it, more objects appeared, a bone awl, a six-foot string of tiny beads, thousands of them, pieces of yarn. I imagine Mel and Ed probably thought they had discovered something interesting. What they couldn't have known was that this single find would be considered the greatest find in North American history. Why? Fabric never survived. Imagine a blanket that survived perfectly for 800 years, and it was made of cotton. Cotton doesn't even grow well in this area, so where did it come from? It was evidence of trade, or evidence of skilled craftsmanship, evidence that ancient people living in these canyons were connected to a much larger world than anyone had imagined. The discovery should have changed archaeology forever. Instead, something unexpected happened. The blanket survived. The cave disappeared. Remember that old photograph that fell out of the suitcase in 1973? Across the bottom, someone had written, prehistoric ruins in southern Utah, taken by E. Turner, given to W.E. Wheeler. That photograph was a photo taken in 1902 of the cliff dwelling where the ranchers were the day the blanket was found. A single photograph, the greatest clue in thousands of square miles. Connected to it was a newspaper article published in the Telluride Daily Journal, dated August 14, 1896, that recounts how local rancher Ed Turner unearthed ancient Anasazi textile from a sealed earthen pot in a cliff dwelling in southern Utah. For years, people knew about the blanket, but somehow no one recorded the cave's exact location. No detailed map, no coordinates, nothing. As the decades passed, the story spread. The blanket became famous, but the place where it had been found slowly faded into history. You see, the cave is the real mystery. Because the blanket tells us what was found, the cave tells us why it was there, and that's a much bigger story. That might have been the end of the story, if not for a man named Fred Blackburn. Before making this film, I had the opportunity to speak with Fred personally, and I have to tell you, Fred doesn't just know the story, he's living it. Fred was born right here in Telluride. In fact, he was born in the very same building that now houses the Telluride Historical Museum, the exact place that houses the blanket on display today. For decades, Fred has researched the Telluride Blanket, interviewing people, tracking down photographs, digging through forgotten newspaper accounts, even following leads that most people would have given up on years earlier. When I spoke with Fred, one thing became immediately clear, Fred Blackburn knew the answer was still out there. The old photographs survived, the newspaper articles survived, and maybe somewhere in the canyons, the signatures left by Mel and Ed Turner were still there too. But Fred could not solve the mystery alone, so archaeologist Winston Hurst joined the search, and together they worked backwards, not from a site, but from an artifact. The Telluride Blanket, old articles, old photographs, old clues, for years the mystery remained unsolved. Then in the summer of 2004, everything changed. Bill Sagstetter walked into Edge of the Cedars Museum in Blanding and picked up an old copy of Blue Mountain Shadows. As his wife Beth read Hurst's article aloud on the drive to Bluff, Utah, Bill glanced at the photograph. He knew the place immediately because 36 years earlier, in 1968, Bill had found and photographed the same cliff dwelling. When he compared his old slides to the Turner photograph, the match was clear. Winston Hurst later even confirmed it. For the first time in more than a century, they knew where this cliff dwelling was, but something still didn't fit. The newspaper said the pottery vessel holding the blanket had been buried beneath the cave floor. The ruin Bill identified sat on bedrock. There was no place deep enough to bury a vessel of the size they found. Then they noticed one overlooked detail. The cave was not in the ruin. It was above it. Roughly 300 feet higher was the cave. Inside were the names Ed T. and M. R. Turner written in red dated 1896. The photograph matched. The article matched. The signatures matched. And finally, this story started to make sense. The cave was documented, but its location protected. Everyone involved understood why. The site had survived because almost no one knew where it was. Today, only a small group of people know the exact location. They made a pact to keep it that way. That is where my part of this story begins. I am a hunter, but the treasure at the end is not what drives me. It's the search. Somewhere out there hidden among thousands of square miles of canyons is the cave where one of the greatest artifacts ever found in America rested for centuries. I could try to ask Fred Blackburn where it is, but what fun would that be? I don't want anything from the cave. No artifact. No secret. Just a photograph standing in front of it. That would be my trope. Because this is a real American mystery. A hidden cave, a lost location, and a blanket whose story survived when almost everything else should have been forgotten. From an ancient weaver in southeastern Utah, to a buried vessel, to a forgotten suitcase, to the hands of ranchers, bankers, historians, archaeologists, and museum creators. Every generation had the chance to lose it, and somehow every generation made sure it survived. Thank you for joining Noah and me on this journey. We'll see you on the next adventure. So after all these years, the mystery of the Telluride Blanket still isn't completely solved. We know the story of the men who found it, we have the old photographs, and we know the incredible blanket they carried out of these canyons more than a century ago. But the exact place where it was discovered is still known by only a handful of people, fewer than five by some accounts. And maybe that's the way it should stay. We came out here hoping to understand the story a little better, to search these canyons, see the ruins for ourselves, and get as close as we could to a place almost no one has ever been able to identify. We may never stand in the exact alcove where that blanket was found, but somewhere out there, hidden among these cliffs, the place is still there. And for now, so is the mystery.