The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (106 page)

All this natural history and yearning for the high country awakened Roosevelt to new possibilities for preservationism. By June 1906, as Congress adjourned for the summer, Roosevelt grew anxious about the fate of United States’ western sites, particularly the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Devils Tower, and Mesa Verde. With regard to these, getting commitments out of legislators was like tearing tin. Arrogantly, Congress was also stalling on whether to accept from the state of California two magnificent gifts: Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove. What in hell were the stingy western senators thinking? That’s what Roosevelt wanted to know. Piqued at Congress’s hesitation over further preservation of Yosemite, Roosevelt wrote to Senator George Clement Perkins of California, a Republican who was an embarrassment to the Republican Party, a sharp letter demanding that Congress, without delay, seize these old-growth redwoods, spectacular waterfalls, and unparalleled scenic wonders for the enrichment of the public domain. With San Francisco three-quarters destroyed by the earthquake, and people living in tent cities on the outskirts of town, the federal government needed to do something special for California.

“It seems to me that it would be a real misfortune if this Congress adjourned without accepting the magnificent gift of California of the Yosemite Park,” Roosevelt wrote. “What is the status of the matter? Is it not possible to have it put through? I earnestly hope you will look it up and let me know. It would be too bad if, either from indifference or because of paying heed to selfish interests, the United States Government fails to act as in my judgement it is morally obligatory upon it to act in view of the generous action of California.”
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IV

On June 6, 1906, President Roosevelt signed into law “An Act for the Preservation of American Antiquities.” It allowed for a president to designate “historical landmarks, historic preservation structures, and other objects of scientific interest” as national monuments. Drafted by the team of Lacey and Hewett, the act was stunning in its exclusion of Congress. It was an unparalleled tool for a president to use.
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The preservationists involved (who included W. H. Holmes of the Smithsonian Institu
tion and the Reverend Henry Mason-Baum, known for excavations in the Holy Land had so carefully crafted the language of the legislation that it sounded inoffensive and whisked through the Senate (on May 24) and the House (on June 5) practically unaltered. It gave the president the unencumbered power to unilaterally declare the protection of landscapes of archaeological, scientific, and environmental value federal land.
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As the historian Robert W. Righter has said in the
Western Historical Quarterly
, now Roosevelt could seek “rapid presidential action” instead of a “dillydally” with a “tortoise-paced Congress.”
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At last Roosevelt had a legal way to circumvent Congress in these matters.
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More than any other policy Roosevelt adopted as president, the signing of the Antiquities Act has earned him praise from modern environmentalists; it represented the self-proclaimed “wilderness hunter” as a high-minded naturalist statesman. Roosevelt had confounded pro-development interests in the West with a preservationist program for both now and tomorrow. There was no longer a need to negotiate with the timber and mining lobbies over such sites as Devils Tower or the Petrified Forest. The resourceful Roosevelt had given America a way station for these places on the road to national park status. The genius of Lacey and Hewett’s effort was that the Antiquities Act didn’t limit the acreage a president could designate as national monument lands on behalf of science. Basically, the acreage was entirely up to a president’s discretion. In wiggle words, the act stated simply that the monuments were to be “confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.” But Roosevelt’s idea of “small was bigger than anybody else’s in official Washington.

Until, June 1906, Congress saw Lacey as the bulwark against Roosevelt’s overreach. Colleagues knew that Lacey was eager to save abandoned ruins of prehistoric peoples in the Southwest, but he was also a man of compromise. Lacey, imbued with the European social ideal of a strong central state, had pounded on doors on Capitol Hill asking for assistance in saving El Morro (Inscription Rock), Montezuma Castle, and Chaco Canyon. He was always soft-spoken and modest in demeanor. As chair of the House Committee on Public Lands he was, however, a formidable power broker, particularly with the delegations from the Middle West and West. So it was understandable that congressmen and senators from Montana, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and other western states agreed to Lacey’s antiquities project. Why not? Their reaction was as old as politics. They’d scratch Lacey’s back and, as a quid pro quo, he would ease up on issues such as timber leasing, mining contracts, and grazing laws in the
national forests. These western legislators surely must have worried. But about Roosevelt’s overdoing the designation of national monuments, the worst case scenario was no worse than the bird refuges of 1903 to 1905: nothing more than a few hundred acres of prehistoric ruins and natural oddities scattered about the American landscape. That would be a tolerable progressive indulgence compared with the grabs of forest reserves.

Congress, in effect, had been tricked by the otherwise ethical Lacey. The Antiquities Act was a dangerous precedent to set with Roosevelt in the White House. The legislation had placed a new conservationist weapon—the national monument—at T.R.’s disposable. To think that Roosevelt wouldn’t stretch his new powers to the extreme was naive. Certainly Roosevelt was honest about the prehistoric ruins in New Mexico and Arizona: these resources
were
preserved for the sake of science. No longer would southwestern pot hunters or tourist vandals have free rein to desecrate these ancient sites. Where Roosevelt grew mischievous, however, was in exploiting the loose language of the Antiquities Act, which stipulated that national monuments were ipso facto of
scientific
value. To Roosevelt a marsh, an arroyo, and a limestone cliff were all of scientific interest. What wasn’t a biological or geological birthright to him? And now, as of 1906, the federal government would become the caretaker of historically significant ruins.

At first, the Antiquities Act would permanently protect part of the Four Corners region in the West. Lacey had traveled earlier that spring from Santa Fe to Durango, Colorado, and had been aghast to see thieves taking artifacts from Mesa Verde. He knew that Roosevelt wanted to make life miserable for such heirloom robbers. Lacey began pushing harder for the Anasazi cliff dwellings near Durango, Colorado, to become a national park. Along with Hewett, he also championed preserving the ruins of the Pajarito Plateau in New Mexico near Los Alamos. A grassroots effort was forming to create a “national cultural reservation” on the Pajarito Plateau. When Lacey first visited the region in August 1902, he had been mesmerized by the deserted caves, communal ruins, and adobe villages where Indians still lived. And he knew that the trail guide at Four Corners, John Wetherill, was Roosevelt’s idea of a great American. Wetherill was a real-life John Ermine in the Navajo-Apache-Hopi lands.
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Old photographs show Wetherill with deep-set eyes and a pronounced
nose, looking looking like a weathered, desert version of Seth Bullock. He wore a turquoise stone to ornament his favorite belt buckle, and his hair was cut bare on the sides; this midwesterner had clearly adopted the Southwest as his home. The novelist Zane Grey wrote about Wetherill, idealistically but simply, in his essay collection
Tales of Lonely Travels
. Once the Antiquities Act was passed, Wetherill made recommendations in the Southwest as requested by Forest Order 19, which asked national forest supervisors to report on prehistoric structures and other artifacts and sites of scientific interest located on the western reserves.

Born in Kansas in 1866, “Hosteen John,” as he was called, had moved to Mancos, Colorado in 1880. Although ranching was the family business, Hosteen John became obsessed with the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde in southwestern Colorado. By 1900 Wetherill, with his wife, Louisa Wade, moved to the Navajo lands of New Mexico. Tired of dealing with droughts and rustlers, he decided to own trading posts at Ojo Alamo, Chavez, and Chaco Canyon. Besides selling trinkets and provisions he became the best-known trail guide for the entire, vast Four Corners region. It was Hosteen John who had taken Hewett and Lacey to see the astounding prehistoric ruins there.
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In retrospect, Lacey, Hewett, and Wetherill were together the ideal advocates for southwestern antiquities: a congressman, an archaeologist, and a knowledgeable guide. After gathering information from both Hewett and Wetherill, Lacey felt certain he could get Congress and the Senate to approve of Mesa Verde. He was more worried about the Petrified Forest of Arizona (soon to become a favorite spot of John Muir and John Burroughs). Thousands of people there were stealing Pliocene fossils, pottery shards, and petrified logs. These thieves would just leave with whatever they wanted. When the Pueblo people had lived in the Painted Desert–Petrified Forest area, they had used fossilized wood for tools; in 1906, travelers en route to California collected chunks for souvenirs, sometimes by the wagonful. “This remarkable deposit has been subject to much vandalism already, and unless permanently reserved and protected, is sure of ultimate destruction,” Lacey wrote about the Petrified Forest for
Shield’s Magazine
. “The land is useless for agriculture, as it is in the heart of a desert. An attempt was made some years ago to work these trees up into table tops, but the prevalence of small holes in the body of the finest of the logs prevented the success of this commercial enterprise. Otherwise this great national curiosity would have long since become a matter of history only.”
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Consumed with impatience, Lacey started learning every geological
fact about Arizona’s Petrified Forest as if he were on assignment from the American Museum of Natural History. To draw attention to the great petrified logs, he wrote reports, delivered speeches, and lobbied the Santa Fe Railway about their value as a stopover attraction for tourists on the way to the Grand Canyon. Lacey also wrote a slogan for the railroad to use: “Come see the Grand Canyon (the greatest scenic wonder in the world) and the Petrified Forest of Arizona (the greatest natural curiosity).” When congressmen from California, Washington, Oregon, and Wyoming told Lacey that their states had petrified forests, too, Lacey grew exasperated. The fools didn’t understand.
Of course
, there were other petrified forests. But his was “
The
Petrified Forest of the World,” in a class by itself. “Yellow, red, blue, white, black, brown, rose, purple, green, gray, in fact, all the colors of the rainbow, are found in these trees,” Lacey said. “Many of them are five feet in diameter and 140 feet in length, and lie just as they were originally deposited, imbedded a few inches in the desert sand.”
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Since the early 1890s Roosevelt and Lacey had made a lot of conservation deals together. They had become alter egos. But Roosevelt had never seen Lacey so stirred up as he was over the Petrified Forest. Lacey even quoted the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had said that the great arches of Gothic cathedrals were a “petrified religion.” And the Arizona Territory—God bless the United States—had the most holy petrified valley in the western hemisphere. Lacey admitted that he wasn’t schooled in the principles of stratigraphy, but he nevertheless knew that the geologic history of the Petrified Forest was worth preserving. Whether they were using petrified wood for tabletops or chopping down old-growth redwoods for decks, Lacey was annoyed by the disrespect that business enterprises and commercial vandals were showing toward the western heritage. “As hard almost as the diamond, as brilliant in colors as the flowers of the field, this ancient forest, which was transformed into stone perhaps before man appeared on the planet, is still to be seen under the sunshine of Arizona,” Lacey wrote. “It should by all means be preserved for the admiration and wonder of generations yet to come.”
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According to Professor Rebecca Conrad, author of
Places of Quiet Beauty
, Congressman Lacey inserted the words “scenic and scientific” into the Antiquities Act as a clever way to preserve places like the Petrified Forest of Arizona. Here wood had been turned to solid silica, rock, and quartz. Lacey also wrote an account of his 1902 trip to Arizona with Wetherill as his guide, and of how his idea for the Antiquities Act came into focus. The archaeological district known as Newspaper Rock Petroglyphs had
Pueblo dwellings actually made out of petrified wood. It was all astounding! Borrowing a page from Merriam, Lacey cleverly chose the Roosevelt elk (T.R.’s beloved species) and the Petrified Forest as his original impetus for the Antiquities Act. “It was this trip which led to the introduction and passage of my bill for the preservation of aboriginal ruins and places of scenic and scientific interest upon the public domain,” Lacey wrote, “under which the Petrified Forest, the Olympic Range Elk Reserve and about two hundred places of ethnological interest have been designated as ‘monuments’ and preserved to the public.”
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What a pity that Congressman Lacey has been left out of most environmental history textbooks covering the Roosevelt era! With the exception of Char Miller, Hal Rothman, Rebecca Conrad, and Patricia Nelson Limerick, few western historians have taken the time to realize all that Lacey did to save prehistoric ruins, desert ecosystems, bird sanctuaries, petrified forests, plug-dome volcanoes, wildlife-rich areas, and national wonders. But Roosevelt, at least, understood that Congressman Lacey was
the man
, the shrewdest pro-conservationist legislator of his time. Lacey’s secret had four aspects: he was a committed outdoorsman, amateur ornithologist, and Indian scholar, and he wasn’t a credit monger. He championed places like Mesa Verde, the Petrified Forest, Chaco Canyon, and El Morro, even though he earned no votes in Iowa’s Sixth District for doing so—Lacey was, therefore, a true American patriot. The Pajarito region of New Mexico, in particular, captivated him with its ancient rock drawings of the sun, snakes, and deer. All the caves and ruins of the Zuni, Taos, and Acoma, he believed, needed to be saved. As for the Petrified Forest, the trees had hardened into a complete and priceless landscape. “Let these trees be protected from vandalism and they will endure forever,” Lacey pleaded with the Senate. “It is to be hoped that the public sentiment which has urged and warmly approved of the action of the House of Representatives in thrice passing the bill to set aside this land as a public national park will in the near future bring about favorable action in the Senate. That lover of nature, the President, will be glad to sign such a bill.”
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