The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [261]
That Christmas season President Roosevelt grew intrigued by the creation of the new American Scenic and History Preservation Society in New York (it was an outgrowth of Andrew H. Green’s Trustees of Scenic and History Places and Objects, which had helped Roosevelt save Palisades Park back in 1900). Just as Roosevelt wanted the Biological Survey to inventory all of America’s plants, birds, fish, insects, and wildlife, this new nonprofit organization, modeled after Britain’s National Trust, was going to protect both historic sites and scenic places. Roosevelt believed—thanks to Congressman Lacey’s inspection tour—that, for example, the Anasazi cliff dwellings in Colorado and the Pueblo Chaco Canyon in New Mexico needed protection. The new trust was going to start doing that and more. Among the places the trust saved were Stony Point Battlefield (thirty-five acres on the shore of the Hudson River near West Point), Lake George Battlefield (thirty-five acres on Lake George), and Fort Brewerton (in Hastings at the foot of Oneida Lake). Wishing he could have founded the trust, Roosevelt began scheming to find new ways for the federal government to interface with it. And Roosevelt started lobbying the trust to save Chalmette Battlefield in New Orleans, the site along the Mississippi River where Andrew Jackson gave the British their comeuppance; he sent Green the appropriate chapter of his Naval War of 1812, which documented the historical significance of the battle.* Contained in the trust fund were the seeds of what would become Roosevelt’s grand preservationist accomplishment—the Antiquities Act of 1906.
Congressman Lacey had truly gotten President Roosevelt to start thinking in earnest about preserving Chacoan heritage sites in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. The cultural blossoming of the Chacoan people had begun in the mid-800s (after Christ), long before Saint Augustine was born and of course even longer before the supposed “oldest city” in North America was named after him in Florida. The Chacoans built a network of fairly sophisticated villages throughout the Southwest. The huge Four Corners high-desert valley was once a hub of Anasazi life. Tribesmen farmed lowlands and constructed elaborate cliff dwellings. The Chaco Anasazi were extraordinary masons, and their towns were monuments to creative architecture. A burning question in archaeological and ethnological circles in 1901 was: what happened to the Anasazi? The answer seemed to be that a great drought had killed them off. The message to Roosevelt was clear: aridity was the death card in the Southwest. To be sustainable, communities had to develop water reservoirs. In 1901 Europeans considered Aztec and Maya ruins in Mexico and South America grand antiquities. The nationalistic Roosevelt scoffed at such boosterism by the European art world on behalf of Mexico. The United States, he said (thumping his chest, as it were), had just as fine ancient rubble in its own Southwest as existed in Peru or Bolivia. The cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, Colorado, were our Machu Picchu.
Since his days at Harvard, in fact, Roosevelt had been interested in the mysteries pertaining to the vanished Chacoans. The photographer W. H. Jackson of the U.S. Geological Survey had written extensively about how Chacoan stairways were carved into cliffs at Mesa Verde. Unfortunately, the plates of photography he took weren’t properly developed,