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But that was a minor issue to Coloradans anxious to save Mesa Verde. With Roosevelt urging Lacey, Hewett, Wetherill, McClurg, and Peabody to stay the course, two bills were introduced in the Fifty-Eighth Congress for a “Colorado Cliff Dwellings National Park.” These also failed. It had become clear to Lacey that getting a sweeping act passed to save the southwestern antiquities than would be easier fighting for each ruin separately. So in the late spring of 1906 it was a happy turn of events when the Antiquities Act of June 8 passed and was soon followed by the creation of Mesa Verde National Park.

Roosevelt wasn’t passive about his new national park, the first in Colorado. Working closely with the Smithsonian Institution, the Department of the Interior began excavating and repairing the Anasazi sites. Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian, for example, had crumbling walls quickly stabilized. Proper roads were soon constructed so that visitors could enjoy the ruins. Cliff dwellings in the park, such as Long House, Mug House, and Step House, were popularized in periodicals including Harper’s and National Geographic. Any vandals who dared touch the ruins would be fined $1,000. The “mothers of Mesa Verde”—McClurg and Peabody—had prevailed.49

VIII

That June the Roosevelt administration was on an upswing regarding the preservation of southwestern prehistoric ruins and cliff dwellings: the Antiquities Act and Mesa Verde were steps forward for the progressive movement. However, the Bronx Zoo took a leap backward. It is true that the New York Zoological Society was running the most amazing endangered species program in the world. As Roosevelt had envisioned it in 1895, Charles Darwin had a living memorial in the Bronx. Two Colorado black bears—Teddy B and Teddy G—had been donated to the zoo that spring by an admirer of the president.50 They were advertised as “teddy bears,” and the city’s schoolchildren flocked to the zoo as if P. T. Barnum’s circus elephants were in town. The rambunctious bear cubs were adorable, with jolly faces and a little white around their muzzles. Every five or ten minutes the cubs, lacking their mother’s discipline, tumbled and rolled in a playful wrestling match as crowds gathered around to ooh and aah. Also, British East Africa—particularly the grasslands of Kenya and Uganda—tugged at Roosevelt’s mind and he had requested that the New York Zoological Society purchase a baby rhinoceros for $5,000. The board complied. The rhino, only five or six years old and weighing 250 to 300 pounds, was an immediate star attraction at the zoo. And there was another baby star as well: a buffalo calf was born in captivity that June. Hornaday had now successfully raised two generations of calves since the founding of the zoo.51

But unfortunately, the New York Zoological Society’s success in showcasing small animals led Hornaday to make a fatal error in judgment. At the Saint Louis World’s Fair in 1904 Hornaday had been fascinated by a Congolese pygmy, Ota Benga, who was put on public display in an ethnological exhibit called the University of Man. The backstory here is essential. An eccentric missionary and anthropologist, Samuel Phillips Verner, had been hunting for specimens in the Belgian Congo when he stumbled on Ota Benga in a cage. According to Verner, a cannibalistic tribe planned to eat the pygmy. What a find! Immediately, Verner had an idea for a human rights gesture. Why not put the pygmy on display in Saint Louis as an example of The Descent of Man? From shrew to spider monkey to chimpanzee to baboon to gorilla to pygmy—the display would be all the rage at the fair. So Verner purchased Benga, thereby, in his own mind, saving him from the boiling pot. Before long Benga found himself in Saint Louis. At the University of Man’s display of aboriginals, the “representatives” included Hottentots, Zulus, Eskimos, Filipinos, and Geronimo in the flesh. All the displays included proper species classifications on informative plaques, on the assumption that these would present Darwinian theory in a more visually interesting