The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [422]
On December 8, Roosevelt had signed quietistic declarations establishing Montezuma Castle (Arizona), El Morro (New Mexico), and the Petrified Forest (Arizona) as national monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906. The three monuments were a tribute to Lacey’s trademark persistence on their behalf. If Lacey hadn’t been a teetotaler, he might have uncorked a bottle of Dom Perignon when told of this order. In Arizona, Wetherill excitedly anticipated more tourists than he could shepherd to see the ancient sites. Roosevelt had created all three monuments as a federal measure to deter artifact thieves and promote scientific study. He understood that these southwestern ruins and petroglyphs were windows to understanding the prehistoric cliff dwellings, pueblo ruins, and early missions discovered by army officers, ethnologists, cowboys, and explorers on the vast public lands in the territories. The story of ancient peoples could be analyzed better in these three monuments than anywhere else in North America; the ruins were that intact. Thanks to the Antiquities Act, nobody was allowed to excavate or appropriate anything from Montezuma Castle, El Morro, or the Petrified Forest without permission from the relevant department (War, Agriculture, or Interior). As Charles F. Lummis wrote in St. Nicholas, an illustrated magazine for young adults, these monuments were in a part of the United States which “Americans know [as] little as they do Central Africa.”82 The historian Josh Protas has noted, in A Past Preserved in Stone, that the “diversity” of Southwestern monuments “set a precedent for the types of monuments that would later be established.”83
Take, for example, El Morro, on the Colorado Plateau. More than 2,000 inscriptions and petroglyphs were carved into the soft sandstone by explorers, pioneers, and native tribes. Much of western history may have been lost when pioneers headed down the Santa Fe Trail, but at El Morro some clues were left behind. Located five miles from Trinidad, New Mexico, this ancestral Pueblo ruin is at an elevation of 7,219 feet. Probably fewer than 1,000 easterners had seen it by 1906. Apparently, the ancients had used El Morro as a reliable water hole and campsite. At the time T.R. declared El Morro a national monument, the walls carved with signatures looked like a gigantic hotel register. Once again, thanks to Roosevelt, El Morro was now a treasured place, saved for future generations to study and enjoy.
Montezuma Castle National Monument of Arizona featured amazing cliff dwellings that had been molded and lived in by the pre-Columbian Sinagua around AD 1400. The Sinagua had once prospered, developing a sophisticated culture, but then inexplicably vanished. To many people, the Arizona cliff dwellings they left behind were among the wonders of the world. Nobody really knew what to make of them. The Verde Valley area overlooking Beaver Creek had been named by Europeans for the Aztec emperor of Mexico—Montezuma II—in the mistaken belief that he had once lived there, and the misnomer stuck. An early advocate of protecting Montezuma Castle was T.R.’s old Rough Rider friend William “Buckey” O’Neill, who besides being a mayor of Prescott, Arizona, was the editor of Hoof and Horn. To O’Neill, the Montezuma Castle cliff dwellings, much like Mesa Verde, raised more questions than they answered. Why did the Sinagua leave? Archaeologists offered conflicting answers to such questions, though warfare and drought seemed the most logical reasons. Now, professional anthropologists and archaeologists could study Montezuma Castle’s axes, tools, shells, paints, bone implements, and other artifacts with federal protection.
Because the Roosevelt administration didn’t have cash to spare, the Arizona Antiquities Association started repairing Montezuma Castle and put up a protective metal roof. Tourists at Phoenix and Prescott now became enthusiastic