The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [423]
But it was Petrified Forest National Monument that created a flash of satori in preservationist circles. If a swath of Arizona’s Painted Desert strewn with petrified coniferous trees could be saved, so could Florida’s swamps, Louisiana’s brackish marshes, and Alaska’s tundra. Lacey, who had crisscrossed the country in his effort to save the Petrified Forest—which he considered one of America’s five most striking wonders, along with Yellowstone, Crater Lake, Yosemite, and Wind Cave—celebrated at his home in Oskaloosa. Nobody in public life could speak about the Petrified Forest quite like Lacey, even though he came from Iowa. He believed that many of the petrified logs had grown exactly where they now lay. Every log impregnated with silica, stained by iron oxide and other minerals, was a rainbow of colors. “Ages ago, so long that it makes one dizzy to think of it, these trees were alive and growing in the Southwest,” Lacey said. “They were coniferous, as shown by microscopic examination of their texture. The species is extinct, and the nearest resembling species now found exists in Asia Minor. The geological history of this forest is easy to read. The trees fell and floated around in some old arm of the sea until the roots and limbs were worn and rounded just as we see like examples on the sandbars of the Mississippi. The trees became heavy and waterlogged and settled to the sea bottom.”85
Thanks to the guardian spirit of Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Lacey, this ancient sea bottom filled with petrified logs in eastern Arizona was an American treasure for future generations to study and enjoy. And Wetherill was ready to enforce federal protection even in treeless vales where the grass blades had perished due to the pounding sun.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE PREHISTORIC SITES OF 1907
I
Even with the administration’s designation of Petrified Forest, Montezuma Castle, and El Morro as national monuments in December 1906, President Roosevelt wasn’t content. Because John F. Lacey was no longer in Congress, Roosevelt had less clout with the House Committee on Public Land. Furthermore, the relationship between Interior and the USDA’s Forest Service was not congenial. By January 1907, Roosevelt had grown increasingly suspicious that his secretary of the interior, Ethan Allen Hitchcock, was too soft on the extraction industries in the West. Hitchcock was like a well-trained bullfighter who made his best passes when there was no bull present (or, as Roosevelt saw it, receded into the shadows when a real goring was possible). Easing Hitchcock, a McKinley man at heart, out of the post, became a priority for Roosevelt in early 1907. Finesse was needed because Roosevelt didn’t want to cut the life-line while Hitchcock was still making policy. Another consideration was allowing Hitchcock to reenter the private sector with honor, and this too became a priority for the administration over the holiday season. The situation was especially sensitive because Hitchcock, who was then sixty-one, was feeble (he died in 1909).
As of January 15—the day of the Senate’s official confirmation—Roosevelt’s new secretary of the interior was James R. Garfield of Ohio. Everybody in Washington knew Garfield as one of Roosevelt’s staunchest foot soldiers. As the saying went, he was an old head on young shoulders. Yet he was always something of a messenger boy. And it didn’t hurt that Garfield’s wife, the former Helen Newell of Cleveland, Ohio, was a prominent Washington