The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [433]
Others were starting to see Roosevelt’s saving of wonders as his gift to America. Praising the Antiquities Act of 1906, the New York Times, for example, noted that the national monument movement had created America’s “conservationist consciousness.” The United States stood at the center of a revolution in natural resource management, and Roosevelt was responsible for this positive shift. That was a high compliment to Roosevelt. If the Times was correct, then 1907 became the year when Roosevelt’s doctrine of conservationism cohered. The four national monuments Roosevelt had founded in 1906—Devils Tower, Petrified Forest, Montezuma Castle, and El Morro—could have just been a flash in the pan to please Hewett and Wetherill. But in 1907, inspired by Remington, Roosevelt kicked up a dust storm, declaring antiquities sites with impressive regularity. Following Hewett’s recommendation, Chaco Canyon—which had been a major urban center of the ancestral Pueblo culture—became a national monument through a presidential executive order of March 11. Ruins and hieroglyphics were now folded into the national forestry movement on a permanent basis. As Stanford University’s president David Starr Jordan later wrote in the journal Natural History, Roosevelt’s genius was that “he did not care a straw for precedent.”35
In 2009 the National Park Service published a detailed time line of Chaco Canyon’s history from AD 850 to 1902. In vivid detail it recalled when Hewett first stumbled upon ancient stairways carved into cliffs. But when Roosevelt declared Chaco Canyon a national monument in 1907, very little was known about this prehistoric Four Corners site. Regularly, as Hewett reported, the Hopi and Pueblo of New Mexico made pilgrimages to the ruins as if to a temple. Likewise, Richard Wetherill (the brother of “Hosteen John” Wetherill) had homesteaded in the Chaco Canyon area west of Santa Fe, studying Pueblo Bonito, Pueblo Del Arroyo, and Chet’o Ketl. For the Roosevelt administration to actually acquire the complex of ruins at Chaco Canyon, the GLO had to ask Wetherill to relinquish the valuable land; he enthusiastically did. In an act of high-minded philanthropy, the great southwestern trail guide and Indian trader Richard Wetherill simply handed Chaco Canyon over. Roosevelt later repaid John Wetherill with a personal visit in 1913 to the Betatakin ruins of a “big village of cliff-dwellers” in what is now Navajo National Monument.36
Then, on May 6, Roosevelt struck again, in northern California. The Antiquities Act was starting to take effect. Following the San Francisco earthquake, geologists came to California from all over the world to study the San Andreas Fault and the Lassen Peak volcano (the southernmost one in the Cascade range). What fascinated geologists about Lassen Peak was that it was not a typical mountaintop; it had a cluster of craters on its summit. Situated on the edge of the so-called Pacific plate, Lassen Peak was one of more than 300 active volcanoes that constituted a ring of fire in that part of the world. These volcanoes included Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, Alaska’s Katmai, Japan’s Fuji, and Indonesia’s Krakatoa. To Californian poets, Lassen Peak was just a weird and gorgeous mountain in Shasta County. But to concerned geologists, it was a mighty volcano about to blow. Recognizing that this volcano was both a scientific and a natural wonder, Roosevelt granted it national monument status. And it wasn