The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [444]
On November 16, for example, Roosevelt declared the Gila Cliff Dwellings a national monument. Located in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, the monument had only 553 acres, yet it contained the cave dwellings of the Mogollan people between AD 1257 and 1300. When visitors leaned against the stone there and soaked up the warm sun, they were transported back in time. Reality seemed like an illusion. Pottery pieces…knives…a cracked crib…a doll…rattles…a slingshot…cooking utensils—you could see where babies had been born and elders laid to rest. You didn’t need to read Adolph F. Bardelier’s Ancient Society to be intrigued by the Gila Cliff Dwellings. The Gila wilderness was a place of both concealment and abandonment. And every inch for miles needed to be card-cataloged by the Bureau of American Ethnology. Roosevelt wanted to save not only the cliff houses but also Gila Hot Springs. By 1910 Harper’s Weekly was promoting the Gila Cliff Dwelling National Monument as a tourist site on a par with the Grand Canyon. Roosevelt had applied his promotional magic once again.69
Besides the ruins, the national forest along the Gila River was spectacular in its diversity. Wildlife was—and remains—thick around the Gila Cliff Dwellings, which are constructed at an elevation of about 5,700 to 6,000 feet. Even in 1907 the Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus bailey) was associated with this national monument. According to U.S. Fish and Wild-life, it was the most genetically distinct subspecies of the gray wolf. In 1911, disappointed that the Tensas River game had vanished, Ben Lilly moved to the Gila mountains, where for twenty years he lived in the wild, as indigenous as a mule deer.70 And it was near Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument that the conservationist Aldo Leopold had an epiphany about wolves, dramatically rendered in A Sand County Almanac. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” Leopold wrote. “I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes. Something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain argued with such a view.”71
And on December 19, as if giving America a Christmas gift, Roosevelt created Tonto National Monument to preserve both cliff dwellings and more than 160 species of birds. No more rifling of antiquities would be permitted at Tonto. A land of sandstone formations and rugged wilderness, the Tonto region was carved by wind, sand, and humans. Hidden about the site were caves pocketed into the red rock. Lacey considered the Tonto—situated at the northeastern boundary of the Sonoran desert—the most rugged terrain in Arizona. Unintentionally, saguaro cactus were now saved by the federal government for the first time, for the sake of Hohokam and ancestral Pueblo ruins. (An intermixing of the tribes had probably occurred between the late thirteenth century and the middle part of the fifteenth century when, as the National Park Service put it, the Tonto Basin was depopulated.)
Mark Twain—unlike the archaeologists—never appreciated Tonto National Monument. But the archaeologists knew that Roosevelt’s monuments in New Mexico and Arizona were important. The late prehistoric pottery found in the upper and lower cliff dwellings of Tonto, in fact, was named “Roosevelt red ware” by archaeologists trained at Harvard and Yale. It was their way of saluting Roosevelt’s foresight in the Southwest. Roosevelt red ware was part of a Salado ceramic tradition begun in AD 1280 to 1450 and based on use of red, white, and black paint in geometrically interesting configurations. Most of the gorgeous