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trees at Muir Woods, which led Roosevelt to reflect on his own legacy. His oldest son, Ted, was a few months away from graduating from Harvard University. Like many fathers, the president realized that his brood had suddenly grown up on him. Kermit—little Kermit—was now almost six feet tall. Roosevelt wondered if he’d been as good a father as his own, Theodore Sr., had been. Why hadn’t he taken his boys to see Crater Lake or Key West or Mesa Verde? “Apparently, I have saved up more last year than I ever have before,” Roosevelt wrote to Douglas Robinson the day after establishing Muir Woods, “and I am mighty glad of it, for next year Ted will go out into the big world, and from that time right along the little birds will hop off one after another out of the nest.”9 It saddened him to recall that he had left both Ted and Kermit at home during his sojourn of 1903 to Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon. Roosevelt now resolved to bring his teenage boys along when he bivouacked in remote parts of Africa, Arizona, or the Amazon.

Except for the pursuit of wealth, one’s legacy is often the strongest motivator for powerful figures. Everybody supposedly had at least one memorable sermon in him, and Roosevelt’s was American conservationism. He had far exceeded any other individual in U.S. history in his efforts to preserve the natural wonders of the West. But he was also uncomfortably aware that his preservationist accomplishments were geographically scattered and isolated, and that his objectives were still hobbled by a slow-moving legislative process. Roosevelt needed a better weapon against congressional lethargy in matters of conservation, and he found it in federal bird reservations, big game commons, and national monuments (as set forth by the Antiquities Act of 1906).

Accustomed to pushing against limits, Roosevelt was determined to put the theoretical power of the “national monument” as a legislative maneuver to an audacious practical test. He wasn’t going to allow the size of a national monument to be a stumbling block with regard to the Grand Canyon. On January 11, 1908, just two days after the Muir Woods initiative, the president snatched the Grand Canyon from the preservation-versus-development debate by declaring it a national monument. His goal was straightforward: to save the Grand Canyon, unmarred. It was, by any measure, a bold step. Until then Roosevelt, with persistence, had put aside only monuments of limited acreage such as Devils Tower, El Morro, Montezuma Castle, the Petrified Forest, Chaco Canyon, Lassen Peak, Cinder Cone, and the Gila Cliff Dwellings. And Muir Woods had been a generous gift by Kent to the federal government; who could argue with such beneficence? But the Grand Canyon wasn’t a small site preserved for scientific interest, as stipulated by the Antiquities Act. This was 808,120 acres of mineral-rich land in Arizona, larger than some New England states. The poet Carl Sandburg wrote that “each man sees himself in the Grand Canyon.”10 This may be true, but only Roosevelt could claim, on a return visit to the canyon in 1913, that he was its presidential protector. “The importance of the canyon will likely outlive the parochial American idea of wilderness designation as world heritage site and mass tourism,” the historian Stephen J. Pyne surmised in How the Canyon Became Grand. “A place that can hold a score of Yosemite Valleys and in which Niagara Falls would vanish behind a butte, that could absorb the shock of American expansionism and democratic politics, that could transcend a century of intellectual inquiry from Charles Darwin to Jacques Derrida, has not exhausted its capacity to refract whatever light nature or humanity casts toward it provided a suitable overlook exists from which to view it.”11

By 1908, Roosevelt’s characteristic impatience had made it difficult for him to abide by the old rules and wait for legislators to see the light. Most politicians of his day made backroom deals, but the supremely self-confident Roosevelt did most of his political maneuvering in full view of