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By Root 4208 0

up in the White House because of snowstorms and freezing weather, Roosevelt began methodically marking on a map of the United States sites he wanted preserved by the federal government before he left office on March 3, 1909. His desks at the White House and at Sagamore Hill were crossroads for plans to rehabilitate species. From a political standpoint, the Antiquities Act was a revelation, freeing the Department of the Interior from having to squabble with Congress. Much like federal bird reservations for the USDA, national monuments soon became an idée fixe at Interior. Even more significantly, bureaucrats and politicians alike were beginning to see national monuments as a way station to national park status. And even Pinchot, chief of the Forest Service, wanted his reserves studied for Indian artifacts. “The importance of taking steps to preserve such objects has become very apparent,” Pinchot wrote to his on-site employees, “and as soon as possible I wish you to report specifically upon each ruin or natural object of curiosity in your reserve, recommending for permanent reservation all that will continue to contribute to popular, historic, or scientific interest.”24

Roosevelt was temperamentally well suited to conflict and acrimony, and his presidency had already had more than its share of both. By February 1908, he had made an impressive number of political and corporate enemies, including Standard Oil Company, the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, the E. H. Harriman conglomerate, and J. P. Morgan, among many others. But as the biographer Ron Chernow wrote in Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., Roosevelt had “no more potent ally than the press,” in his corner.25 And the clashes of Roosevelt versus the titans made good copy. The corporations of the gilded age spent millions of dollars on advertising, trying to smear Roosevelt’s reputation, cripple him politically, and exhaust him personally. They had failed on every count. Each swipe had the reverse effect—bolstering Roosevelt’s obstinacy. He licked them at their own game. Although he had never been solicitous of the opinions of his political antagonists, by February 1908 Roosevelt had lost all patience for anti-forestry. He now saw his enemies as Dickensian villains, full of “bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth.”26

America’s corporate leaders (and their army of bosom chums) were not the only unfortunates on the receiving end of Roosevelt’s wrath. When he had established Wind Cave National Park in 1902, a clamor had arisen for him to do the same with Jewel Cave, 143 miles of unmapped underground passageways in the Black Hills just west of Custer. Even though it was the second largest cave in the world, this labyrinth hadn’t been discovered until 1900, when a couple of small-time prospectors, the brothers Frank and Albert Michaud, had felt a blast of chilly air emanating from a rock crevice in Hell Canyon one warm summer afternoon. It was a good place to protect the carcasses of slaughtered cattle from rotting in the heat. But just maybe there was gold beneath where they stood!

Excited by their find, the Michauds purchased dynamite in Rapid City, South Dakota, blasted a big opening, and then crawled into a cavernous room aglow with calcite crystal. Much to their chagrin, there was no gold to be found. But there were numerous caverns filled with stunning, gemlike calcite crystals, which caught the light from their lanterns and returned it in varied patterns and colors. The brothers rushed to procure a mining claim for Jewel Tunnel Lode, as they named the site, and began advertising it as a tourist attraction. They even used the caves to hold a number of dances for local couples—the crystalline walls were a natural forerunner of the disco ball. A few geologists who studied the site determined that the passageways were part of an extinct geyser channel.* 27

The Roosevelt administration soon got involved, using the almost unlimited power of the executive branch to establish national monuments for the permanent preservation of places deemed to have historic