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By Root 4150 0

West like a colony, extracting wealth and resources without giving anything back. They were tired of the east coast stuffed shirts telling them what to do. As the episodes involving the Grand Canyon National Monument showed, they could also turn their blistering ire on the federal government. But as the historian G. Michael McCarthy argued in Hour of Trial: The Conservative Conflict in Colorado and the West, 1891–1907 (1977), there were plenty of westerners who approved of federal regulation of resources. At a public lands convention in Denver in 1907, for example, many of the attendees favored the Roosevelt administration’s deployment of rangers to protect national forests from wildfire throughout Colorado. They understood that Colorado was special because of its mountains, forests, and water resources.43

The president of the American Scenic and Historic Preservation Society, Dr. George F. Kunz, also backed Roosevelt’s national monument initiatives every step of the way. Kunz and Roosevelt had been allies since the battle of 1899–1901 to preserve the Palisades cliffs in New York, and Roosevelt thought that Kunz was among the most cogent voices for protection of American scenery. One might almost name an American site at random—from Yellowstone to the Catskills, from Watkins Glen to Bunker Hill—and find that Kunz had fought hard for its scenic integrity. Scholarly, clear-minded, and committed to the cause, Kunz considered all significant ruins as part of the cultural heritage. He had been offended by Oscar Wilde’s offhand comment that the United States “had no ruins.” Whether Wilde had spoken out of ignorance, arrogance, or flippancy, Kunz knew better. The United States had Mesa Verde, Montezuma Castle, Chaco Canyon, the Gila Cliff Dwellings, and numerous other “ruins.” But Wilde was right in one respect: most Americans did not value their ruins as Europeans did. Rome, for example, celebrated its ancient ruins, such as the Colosseum, whereas by contrast, it had taken a small group of Colorado women, fighting tooth and nail, to protect the stunning cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde—and their battle had taken place largely unnoticed by America’s newspapers.

According to Kunz, there were hundreds of antiquities sites, both natural and architectural, that needed preservation—places filled with arrowheads and pottery shards whose designation as monuments wouldn’t disrupt commerce in the slightest. Grateful to Roosevelt for raising the nation’s consciousness on this issue, Kunz became his strongest public defender, countering criticisms of the president’s conservationist and preservationist agenda. “Niagara Falls, Letchworth Park, the Hudson River, the Yellowstone Park, the Grand Canyon and the Colorado, the Agatized Trees, the Giant Redwoods, the Columbia River, and the prehistoric remains of the Southwest, are the poetry of our possessions,” Kunz wrote. “What nation is rich without a poet, and what country has such grand natural objects to inspire the poet as ours?”44

Roosevelt and Kunz were deeply suspicious of anyone foolish enough to register any kind of concern about the creation of national monuments like Pinnacles or Natural Bridges. Legal and constitutional objections, Roosevelt was convinced, gave false legitimacy to a much baser desire: protecting entrenched interests. “The very luxurious, grossly material life of the average multimillionaire whom I know, does not appeal to me in the least, and nothing would hire me to lead it,” Roosevelt wrote to Cecil Arthur Spring-Rice on April 11. “It is an exceedingly nice thing, if you are young, to have one or two good jumping horses and to be able to occasionally hunt—although Heaven forfend that anyone for whom I care should treat riding to hounds as the serious business of life! It is an exceedingly nice thing to have a good house and to be able to purchase good books and good pictures, and especially to have that house isolated from others. But I wholly fail to see where any real enjoyment comes from a dozen automobiles, a couple of hundred horses, and a good many different