THE AMBIGUITY OF THE ANTIQUITIES ACT made it useful as a catchall preservationist law. The initial proliferation of national monuments showed the need had existed for a law that could permanently protect a wide range of places that government agencies and private citizens deemed worthy of preservation. The Antiquities Act became a weapon in the presidential arsenal, as well as a means that individual citizens could use to protect historic, scientific, and natural features. As a result, the Act became the authority for governance of the broadest range of areas ever established by any government. The twenty-eight offerings accepted between 24 September 1906 and 6 July 1911 included many types of areas that the framers of the Act had not considered.

In nearly every case, the proclamation of a national monument provided no supervision. Special agents of the GLO posted warning signs at each monument, but these signs offered the only form of protection for most early monuments. The establishment of an area as a national monument failed to deter vandals, who were oblivious to warning signs, although it did prevent law-abiding private citizens and companies from exploiting some unique features of the American landscape for commercial gain.

The cases of Chaco Canyon, Muir Woods, and the Grand Canyon showed that in some respect, the Antiquities Act was a success. But most monument proclamations failed to address pressing problems. Because Forest Service or GLO representatives visited most reserved areas only once or twice a year, the monuments were often targets of callous vandalism. Visitors in search of souvenirs destroyed sections of the Petrified Forest, and despite the efforts of government officials, archaeological vandalism persisted. After putting up a warning sign at the El Morro National Monument during his annual trip in 1911, GLO mining inspector Charles B. Barker noted: "The appearances indicate that unless more adequate protection and patrol can be given, the inscriptions on this rock will likely suffer." [1] El Morro and its peers were defenseless under the provisions of the Antiquities Act.

The problem was not just malicious vandalism. Without formal protection for monuments, people did not realize that their behavior was inappropriate. The lack of evidence of care, wrote GLO inspector Leslie Gillett in 1916, made it "doubtful whether visiting tourists, especially those who do not visit [El Morro] with the idea of its being a national monument in mind, are acquainted with the fact that the site has been withdrawn." [2] In the vast expanse of the West, the idea of a small reserved tract seemed incongruous. With only a sign to indicate the significance of each monument, people did not sense the special status of reserved areas.

Because of the lack of clarity of the monument designation and the remote location of most the reserved areas, the early monuments were victimized. The pothunting that had preceded the Antiquities Act remained endemic at archaeological sites, and the influx of people to the Southwest after 1900 increased the potential for scavenging, digging, and callous misuse. Unauthorized hunting and grazing affected the flora and fauna of many natural areas. Natural decay of historic and prehistoric features was another problem at many monuments.

Neither the GLO, the Forest Service, nor the War Department had the infrastructure to administer national monuments, and the lack of an organized system compounded problems. The three departments lacked budgets and specific personnel for these areas, nor did they have any clear sense of a reason for the existence of the national monuments. GLO special agents and Forest Service rangers visited monuments and made reports, but little action resulted from these efforts. The only link between the national monuments was the warnings signs posted by official representatives.

The lack of ascribed purpose for the national monuments as a whole posed an even deeper problem. The almost random creation of new monuments offered local and national special-interest groups such as the Sierra Club opportunity to implement their individual agendas. Because these groups saw the monuments from a range of perspectives, conflicts over the utilization of new monuments accelerated.

The archaeologists and anthropologists who had led the battle for the Antiquities Act were the most influential group to maintain interest in the monuments. They believed that they understood the purpose of the Antiquities Act and sought to use its provisions to encourage excavation. Scientists had advocated legislation for almost a decade prior to 1906, and they learned how to operate within the system that they had helped to establish. After passage of the Act, scientific and educational institutions both public and private began to exploit the crucible they had fought to protect. Many received permits, and they began excavations at many of the archaeological national monuments. The number of permits created dismay among GLO personnel, who worried about the motives of many privately sponsored excavators.

At that time, an unwieldly mix of people educated in Europe and the self-trained dominated American archaeology. Most trained specialists concentrated their research in southern Europe and the Middle East, and although they were sympathetic to the pursuit of archaeology in the American Southwest, they generally left the actual work to the self-trained. The GLO feared that unscrupulous excavators would use their permits to collect artifacts for private collections. From the perspective of GLO officials, this prospect meant the appropriation of public treasures for individual gain, an idea at odds with the social philosophy of the era.

While efforts were under way to establish an equitable and manageable set of rules governing excavations, federal officials and academic archaeologists tried to impose their own standards on fieldwork. GLO employees raced to find and reserve archaeological sites before scientists arrived and began to dig. In one case, William B. Douglass, the examiner of surveys for the GLO, visited extensive Anasazi ruins in northern Arizona. He found undisturbed remote ruins and advocated the establishment of the Navajo National Monument. On 3 March 1909 he informed the commissioner of the GLO that withdrawal of the land "embracing the Bubbling Springs group of ruins," about forty miles from the Arizona-Utah state line in northeastern Arizona, was imperative. Douglass's message revealed his motive; he had heard that a "pseudo-scientific expedition . . . principally concerned in securing a priceless archaeological collection" planned to invade the area that summer. "It will probably be the last opportunity to explore important ruins that have not been marred and robbed by the pottery hunter," he concluded. [3] The solution he suggested typified his era; government regulation rather than professional consensus was the means to ensure proper excavation of the ruins.

Douglass objected to private individuals, even those with archaeological credentials, acting as if they owned the public domain. Undisturbed ruins held important information about the prehistoric past, and he insisted that the government regard more than the land and the structures upon it as valuable property. He wanted a record of "every article that comes from them, with accurate data as to its exact location in the building and the conditions under which it was found." [4] If archaeological science was to make new contributions, Douglass believed, it had to do more than uncover objects with which to fill museums.

To protect the new discovery, Douglass enlisted John and Louisa Wade Wetherill, who owned a trading post at Oljato, on the Utah side of the Arizona-Utah border, to be responsible for the ruin. Although John Wetherill was Richard Wetherill's brother, he had avoided the rancor that surrounded his brother's dealings with the Department of the Interior. He and his wife lived at Oljato the entire year and made their living by trading with the Navajos. Wetherill was a dependable man and very knowledgeable about the region. Louisa Wade Wetherill had earned the respect of Indians in the area and was an important conduit for information. A Navajo Indian told her of the ruins, and she alerted Douglass. Confident that he had done all he could for the moment, Douglass sent a description of the lands to be reserved to the commissioner of the GLO. On 20 March 1909 President Taft signed the proclamation establishing the Navajo National Monument. [5]

The Navajo National Monument situation seemed a repeat of the episode between the government and Richard Wetherill at Chaco Canyon, but in a reversal of roles, the scientists who had argued so vehemently in favor of the Antiquities Act became adversaries of the federal agencies responsible for the administration of the ruins. Archaeologists lobbied for federal sanctions against unbridled exploitation of the sites, but seemed astonished when men like Douglass tried to apply the same rules to them. They believed that they were acting credibly and resented the need to prove their reliability. Edgar L. Hewett, who in 1907 became the director of the School of American Archaeology in Santa Fe, and Byron Cummings of the archaeology department at the University of Arizona, headed the group to which Douglass objected. In Douglass's view, southwestern scientists intended to become officially sanctioned pothunters, collecting relics to reap professional spoils.

The solution entailed determining which experts had the public interest in mind. Douglass accused the people who had maneuvered Richard Wetherill out of the picture of similar exploitive motives. He believed that the planned excavations were "detrimental to science" and recommended that the Department of the Interior deny all further requests for excavating permits in northern Arizona until scientists from the Smithsonian Institution had an opportunity to do preliminary work. [6] Smithsonian scientists were federal employees with established reputations, and Douglass believed that they behaved more responsibly than other archaeologists. Their discoveries also became government property.

In Douglass's far-sighted view, legalized pothunting was as detrimental as random digging for artifacts. If those with an academic affiliation were allowed to excavate wherever they chose, the archaeological sites they worked would be no more significant than those dug by amateurs. In eastern museum cases, treated as art objects only and lacking contextual information, the discovered relics would cease to be useful tools to reconstruct the past, and instead would merely be curiosities.

Alerted to Douglass's fears, the Department of the Interior closely watched Navajo National Monument. But in 1909 Hewett had immense influence, and the department routinely granted his requests for excavating permits. Earlier that year, he requested a permit to dig at the new Navajo National Monument. Departmental officials in Washington were not opposed to granting the request. Yet some officials at the GLO worried about the situation. S. V. Proudfit, the acting commissioner of the GLO, asked John Wetherill to keep him informed throughout the summer of 1909. On 24 August 1909 Wetherill wrote that "there is no one excavating on the Navajo National Monument except Prof. Cummings and party," which held Hewett's permit. [7] Douglass did not know that the permit had been granted, and he became furious when he discovered that the proclamation of the monument had not deterred Hewett and his friends.

John Wetherill's interpretation of the situation differed from Douglass's. Cummings and Hewett were colleagues of the experts who had harassed his brother. But although John Wetherill may have harbored resentment about the way the Department of the Interior had treated his brother, he clearly saw that the government had the legal power to control access to American prehistory. John Wetherill perceived the Cummings excavation as legitimate because it held the Hewett permit. But Douglass did not care about credentials. Motives interested him, and Douglass distrusted Hewett. In his opinion, the Hewett Cummings party was out for personal aggrandizement, not for the advancement of knowledge; Douglass wanted to stop them.

Thanks to Douglass's diligence, the label "pothunter" came to include academic relic hunters who took advantage of their professional status to make collections for museums all over the country. With the help of William Henry Holmes, John Wesley Powell's successor as the director of the Bureau of Ethnology, Douglass was able to stop the Cummings excavation. Holmes ordered Cummings to cease except when Hewett was present. In the summer of 1909, Hewett was involved in projects other than Navajo and John Wetherill dogged Cummings's party. The excavators soon gave up.

In their place, the Smithsonian Institution sent its scientific representatives. Holmes selected two experienced and eminent Americanists, Dr. J. Walter Fewkes and Dr. Walter Hough, both of his bureau, to excavate at Navajo. Douglass went along on the expedition, and in 1910 Fewkes and Hough completed their survey, filing Bureau of Ethnology Bulletin No. 50, A Preliminary Report on a Visit to the Navajo National Monument. The report, complete with an extensive pictorial record, conformed to Douglass's expectations of proper conduct for archaeologists. [8] In Douglass's view, the Cummings party, concentrating upon artifacts and the training of students, would have paid less attention to the public interest.

The substitution of federal excavators for professional and academically affiliated ones strengthened the institutionalization of archaeology. This evolution began when Stephen J. Holsinger handed Richard Wetherill and Frederic Hyde the cessation order at the Chaco Canyon in 1902, and between 1902 and 1909 institutional affiliation became credential enough to authorize excavation. But a decade later, when it appeared that scientists were using excavation permits for personal aggrandizement, the GLO censured them.

Douglass presented Hewett in the same light that Hewett had once cast Richard Wetherill. In his view, former protectors of archaeological sites like Hewett had slipped into the patterns that had characterized the late nineteenth-century in the Southwest. Credentials and institutional affiliation were no longer sufficient for Douglass and his peers in the West. Because Hewett's and Cummings's allegiances to their furthering their reputations might outweigh their commitments to the principles of their discipline, they had to be watched. The government had an obligation to manage the sites, and the Smithsonian Institution and the Bureau of Ethnology sent government ethnologists to work in the monuments. The weight of government authority now supported the scientists efforts.

Unlike Hewett, the careers of federal ethnologists were already established. J. Walter Fewkes had excavated in the Southwest during the 1890s, and Walter Hough had played an important role in the Columbian Exposition of 1893. In 1902 William Henry Holmes had succeeded John Wesley Powell as head of the Bureau of Ethnology. At the top of their profession, such men already had the respect of their peers.

Archaeological protection became a question of philosophy and guardianship. As long as making a collection offered an avenue to enhanced professional status, remote archaeological sites like the Navajo National Monument were vulnerable to pillage by professionals. In many cases, it took so long for an unauthorized dig to come to light that an astute entrepreneur could, depending upon his inclination, parlay his find into a financial or professional windfall. The situation encouraged archaeologists to behave irresponsibly, even overturning walls in search of pots and burial locations. In their haste, some did not even take field notes. Often a site excavated by these professional pothunters lost much of its potential value to archaeological science. Douglass believed that the advancement of the discipline, not solely the collection of artifacts for museums, was the greatest good, and that if random collection continued, the purpose of the Antiquities Act would be defeated, ironically, by the groups that had supported its passage. Whether Edgar L. Hewett or Richard Wetherill compiled them, irresponsibly made museum collections decreased the value of an archaeological site and threatened the credibility of the discipline.

The battle between archaeologists and federal administrators continued throughout the 1910s, but archaeological national monuments were not the only places in danger of depredation. Although Douglass focused upon a small group of the areas created under the auspices of the Antiquities Act and addressed problems relevant only to the administration of archaeological sites, the protection of natural and historic areas was also necessary. The diversity of the national monuments category made uniform administration impossible. Without budgets or personnel responsible for care on a full-time basis, the national monuments remained an unorganized collection of interesting places that grew in number every year.

In the Department of the Interior, efforts to administer the monuments gradually began. Frank Bond, the chief clerk of the GLO, assumed responsibility for the national monuments under its care and also evaluated monument proposals. Bond drafted proclamations for the establishment of various monuments and in general assumed responsibility for determining whether a proposed area would become a national monument. [9] Even the Forest Service solicited his opinion on its monument proposals. Although he rejected numerous requests that he thought were inappropriate, Bond wrote all of the twenty-eight proclamations establishing national monuments between 1906 and 1911.

But the conditions at many national monuments were so poor that after recommending the establishment of the Devils Postpile National Monument, a basaltic column formation, in July 1911, Bond passed favorably on only two more monument proposals in the following four years. [10] Battles over the philosophy of excavation, the haphazard process of monument establishment, and the pervasive absence of funds for monuments' maintenance all bothered Bond. Because he believed that the monuments were deteriorating, he completely reversed the policy of the GLO.

By 1911, five years after the passage of the Antiquities Act, protecting the monuments from wanton or inadvertent vandalism was a frustrating proposition. There were twenty-eight national monuments, and none of the three responsible departments had yet developed a formal administrative process to ensure their upkeep. The Forest Service regarded national monuments as a " makeshift," and at the Department of the Interior, only Bond and W. B. Acker, an attorney, took an interest in the monuments. The War Department had even less interest in its monuments. The three departments communicated little about common problems.

Conceived and executed in haste, the Antiquities Act left unanswered important questions on the issue of preservation. A system of paper entities existed; a proclamation affirmed the existence of places like the Shoshone Cavern National Monument in Wyoming, but it was possible to visit this monument, and many others monuments, without realizing that they were places under federal protection. For Frank Bond, proclaiming national monuments ceased to be an end in itself. The monuments needed more than protection on paper.

During the Roosevelt administration, the national parks had begun to attract more attention, and this interest carried over into Taft's presidency. Vocal advocates like Horace McFarland, the president of the American Civic Association, lobbied Congress and worked to enlighten the public. The Department of the Interior also responded, although slowly. In September 1911 Secretary of the Interior Walter L. Fisher convened the first National Parks Conference at Yellowstone National Park, at which government officials and concerned citizens argued for the creation of a federal bureau to administer parks and monuments. In the middle of the whirl of enthusiastic presentations, Frank Bond stepped to the podium to speak about the national monuments.

Bond's presentation revealed the problems he faced trying to manage areas on the periphery of the preservation movement. Tripartite jurisdiction created confusion in monument administration. To illustrate how management problems cut across departmental lines, Bond divided the monuments into two categories: the scientific and the historic. He noted that different departments managed monuments in both categories, and places as similar as the Gila Cliff Dwellings and Chaco Canyon, both prehistoric ruins, were under separate jurisdictions. In his view, duplicate administration limited the chances for comprehensive planning.

Bond correctly perceived that increased settlement in the Southwest and West was endangering the monuments, and the lackadaisical attitude of his department did not help. "It is only a question of time," he told the conference, "when [the national monuments] will be secretly attacked and pillaged piecemeal, until there is nothing left to preserve. . . . [They are] a responsibility which we now feel but can not make effective." [11] The realities of administration infuriated Bond; he could arrange for the proclamation of any number of national monuments, but he could not protect them in any way.

Bond tried a strategy that he hoped would arouse the audience of conservationists and government officials. Although many in his audience were leaders in shaping contemporary America, Bond realized that the government had not yet made a firm commitment to the monuments. As an alternative to the current chaos, he proposed privatization, turning monuments in danger of being spoiled to private owners, where "they would soon be made available at a price, which would be much better than not available at all." However "unpatriotic . . . the abandonment of any one of them would be," Bond suggested that private ownership and development offered the monuments a better future than benign neglect. [12] Privatization was Bond's ploy to attract attention to the plight of the monuments. As members of the reform generation, Progressive-era government officials eyed the motives of the business community with suspicion, and Bond played to these instincts. Private ownership of public treasures was the solution his audience dreaded.

Bond's oratory might have moved Theodore Roosevelt to initiate an immediate program of reform, but for his trouble, Bond received no substantive response from Secretary of the Interior Fisher, and it was on to the next speech in a seemingly endless succession. The lack of response, even to Bond's calculated attempt to rouse the passions of progressive-minded conservationists, confirmed his sense that, in 1911, the national monuments had little importance. The solution of his era was the creation of a watchful bureaucracy that would do no more than occasionally lament the continuous decay of the national monuments. Ironically, at a conference filled with pro-national park rhetoric and addressed by such luminaries as Sen. Reed Smoot of Utah, Rep. Scott Ferris of Oklahoma, chairman of the House Public Lands Committee, and William Kent, the donor of Muir Woods, the precarious position of the national monuments was not of interest. Although Bond declared the parks and monuments "as alike as two peas in a pod," it appeared that national park advocates felt otherwise. [13]

National monument status was a mixed blessing for the areas so proclaimed. Proclamation of a monument meant recognition of the value of a place, but little more. It reserved a place from private appropriation, but did not protect it from lawbreakers. In fact, monument status negated any chance of receiving direct administration. Established in law and ignored in practice, in 1911 the national monuments were in danger. Unless federal interest became stronger, the monuments would remain little more than places to post warning signs.

The national monuments began to acquire an identity of their own—albeit a somewhat confusing one—based more on what they were not than on what they were. They clearly were not like the national parks. The central features of most monuments were natural, archaeological, or historical, but many areas seemed barely to fit even this vague definition. The process by which the monuments were selected required the implementation of some type of standards. The category had become a repository for places of interest that were not considered eligible for national park status.

The long series of proclamations beginning with Devils Tower followed by the sudden dearth of proclamations after July 1911 reflected Bond's anxiety over the condition of the national monuments. He was no longer sure that establishing a new monument was any service to the place or to the nation. Increasingly frustrated, Bond referred fewer and fewer proclamations to his superiors. Only in rare cases did he believe that monument status was necessary for the proposals that crossed his desk. With this rationale in mind, Bond checked the growth of this amorphous system, preferring to wait and see whether Congress might establish a unit of the federal government to administer the parks and monuments.

Bond was not the only one responsible for developing new national monuments. Influential private citizens and elected officials could exert their will, and the two monuments proclaimed during the following four and one-half years resulted from such instigation. In 1913 the Order of Panama, which sought to commemorate Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, the Spanish discoverer of California, pressed for the establishment of the Cabrillo National Monument on Point Loma, near San Diego. Upkeep and maintenance was not an obstacle; a lighthouse less than one acre in size and adjacent to Fort Rosecrans, a military installation, constituted the entire monument. There seemed to be little chance of vandalism because of the constant military presence. After Bond favorably reviewed the Cabrillo National Monument proposal, in October 1913 Woodrow Wilson established the new monument.

In the case of the second proclamation Congressman Carl Hayden of Arizona desired a desert flora national park in the new state, and his efforts resulted in the establishment of Papago Saguaro National Monument in 1914. At Bond's request, GLO commissioner Fred Dennett tried to convince Hayden that "topographic conditions seem to offer nothing but scenery and . . . [the Antiquities Act] does not provide for the reservation of public land for the protection of scenery," but Hayden persisted. [14] He had watched as Theodore Roosevelt used the monument category to fulfill arbitrary conservation objectives and was not to be denied. Using his influence as a member of the House Public Lands Committee, Hayden's efforts resulted in the creation of another monument authorized for its scientific importance that had largely scenic and recreational value.

Throughout this period, the movement to establish a branch of the Department of the Interior to administer parks and monuments gradually gained momentum. In 1910 Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger advocated the idea, and two years later President Taft gave it presidential sanction. [15] Franklin K. Lane, Woodrow Wilson's secretary of the interior, and public-spirited organizations such as Horace McFarland's American Civic Association continued to press Congress for some kind of national parks bureau. In 1913 Lane appointed Adolph C. Miller as his special assistant in charge of national parks; he was the first, and at that time the only person in Washington, D.C., with full-time responsibility for national parks. When Woodrow Wilson drafted Miller for the Federal Reserve Board, Lane named Stephen T. Mather, a graduate of the University of California who had made a fortune in the borax industry, to replace him.

Mather came to Washington, D.C., to improve the parks, and to assist in this process, Lane assigned to him a graduate of the University of California, Horace M. Albright. Mather was an energetic dynamo with finely tuned promotional instincts and a network of influential contacts; the young Albright was persuasive, charming, astute, and underneath a polished veneer, hard as nails. Throughout 1915 the two men worked at laying the basis for a federal agency to manage the national parks and monuments, and by the end of the year, the prospects for a bureau of national parks and monuments looked very good. [16]

Once establishment of a parks bureau seemed imminent, Bond became less restrictive about establishing new monuments. On 4 October 1915 Woodrow Wilson established Dinosaur National Monument, and preceding the passage of the National Park Service Act on 25 August 1916, national monuments were established at Walnut Canyon, Sieur de Monts, Bandelier, and Capulin Mountain. The new monuments represented the usual diverse array of archaeological, scenic-scientific, and historical entities (see table 1).

After the establishment of the new bureau, Bond saw that the role of the GLO in administering federal park areas would decrease. The rash of proclamations in late 1915 and early 1916 were evidence of the GLO's abdication of this responsibility. As long as Bond believed that he was responsible for maintaining monuments, for which he knew that he did not have the money or personnel, he kept a close check upon the creation of new monuments. Once he understood that a new agency would assume responsibility, he released the tight hold. The GLO system of preservation by warning signs had simply been a stopgap measure until a formal system of administration was established.

GLO officials looked expectantly toward a future in which they anticipated that a system of administration, and possibly even funding for monument upkeep, would be developed. Bond ended the self-imposed four-year ban on establishing new monuments hopeful that the chaos which had surrounded the first decade of the implementation of the Antiquities Act was over. Unfortunately, the kind of organization he envisioned for the administration of the monuments remained far in the future.

Table 1. The National Monuments in 1916