Roosevelt's Legacy

In the early twentieth century, President Theodore Roosevelt was a dynamic force in a relatively new movement known as conservatism. Roosevelt, an avid adventurer and lover of nature, dedicated himself to protecting both wildlife and natural resources. He recognized that without dramatic action, the rich natural resources and incomparable landscapes of our country would disappear as quickly as the buffalo, leaving future generations without a legacy of natural splendors. He famously said, “the rights of the public to the natural resources outweigh private rights, and must be given its first consideration.” As president, Roosevelt provided federal protection for almost 230 million acres of land, an area equivalent to the entire Eastern Seaboard from Maine to Florida. He sat aside 150 national forests, the first 51 federal bird reservations, five national parks, the first 18 national monuments, the first four national game preserves and the first 24 reclamation, or federal irrigation, projects, designations that were bitterly opposed by commercial interests. Other than added land to Yosemite National Park, he worked with the legislative branch to establish these sites:

1. Crater Lake National Park (1902)

This United States National Park is the fifth oldest national park in the U.S. and is the only national park in Oregon. It encompasses the caldera of Crater Lake, a remnant of the destroyed volcano Mount Mazama, as well as its surrounding hills and forest. The lake is 1,949 feet deep at its deepest point, making it the deepest lake in the nation, and its average depth makes it the deepest in the Western Hemisphere and the third deepest in the world. No streams flow into or out of it, and all water that enters the lake is eventually lost from evaporation or subsurface seepage. The lake’s water has a strikingly blue hue, and it is refilled entirely from direct precipitation in the form of snow or rain.

https://www.nps.gov/crla/index.htm

2. Wind Cave National Park (1903)

The Wind Cave National Park, established in 1903 as the seventh U.S. National Park and the first cave to be designated as a national park in the world, is located 10 miles north of the town of Hot Springs in South Dakota. Most notably, this cave has displays of calcite formation known as boxwork - in fact, approximately 95% of the world’s discovered boxwork formations are found in the Wind Cave. It is considered to be a three dimensional maze cave, recognized as the densest cave system in the world and as the sixth longest in the world. The park also includes the largest remaining natural mixed-grass prairie in the nation. The Lakota, Cheyenne, other Native American tribes, and early Euro-American settlers were who traveled through the area were aware of the cave’s existence, but there has been no discovered evidence that anybody actually entered it. However, the Lakota, who reside in the Black Hills region, spoke of a “hole that blew air,” and they consider the place sacred as the site in which they first emerged from the underworld where they had lived before the creation of the world itself.

https://www.nps.gov/wica/index.htm

3. Sullys Hill (1904)

This area is now managed by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), but it was originally named after General Alfred Sully, son of the painter Thomas Sully. During the Great Depression, the United States Congress transferred the park to be managed by the USFWS  as a wildlife refuge in which hunting is permitted, and the Spirit Lake Tribe currently has fishing and hunting rights here. It is 1,674 acres and sits on the shores of Devils Lake in North Dakota, supporting a unique community of habitats such as oak, ash, basswood, and aspen woodland. The park also includes such wildlife as American bison, elk, white tailed deer, a colony of prairie dogs, and an array of birds, insects, and plants.

https://www.fws.gov/refuge/sullys_hill_national_game_preserve/

4. Platt National Park (1906)

Now a part of the Chickasaw National Park, Platt National Park was the smallest national park in the United States at the time as well as the only national park in Oklahoma. In 1902, Orville H. Platt, a senator from Connecticut, introduced legislation to establish this 640 acre land to protect 32 freshwater and mineral springs. This reservation was officially opened to the public on April 29,1904, but on June 29, 1906 it was redesignated by Congress as the Platt National Park, named after the senator, a year after his death. In 2011, as a part of its America the Beautiful Quarters series, the United States Mint issued a quarter featuring the Chickasaw’s Lincoln Bridge, a limestone bridge built in 1909 to commemorate the 100th birthday of Abraham Lincoln.

https://www.nps.gov/chic/learn/historyculture/remembering_platt-np.htm

5. Mesa Verde National Park (1906)

The Mesa Verde National Park is both a National Park and a World Heritage Site, located in Montezuma County, Colorado. This park occupies 52,485 acres of land near the Four Corners region of the American Southwest, and it has more than 4,300 sites. Some of these sites include 600 cliff dwellings, one of which is the Cliff Palace, thought to be the largest cliff dwelling in North America. Starting c. 7500 BCE, Mesa Verde was seasonally inhabited by the Foothills Mountain Complex, a group of nomadic Paleo-Indians. They survived using a combination of hunting, gathering, and subsistence farming of crops such as corn, beans, and squash. They built the mesa’s first pueblos sometime after 650 and by the end of the 12th century, they began to construct the massive cliff dwellings within the park. By 1285, following a period of social and environmental instability driven by a series of severe and prolonged droughts, they abandoned the area and moved south to locations in Arizona and New Mexico. In 1776, Mexican-Spanish missionaries and explorers Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, seeking a route from Santa Fe to California, discovered the Mesa Verde, or green plateau, which they named after its high, tree-covered plateaus. Today, it protects some of the best preserved Ancestral Puebloan archaeological sites in the United States.

https://www.nps.gov/meve/index.htm