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Landmark Decision: The Antiquities Act, Big-Stick Conservation, and the Modern State
- Oregon State University Press
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66 Landmark Decision the antiquities act, big-stick conservation, and the modern state Roy neary could not help himself. at dinner, he played with his mashed potatoes. Had he been a child, no one would have much minded, but he was a father, and his wife and three children anxiously watched his mealtime antics. ever since that fearsome night when the power was suddenly cut off, he had become ever-more reclusive and odd, so much so that at dinner the kids had scooted closer to their mother. From that remove they watched, furtively, as he molded the white mound topped with melting margarine into a small peak; and then, with ill-disguised fear, as he lunged across the table, grabbed the bowl of steaming spuds, and began ladling gob after gob on to his plate. That’s when, “like a mad potter, neary started to knead the white mush with his hands into some kind of shape,” which emerged into a rough approximation of devils tower. That’s when we know the aliens made him do it.1 but why did steven spielberg frame his sci-fi thriller, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), around that remote Wyoming landmark? Why in a later scene have a half-crazed neary upgrade his food-art project into a hardened nine-foot exact replica of the haunting land form; and then, after a harrowing journey, have him come face-to-face with the object of his desire before which he stood speechless: “The tower stood alone, unique, something so one-of-a-kind that neary felt a chill across his shoulders at the thought he was able to reproduce it in sculpture without even knowing it existed.” Why that place?2 Perhaps for some of the same reasons that several northern Plains tribes have been drawn to what they revere as Mateo tipi, bears lodge, though they remain a good deal more vocal in their appreciation of its formidable power than was the tongue-tied neary. The monolith has played a formative role in legends of the arapaho and cheyenne, crow, Kiowa, and sioux. several of these, transcribed in the 1930s, used bears’ claws scratching at the tower’s surface to explain its deeply grooved sides. its soaring height is said to be a consequence of the Great spirit’s lifting ground-level rocks into its present elevated form to save children from marauding bruins. Other tales explain the creation of the constellation Pleiades by evoking Landmark Decision 67 the plight of seven sisters, saved from earthly demise—once more at the claws of bears—by godly intervention. For the Plains peoples, bears lodge occupies a special dimension, a spiritual portal between this world and the other-worldly. so it also functioned for steven spielberg, who concluded his film with a now-obsessed Roy neary walking across a hastily constructed “cosmic port of call” at the tower’s base and toward a massive intergalactic spacecraft. Forever alienated from his family, he does not hesitate to step into this “fiery heart of the mystery,” and as its gateway closes after him, the craft lifts off into a “scaffold of light,” a “brilliant stairway up to the heavens,” transported into the night sky where it becomes the “brightest of the brightest stars.”3 a divine domain, devils tower is also a massive, perpendicular obelisk, formed of molten rock and estimated to be more than fifty million years old, lodged within a human, that is, political environment. designated a national monument, its use is now regulated by the national Park service, a bureaucratic reification of legal status it gained in september 1906 when President Theodore Roosevelt signed a piece of paper absorbing it into the american polity. He did so by invoking the antiquities act, passed that same year, congressional legislation that granted the presidency extraordinary powers to preserve “historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the united states.” However prosaic, Roosevelt’s stroke of the pen marked an iconic moment: devils tower became the first national monument. The landmark’s political ascension has had earth-bound consequences. because its modern history has been linked to the antiquities act, an initiative emblematic of the Progressive era in which it was crafted, devils tower has contributed to the development of a new form of land management in the american West, the realignment of the relative...