Click to Return to Beginning		THE NATIONAL PARKS AND EMERGENCY CONSERVATION THE NATIONAL MONUMENTS Another group of reservations similar to the national parks in concept and administration are the national monuments. In order to insure the protection of places of national interest from a scientific or historic standpoint, Congress in 1906 passed a law known as the "Antiquities Act", which gave to the President of the United States authority "to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments." There are now 66 of these national monuments. Forty of them, with the 22 national parks already mentioned, make up the great national park and monument system now administered by the National Park Service of the Department of the Interior. Sixteen such areas are administered by the Forest Service of the Department of Agriculture, to simplify administration, since they occur on areas already having national forest status. Ten other monuments, established to preserve battlefields and other features important in our military history, are under the jurisdiction of the War Department, as are 13 national military parks. Negotiations have been under way for several years, with the approval of the Secretary of War, to transfer the military parks and monuments to the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, the bureau established by Congress for the express purpose of administering the country's national parks and national monuments. Because of their similarity in purpose and ideals, all emergency conservation work in the military parks and monuments has been intrusted to the National Park Service, to be conducted along the same general lines as such work in the national parks and monuments under the Department of the Interior. Horseback Party and Guard House Mountain, Glacier National Park The exhibits in the national monuments run the gamut from the ruined dwellings of Indians who lived a thousand or so years ago to historic areas of the middle nineteenth century; from trees and plants petrified-apparently turned to stone–millions of years ago, to magnificent groves of living trees. By far the greater number of monuments are rich in human associations. Those of the Southwest in particular are a vast storehouse of treasures of antiquity. Research constantly brings to light new facts about the peoples who lived on that part of the continent long before the footsteps of the first white man were recorded only temporarily in the shifting desert sands. For instance, by removing tons of earth literally shovelful by shovelful, by hand labor, a few years ago a vast apartment house was uncovered that was built and occupied probably a thousand years ago. Modern man had no such apartment house until 1887, when the first one was built in New York City. Often a sealed-up cave is opened, to disclose a great earthen jar, perfectly preserved, that was made by hand hundreds of years ago. Such a find makes one think; think particularly of the fact that to make that bowl some person, probably an Indian woman, carried water on her back up a steep cliff from some far-away water hole or creek. Life was a very different thing in those days to what it is now.
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