Southwestern National Monuments

Will Moore, now retired from the Arizona Education Association, serves as a winter-season volunteer at Tonto National Monument in Arizona. His work has appeared in the Journal of Arizona History and on the National Parks Conservation Association website.

“The eloquent Will Moore has provided us with a much-needed history of America’s outstanding southwestern national monuments. Moore takes us back to the wild and woolly early days of Canyon de Chelly, Bandelier, Walnut Canyon, and two dozen other sites when they were managed by a lone part-time employee with little pay or resources. It’s an excellent history, both of the Indigenous people who knew the sites as home, and the rangers charged with keeping vandals and pot hunters at bay.”—Steve Kemp, author of An Exaltation of Parks: John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Crusade to Save America’s Wonderlands“An engaging discussion of the little-known, often quirky, but highly dedicated individuals who watched over some of our most important national monuments through a period of benign neglect by the federal government. A fine addition to the literature of our national park system.”—Frederick H. Swanson, author of Wonders of Sand and Stone: A History of Utah’s National Parks and Monuments