Petrified Forest National Monument (1953)

Cover: Petrified Logs in the Rainbow Forest.
PETRIFIED WOOD MAY NOT BE REMOVED FROM THE MONUMENT
The National Park System, of which Petrified Forest National Monument is a unit, is dedicated to the conservation of America’s scenic, scientific, and historic heritage for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.
Petrified Forest National Monument, containing 85,304 acres of federally owned land, has the greatest and most colorful concentration of petrified wood known in the world. In the monument are six separate “forests” where giant logs of agatized wood lie prostrate, surrounded by numerous broken sections and smaller chips and fragments.
The area is a part of the Painted Desert of northern Arizona, a region of banded rocks of many hues carved by wind and rain into a fantastic landscape. Here and there beds of shale contain perfectly preserved fossil leaves of plants of a remote age. Occasionally the bones of giant reptiles and amphibians are washed from their burial places in the deposits.
The ruins of pueblos built by Indians in pre-Columbian times, from 800 to 1,400 years ago, are scattered on nearly every mesa throughout the monument. Low mounds, strewn with blocks of sandstone and bits of broken pottery, mark the sites of these ancient homes. Some of the dwellings, such as the Agate House in the Third Forest, were built of blocks of petrified wood, and smaller fragments of this material were chipped into arrowheads, knives, and scrapers. Many petroglyphs (pictures carved into the surface of the rock) are found on the sandstone rocks throughout the area.
Apparently the first man to report the “stone trees” was Lieutenant Sitgreaves, an Army officer who explored parts of northern Arizona in 1851, soon after Arizona was acquired by the United States.
The petrified forests remained largely unknown, however, until the settlement of northern Arizona began in 1878 and the Atlantic and Pacific, now the Santa Fe Railway, was completed across northern Arizona in 1883. During the following years, the existence of the petrified forests was threatened by souvenir hunters, gem collectors, commercial jewelers, and abrasive manufacturers. Entire logs were blasted to obtain the quartz and amethyst crystals often found within the logs, and much agate was carried away for making jewelry. The erection of a stamp mill near the forests to crush the petrified logs into abrasives offered the most serious threat. Alarmed, the citizens of Arizona, through their territorial legislature, petitioned Congress to make the area a national reserve “so that future generations might enjoy its beauties, and study one of the most curious results of nature’s forces.”