#1659 Theodore Roosevelt in Grand Canyon Country

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 July 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Clay’s conversation with Harvey Leake, the great-grandson of the pioneering southwestern archaeologists John and Louisa Wetherill. Harvey tells the story of former President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1913 visit to the Four Corners region. First, TR and his sons Archie, age 19, Quentin, age 15, and their cousin Nicholas Roosevelt, age 20, rode through the Grand Canyon and up to the North Rim, where they hunted mountain lions. Then, they made an arduous horseback journey to Rainbow Bridge, the sacred site in the heart of Navajo country. Finally, they visited the Hopi world, where TR and his young companions observed the sacred snake dance and got into the underground kiva, where scores of rattlesnakes slithered around. Harvey Leake has dozens of family photographs of this 1913 Roosevelt adventure. It's a strenuous life story that could not possibly be connected to any other president of the United States. Recorded May 25, 2025.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to this introduction to today's podcast.
0:04.7	Harvey Leak of the Four Corners area lives in Prescott, Arizona, which is a wonderful community
0:12.8	in northern Arizona, not so far from the Grand Canyon.
0:17.6	He's the great-grandson of John and Louisa Wetherill, who are sort of the Adam and Eve, let's say, of Southwestern archaeology, who played a role in the creation of a bunch of national monuments in national parks, including Mesa Verde, where they were amongst the first serious archaeologists.
0:39.6	There was a great deal of pot hunting going on, and that's one reason why the National
0:44.6	Antiquities Act was passed in 196, because we had all these extraordinary places throughout
0:52.1	the American West, particularly the Southwest, you know, cliff
0:55.0	dwellings and granaries and pictographs and petroglyphs and burial sites and so on. And people
1:04.4	were just coming and digging indiscriminately to get items which they could either hoard or
1:09.6	sell.
1:14.7	And it was clear that this was enormous desecration.
1:17.1	And by the way, it continues to this day.
1:18.0	I'll come back to that.
1:23.1	And so the weather rules, who are not without a certain controversial aspect in all of this,
1:25.2	but nevertheless, they played this key role.
1:28.0	And Roosevelt had never met them.
1:34.2	He'd heard of them, and he came out in 1913, so one year after the debacle of the Bull Moose campaign.
1:35.6	He brought his son Quentin.
1:37.5	They caught up with his other son Archie and cousin Nicholas in Mesa, and they went off
1:43.2	on this three-part epic journey to the north rim
1:47.7	of the Grand Canyon by way of going down the south rim through Phantom Ranch and up the other
1:52.9	side when that was much more difficult than now when it's still very difficult.
	...

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