Fossil Cycad National Monument: The Park Whose Fossils Were Taken

A national monument made to protect fossils lost its fossils within a decade. On October 21, 1922, President Warren G. Harding used the 1906 Antiquities Act, which lets the president designate significant scientific or scenic areas as national monuments, to create Fossil Cycad National Monument. Managed by the National Park Service (NPS), the 320 acres in the southeastern Black Hills of South Dakota were the third monument created specifically to protect fossils. Harding's proclamation warned all unauthorized persons not to appropriate, injure, destroy or remove any of its fossils. Before the decade was out, the fossils at the surface were gone.

Reconstruction of a fossil cycadeoid flower from Wieland's "American Fossil Cycads" (vol. 2, 1916).

What was there

The fossils were not true cycads, which are tropical and subtropical palm-like plants. Most were cycadeoids (Bennettitales), an extinct order of seed plants that flourished in the Cretaceous, 145 to 66 million years ago. They are scientifically important because they preserved details of the plant's shape and reproductive structures found nowhere else.

The site was confirmed about 1890, when ranchers began selling the "petrified pineapples" as curiosities and scientists came to buy specimens for their museums. In 1898 George R. Wieland, a paleontology student at Yale, visited, became fascinated, turned to paleobotany and became the world's leading expert on fossil cycads. He also began a campaign for federal protection of the site. Even while the monument was being considered, there were reports that most surface fossils were already gone. The Department of the Interior (DOI) backed it anyway, because erosion would keep exposing more.

A fossil cycad trunk collected about 1903 from the area in or around what became the monument, from the U.S. Geological Survey's Edgemont folio (1904).

Neglect

The NPS never appointed a custodian. The monument was assigned on paper to the superintendent of Wind Cave National Park, and local ranchers kept an informal eye on it. Two small wooden signs reading "No Prospecting" did little once fossils showed at the surface, and in the 1920s permits were occasionally issued to collect specimens for display or university collections. An NPS report of November 20, 1929, concluded that all available specimens had been picked up and nothing of interest to visitors was left. Seven years after its creation, the monument was seen as a liability.

It never officially opened to the public and had no visitor center or programs. Its entrance was a private road, but collectors went anyway. In 1933 the Park Service Bulletin reported vandalism. Superintendent Edward D. Freeland of Wind Cave visited, found that it took almost a whole day to find a few small specimens without excavating, and concluded that souvenir hunters had carried off practically all the surface cycads. When the NPS wanted a fossil cycad for the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, it had to borrow one from a collector.

Original sign for Fossil Cycad National Monument. NPS History Collection.

A dig and a dispute

Wieland pressed for development, but NPS Associate Director Arno B. Cammerer wrote on March 23, 1933, that development came at an unfortunate time because of the Great Depression. At the service's request, Wieland and a team of 13 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) men began an excavation on October 27, 1935, with picks, shovels, power drills and dynamite. They uncovered more than a ton of fossils one to five feet below the surface. NPS Acting Chief Geologist Caroll H. Wegemann halted the dig on November 15, but Freeland reported that it had proven that numerous cycads remained. On December 2, 1935, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes announced plans to keep the monument, with the recovered fossils stored at Wind Cave until the monument could care for them.

Yale paleobotanist George Wieland and NPS officials oversee a CCC field crew in a test excavation at the monument, 1935. NPS photo.

Relations between Wegemann and Wieland then soured, and Wegemann accused Wieland of stealing fossils. Wieland replied from Yale on March 23, 1936, that he had quietly shipped a good load of important in situ material from the November work to his laboratory there. In 1937 local residents told the NPS that Wieland had also taken tons of fossils before the area was set aside, and in 1939 he admitted removing more than 1,000 fossils before the NPS administered the site.

Why it was never developed

In 1936 and 1937 Wieland kept pushing, even drawing a visitor center, but the NPS rejected it as too expensive. A 1937 NPS statement held that the monument's justification was not "unimpeachable": the subject of fossil cycads lacked broad appeal, and the area had no other outstanding attractions. On December 16, 1937, NPS Associate Director Arthur E. Demaray arranged for the fossils at Wind Cave to go to Yale for study, with the material to remain government property and be returned afterward. About 1,700 pounds were shipped to Wieland on January 20, 1938. Wind Cave had kept one fine specimen, described by Wegemann as weighing some four hundred pounds, but it was ordered to Yale too. Freeland later wrote that he asked repeatedly for any specimen to be returned for display and never succeeded.

Plans kept coming. One, costing $73,300, called for a museum building, exhibits, a custodian's residence, a public road and a parking lot, but many in the NPS questioned the need. In December 1942 the Region II director told NPS Director Newton B. Drury that development was not justified. A wayside exhibit proposed at a highway overlook was never installed because World War II redirected people and money. Wieland kept up his unsuccessful campaign until he died in 1953. If he had not removed the specimens to Yale, the article suggests, he might have found a more receptive audience for his visitor center.

Abolition and afterlife

The DOI supported legislation to abolish the monument, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed it on August 1, 1956. The abolition took effect September 1, 1957, and the land went to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the NPS noting that it was removing areas of less than national significance. In 1980 construction inside the former boundaries unearthed more fossils. In 2015 the BLM designated the 320 acres an area of critical environmental concern, closing it to mineral leasing, casual or commercial fossil gathering, renewable energy development and many other uses.

Boundary marker installed at the monument and replaced by the BLM in 2021. NPS History Collection.

Fossil Cycad is not the only former unit of the park system. The NPS calls it an example of how earlier management practices, neglect, internal disagreements and budget shortfalls let one man "love a park to death", and uses the objects from it in the NPS History Collection as a cautionary tale.

Sources

• National Park Service, "50 Nifty Finds #10: An Extinct Monument" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/50-nifty-finds-10-an-extinct-monument.htm), drawing on records in the NPS History Collection, Harpers Ferry Center; rewritten in hubnx's own words.