America's Treasures

America has been blessed as a land rich in fossils. America's great natural history museums display many of the great treasures from the country's ancient paleontological past. Fossil fish, giant mammals, invertebrates, plants, and everybody's favorite: dinosaurs. The National Park Service has taken great care in preserving some of the nations most important precious fossil resources.

During explorer Hernando de Soto's early 16th century expedition in what would become the southeastern United States, he encountered Native American cities of great wealth. These were the cities of what archaeologists call the Mississippian culture. The cities were marked by the construction of large, truncated earthwork pyramid mounds. Mounds still visible and preserved today in many places.

The Colorado Plateau there is no place like it on the planet. Commonly called the four corners region, it contains more National Parks and Monuments than anywhere else in the world. It is a geologist's paradise. It has domes, hoodoos, natural bridges, dramatic pinnacles beyond belief.

The intrepid mountain men of the Rockies. It was a short but epic era when a hearty breed of men battled the elements and overcame great dangers. All in search of enormous wealth. Not wealth in the form of gold, but wealth in the form of animal pelts, particularly beaver pelts.

Florida, is a subtropical paradise. Florida is where two National Park units capture transformative events in American history. On the Atlantic side was the launching of the first American satellite into space from Canaveral National Seashore. And the other is on the Gulf side at De Soto National Memorial.

It was the longest war in U.S. history. It was sixty years of ongoing battles, fights and raids that took place between the Great Plains nomadic horse warriors on one side, and settlers, traders and the United States military on the other. With as many as 40,000 combined deaths, it made the Wild Wild West a dangerous and violent place. It was simply called The Great Indian Wars.

The National Mall. The premiere civic, spiritual and symbolic space of the nation. A great swath of green in the middle of America's capital city, Washington D.C. The mall itself stretches from the foot of the United States Capitol Building to the Lincoln Memorial on the banks of the Potomac River.

Since the first black slaves arrived at Virginia's Jamestown colony in 1619, they began, against all odds, a noble struggle for equality. Today, nearly 400 years later, that struggle has been recognized and memorialized with the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

America has been blessed with a spectacular coastline. The Pacific Ocean coastline. A coastline where the tectonic forces of the Pacific and North American plates are colliding, producing one of the most dramatic coastlines in the world. A coastline with one of the great Mediterranean climates. A coastline with over 50 million inhabitants.

It is perhaps the most treasured landscape in America. Commonly known as the Southern Rockies, it is one of the most spectacular sections of mountains on the planet. Most of the range is above 10,000 feet. It is the highest region on the North American Continent. And it contains many of the highest peaks in the whole Rocky Mountain Range.

Grand Teton National Park - a complete glacier-carved Rocky Mountain ecosystem, Joshua Tree National Park - displaying the mid-latitude Mojave Desert ecosystem, and Olympic National Park - containing a primeval temperate rainforest ecosystem are all parks that started out as Monuments.