TR had conservation ally in N.C. governor

“On the same afternoon [in 1908 that President Theodore Roosevelt] declared the Grand Canyon a national monument, he began threatening to do the same with large parts of the Appalachian and White Mountains, an action certain to cause tremendous resistance by congressmen from Maine to Georgia. One notable exception was Gov. Robert Glenn of North Carolina, who committed himself politically to Roosevelt’s conservationist crusade, hoping that the Great Smoky Mountains would emerge as a national monument.”

— from “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America” by Douglas Brinkley.

A few months later Glenn would tell the National Governors Conference, “Our forests are being denuded…. Our people… have been living only for the present, thinking of themselves and not of their children and their children’s children.”