This dissertation begins with a simple question: By what process(es) have remote prehistoric ruins and natural wonders, particularly in the American Southwest, been transformed from interesting curiosities of the unknown frontier to American "national monuments"? If monuments, in their various forms, are understood as symbols of national and regional identities, then the National Park Service's (NPS) Flagstaff Area National Monuments (Walnut Canyon, Sunset Crater Volcano, and Wupatki) have been preserved for more than just their historic or scientific value. By tracing the story of these monuments from the era of European contact through the 1930s New Deal, when the NPS assumed full control, this dissertation explores the relationship between a community's sense of place or history and the creation - perhaps even invention or imagining - of some of America's first national monuments. I argue that there are three general cycles through which these sites progressed: periods of exploitation, ownership, and protection. In short, the possessive nature of natural and cultural resource exploitation (through early lumbering, ranching, pothunting, tourism, and the like) had the eventual effect of creating a sense of ownership of those resources, which, in turn, brought about the desire for their protection from exploitation and wholesale destruction. These shifts occurred as the people of Flagstaff developed a sense of place or history - a kind of intellectual ownership - through which Walnut Canyon, Wupatki, and Sunset Crater Volcano became an integral part of local, regional, and national identity. Each phase is therefore not mutually exclusive and changed only through the influence of external forces, like the federal government and the passage of legislation, but rather is part of a gradual process through which change is brought about on a number of levels - internal and external, local and national, individual and community-wide. The work that follows is based on a reading of the relevant literature in cultural resource management, as well as extensive research in period manuscript, newspaper, and photographic collections from Flagstaff to Washington, D.C.