Ten years before dying, Amiel Weeks Whipple came upon the most amazing thing, In 1853, the U.S. Army Lt. was leading an expedition of the new Southwestern territory of the United States when his party happened upon fallen, almost translucent logs in what later became known as the Petrified Forest. The “stone trees,” as Whipple dubbed them, and their shards were not just dazzling but had previously proven to have great utility. This rock-like wood had quietly spread across the continent for centuries as it served as an organic munitions plant of sorts for native peoples, providing arrow heads and the like, traded from one tribe to another. An article in the August 14, 1899 Brooklyn Daily Eagle (originally published in the Chicago Record) looked at the land less than a decade before it became a national park.