The Grand Canyon's First Superhero Duo

SOMETIMES IT TAKES TWO

The early legislative/political history of the Grand Canyon is indebted to some of the giants of our West: John Wesley Powell, of course, but also Gifford Pinchot and John Muir.

Because of destroyed archives, Powell’s collaboration with Benjamin Harrison over the Canyon has been largely lost. Their efforts were in 1882-5 and 1893, while the Muir-Pinchot efforts came later, in the 1890’s. 

This post covers the earlier, first, Powell-Harrison effort; a second will review Muir-Pinchot.

John Wesley Powell — The Procreator Of The Park

2019 was a signature year for Grand Canyon National Park — the centennial of President Wilson signing the Act that established it… after 35 years of political pushing and pulling, hauling and fiddling.

And who started this almighty tug-of-war of reverence and protection, pulling away against the crowd of would-be users and profiteers? The Grand Canyon's seminal explorer and popularizer, John Wesley Powell.   And yet…

And yet, here is a typical piece, written to celebrate the 2019 centennial (there are many other such references in the Canyon literature on how the Park came to be):

In Smithsonian Magazine, 26 Feb 2019, Francine Uenuma, 

“The Decades-Long Political Fight to Save the Grand Canyon” starts off in its first sentence:

    “if had been up to then-Senator Benjamin Harrison,

            America would have marked that (centennial)

            milestone in 1982”.

Exercising my titular metaphor, this is like calling the mid-wife the biological parent. To see what roles the Indiana newbie and the Canyon-besotted scientist really played, start with a quick summary of each. 

Yes, Harrison, as a first- and single-term Senator introduced the GCNP bill in 1882, just a few months after he came to Washington from Indiana, his home and permanent residence. Indiana’s legislature had selected him for the Senate in 1881. Nothing in his biography up to that point relates to the Grand Canyon.

1881 was also the year Powell assumed the directorship of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), where he had already been working. His books about the Grand Canyon had been available and popular from the mid-1870’s.

Powell was a great schmoozer, a persuader of men. Twice he had convinced a group to prepare for and undertake the first organized boat trips down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. He had come to Washington on the crest of his exploration accomplishments and writings. He was known; he knew people. He was a fecund source of ideas and knowledge in his fields of geology, ethnology, the use of our western lands. He was an administrator of public agencies in these areas. He was one of the band of 33 that started the National Geographic Society. He was a founder and active participant in the sociable Cosmos Club of those interested in science and the natural world.

Almost certainly, I believe, he conceived the idea of taking the National Park idea (that had first been legislated for Yellowstone in 1872) and applying it in celebration of the Grand Canyon. Quite likely, the Canyon came up often in his conversation with others.

Harrison, coming to the Senate in the 1880’s, was a mainstream Republican. He was assigned the committees on territories and on transportation routes to the seaboard; he served as Chair. He advocated for the voting rights for African Americans and increasing funding for their education. He was involved in economic issues, such as the tariff. He had to deal with a parade of office-seekers as part of the task of bolstering his Party.

None of these or other discernible activities or interests seem likely to have brought him into contact with Powell, much less as a collaborator on the Grand Canyon. There is, so far as I can find, no record.

Nevertheless, on 9 May 1882, five months after he took office, Senator Harrison introduced S. 1849, to set apart the Grand Cañon of the Colorado as a National Park. How did that come about? That is the mystery, and here is the sparse documentation, letters, that we have:

Handwritten from Harrison to Powell, though to his other post as Director of the Bureau of Ethnology, on April 26, 1882, the first document says,

“I received the draft of the bill which you sent me providing for setting apart the Cañon of the Colorado as a National Park. By some mischance it has got away from me...I do not see any other way than to ask you to rewrite this bill and send it to me and I will try to present it before I lose it again.”

Powell replied on May 5, taking "pleasure in sending you" and "thanking you for your kind attention to" this matter of the Canyon.

No more?Two letters that only exist because Harrison lost Powell’s bill draft?

There must have been more; almost certainly were, in the 1880's. On Powell's side, however, fire in the early twentieth century destroyed the pertinent archives of the U. S. Geological Survey under his directorship. On the other side, Harrison’s correspondence contains nothing about the Canyon. Nor is there any other evidence of a relationship between the two that I could find in biographies and writings. The evidence relied on in Harry Sievers’ three-volume Harrison biography is solely a note in the ""Congressional Record" about S.1849, found and included in a Princeton senior’s thesis that Sievers’ cites.

The formal record of the legislation (containing nothing from either Powell or Harrison; did they not put in a word?) fortunately does continue.  As introduced, S.1849 was referred to the Senate Public Lands Commitee, which sent it on May 15 to the Secretary of the Interior for comment; it then passed on to the General Land Office (GLO). On the 24th, It came back to the Secretary, with a positive-sounding comment that the bill’s purpose was worthy of Congress’ consideration. 

Powell’s draft originally described the Park boundary using longitude and latitude. GLO changed that to read: from the junction of the Colorado and Little Colorado, go east 2-½ miles. Then go north 40 miles, west 56, south 69,  east 56, then back north 29: 3864 sq. mi., 2,473,000 acres. A very big rectangle:

 (The current Park is 1902 sq. mi., 1,217,262 acres, just one-half the 1882 version. And, the Park’s conceptual shape and boundary description are radically different.)

Note was taken in the GLO’s report that the brand-new “Yavai Suppai” Reservation was within the proposed boundary and should be exempted from the Park. (However, the fulfillment of Havasupai needs took 90-some more years, also ending with radically different boundaries and conceptual shape.)

American boomerism now intervened, for Colorado’s Senator Henry Teller of Colorado had just assumed the Secretaryship on April 18th (and served until March 1885). He took the bill and GLO’s approving comment, and on May 24 transmitted the GLO report to the Senate, his language’s spirit resonating with every would-be Canyon profiteer’s and exploiter’s hopes since:

“It is questionable whether the withdrawal of so large a tract of the public land from sale and settlement is advisable at the present time...The natural scenery along the Colorado River of the West, within the boundaries of the proposed reservation does not require the creation of a public park to preserve it. Believing that its full benefits can be enjoyed by the public without interfering with the right of settlement or entailing upon the United States the expense of the care and improvement of the proposed reservation, I am of the opinion that this Bill ought not to become a law.”

This apparently was the death blow, for although the GLO version of the bill went back to the Senate Public Lands Committee, and was reported out to the Senate on May 29, that body took no further action. Teller’s negativity and general blindness prevailed. Whether Harrison made any effort to overcome it is not recorded. He did reintroduce the bill in two more Congresses, but it left no further trace in the archives or his biography.

However, that was not the end of the Powell-Harrison collaboration. Harrison’s Senate career ended, he won the Presidency in 1888, serving until 1893. Powell continued in his work, facing increasing frustrations, although the Grand Canyon seems not to have been an issue for him. 

What became a raging issue for many others was the despoilation of what we now call our public lands, and particularly the forests. Long story not told here, a provision was slipped by Congressman William Holman, a land-law reformer, into 1891 omnibus homestead legislation, "to repeal timber-culture laws, and for other purposes". This was what became the almightly Sec. 24: 

That the President of the United States may from time to time set apart and reserve, in any State or Territory having public land bearing forests, in any part of the public lands wholly or in part covered with timber or undergrowth, whether of commercial value or not, as public reservations: and the President shall, by public proclamation, declare the establishment of such reservations and the limits thereof.

Although this initiative did not come from Harrison, and may not have been a priority for him, Harrison showed himself willing to sign the bill and use the provision, starting out with protecting lands around Yellowstone National Park, which he had been able to visit. 

So in March 1891, Yellowstone proponents from USGS and outside took a forest reserve proposal to Interior Secretary Noble. He agreed and asked them to draft a proclamation. This format was exactly what happened in 1893, when Powell (most probably) took the initiative on the Grand Canyon. Here are the events on the record.

Harrison had been defeated in his re-election effort a few months earlier and would be out of office in a month when, on February 14, 1893, Powell (still USGS Director) "in compliance with your oral instructions" reported to Secretary of the Interior J. W. Noble on a public reservation of lands:

The region ... embraces the most important scenic features of the Grand Canyon ..., the most stupendous chasm known on the globe, the picturesque features of which are elsewhere unequaled... The plateaus on the north and south ... are covered with great forests which will thus be protected from spoliation. ... The region has been topographically surveyed and mapped and can be defined with accuracy.

Interestingly, Powell reverts to describing the boundary in latitude and longitude. Even more interestingly, he has lopped off the northernmost 15', setting the boundary at 36°30', and leaving 18 linear miles of “great forest” not "protected from spoliation". Perhaps revealingly, when he comes to repeat that number he writes 58 instead of 36. The area, he says, will include 2,893 square miles, about 1.85 million acres.

The Secretary endorses the proposal, sending it to the GLO Commissioner for "early" report and a proclamation creating a Forest Reserve. A few days later, the Commissioner returns the proclamation in duplicate, with an official map of Arizona, saying that the lands are unsurveyed, and the greater portion are "granted and indemnity lands of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad". All flowery language is eschewed in favor of: public lands "are in part covered with timber" and "the public good would be promoted". Indeed there is no mention of the Grand Canyon, except in the title. Moreover, the efficiency or sympathy of 1882 is gone, for there is no mention of the "Yavai Suppai" either. What is mentioned is "settlement" in three paragraphs, to wit: unaffected is any settlement that is legal or covered by lawful filing or made pursuant to law; all mining claims duly located; except if the claimant or entryman doesnt comply with the law or tries anything after this takes effect.

Noble's cover letter is a bit more expansive, back to speaking of "the great forests". This, he says, "I deem one of the most important and valuable reservations to which I have had the honor to invite your attention. The forests are the most magnificent on this continent, and the wonders of the Canon of the Colorado should be preserved in this connection as an inheritance for the people." He goes on to protection: "The rail roads have not yet reached this region and settlements have not been made. It is a fortunate opportunity to reserve control of the timber and protect the approaches to the river from early individual appropriation, and subject them to the rules and regulations of this government." If only...  And even today, Noble's sentiments are both honored and breached.

The proclamation went to Harrison on February 20, 1893 (a week later!) and he signed it the same day. One might hope that, at least, Powell and Harrison had a cigar and a glass together.

And so, speaking of centennials, there was another anniversary that got missed: the first reservation of the Grand Canyon. (Well, not really; the Hualapai and Havasupai Indian Reservations had been proclaimed a decade previous.)  Ironically, this first was for a forest reserve, and because of the administrative tangles and resource uses that differ among our lands agencies, there have been times when Forest priorities have gotten in the way of Park priorities. Too bad the Park did not come first; it would have saved a lot of conflict (that’s a joke, but fun to contemplate).

BUT HERE’S ANOTHER, GOLDEN, ANNIVERSARY

We can, however, if we hurry, make a thing of the 50th Golden Anniversary of the January 1975 public law that first, expanded the National Park to include its full length, and first, (depends on your priorities), repatriated a chunk of the Canyon’s land back to the Havasupai. 

Nor are we even barely done: In July 2023, the Greater Grand Canyon was brought into being by President Biden’s (present and in person) proclaiming Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni National Monument. This collation of ownerships and administrations, purposes, needs, challenges, and opportunities will be a cause for many remembrances, and settings-out as well, in the future. 

But that is for another entry. The next takes us back to the 1890’s, and two more great friends of the Grand Canyon.