Saturday, December 5, 2009

GCNM the First

While I dig around in my notes, here is the map put out by the Forest Service after the first Grand Canyon National Monument was proclaimed by President T. Roosevelt in January 1908.
Since the surveying was complete, the boundaries could be better squared off (sorry the resolution is not good enough to see the text; once again, the original is at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/nphtml/gchome.html  Click on "maps produced before 1920". )
It is easy to see what the USGS intended when it aimed to get the minimum possible land above the rim. Marble Gorge did not make it; that would take sixty more years and a dam fight. But USGS took Cataract (Havasu) Canyon and put the Havasupai Reservation inside the Monument without a label. I will get to an updating of that woeful tale fairly soon.































You can see that they have been playing around with the northern part of the Powell-Harrison rectangle, but did not carry the Forest up to the state line. There is more change to come, including a splitting and renaming of the National Forest.

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