Tin Ear for the Grand Canyon's Tunes

TIN EAR FOR THE GRAND CANYON’S TUNES

Some Comments on John D. Leshy’s Our Common Ground

A History of America’s Public Lands*

Yale U. Press, 2021

John Leshy’s new book is a condensed way to get a feel and general sense of how Americans since the 18th century have interpreted, changed their views, and fought over what “public” in our public lands means. His long career, including 8 years as Solicitor in Bruce Babbitt’s Interior Department, must have staggered even him (the narrative is 600 pages) in tracking the ins and outs of Americans’ views, from precious possessions of the entire nation to choice bits to grab and exploit for all the cash one can squeeze.

He has his favorite subjects; I think grazing use is one; another must be reservation and conservation as embodied by our National Parks. I don’t intend here to come close to a review or reading guide. Rather, I want to select out the few, very few, references to the Grand Canyon, and take a detailed look at his accuracy in dealing with this very special environmental icon of ours. What weight does the Canyon have in the two-centuries+ of the formulation and alteration and evolution of the law/legal structures governing American national inheritance of our great tract of public land?

I read Leshy’s account as showing the major thrust of American land law change: from moving public land into private control (19th-century national goal) to the reverse: the multi-faceted national decision to keep, cherish, and provide the public lands for public use rather than private ownership. Using the years 1880-1920 as the pivot, we can fit the Grand Canyon in this narrative as going from being a blank spot to being a world-renowned signifier of respect for scenery, non-destructive recreation, and the Environment as our life support.

The Grand Canyon's importance was first signaled by John Wesley Powell as he made and publicized his exploration of the Colorado River’s great canyons and plateaus. Then, in 1880's Washington, with Benjamin Harrison (as a first-term Senator, then as President — i.e., the man with the political position) he pioneered trying to protect the Canyon, first as a Park, then as a Forest Reserve. Leshy drops in some of the pieces of this joint effort:

Powell  (165)* is only mentioned in Leshy as “having also endorsed establishing a national park at the Grand Canyon”. Actually he drafted the first Park bill, giving it to Harrison. Harrison, Leshy writes, (179) then proclaimed the GC Forest Reserve ten years later as a “not surprising” act, since he had  sponsored Park bills. However, he doesnt tie these together, since again it was Powell who presented Harrison with the Forest proposal, somewhat revised from their 10-year-old Park bill. It was Powell’s action, not Harrison’s, that was “not surprising”, as Powell saw that a power to regulate forests could also protect this very large hole in the ground. 

Leshy suggests that recreation (= tourism) was a big factor when in 1893 Harrison established the Forest Reserve. He could have mentioned that activity was accentuated hugely by the Santa Fe RR’s ambition as it became central in how development proceeded at the Canyon.

Another element, more deleterious, was the 1872 Mining Law, that legal beast that has been used to ravage and threaten so much American land. Leshy features the story of Ralph Cameron (260), a standard issue western boomer, with the bogus mining claims he used to control the main Bright Angel trail access, before he was driven and harassed out, culminating in a Supreme Court case that affirmed the constitutionality of one of the great preservation statutes, the Antiquities Act.

More long-lived and obnoxious, though not mentioned, has been  the Orphan mine, an actual producing uranium operation once located very obviously on the rim near Grand Canyon Village. Cameron, as a rascal, deserves his mention, but the Orphan was an even more destructive example of the damage the 1872 law can cause.

I read Leshy, given his apparent preferences (Parks over Forests), as considering Gifford Pinchot less than the hero others often would make him. It would have been interesting for Leshy to have brought Muir and Pinchot together (as they were) in the debate over the Canyon’s future. In his chapter on T. Roosevelt and National Parks (263-4), he recognizes T.R.’s seeming deference to Pinchot on Parks.

However, it was more consequential in Grand Canyon history than that. We all know how enthusiastic Roosevelt was at, and after, his visit to the Canyon (followed shortly thereafter by a sojourn with Muir in California). Not just once, but repeatedly thereafter, Roosevelt recommended a Grand Canyon Park in his annual messages. Yet he never took the Park bill that Interior had worked so hard on during his administration, and and sent it to Congress. We also know that Pinchot directed the President’s attention away from the Canyon and toward areas like Crater Lake as being politically cheaper. And how convenient, that when Roosevelt proclaimed the National Monument, it remained in the National Forest. 

While Leshy does give Roosevelt great credit (259-60) for declaring the Monument, he ignores again the role played by the Santa Fe, and then he goes off on the Cameron problem. Even more odd to me, he takes up space to suggest that the GC Game Preserve (250) was a meaningful gesture, though it was toothless, and he admits it was effective only once, in 1987. (fn. 17,18, on 627: ). I can only assume it fits in with his major emphasis and interest in the great growth of the importance of wildlife care and protection.

In 1919, Leshy has Congress busy on parks, (335) with barely a mention of GCNP and nothing on the plethora of the non-Park uses in its establishing act that would come to plague it.

Hoover, “after losing decisively  (in 1932 …), used the Antiquities Act to add 273,000 acres to the protected areas around Grand Canyon in December.”(380) I am not sure why he mentions the election (though he gives the Hoovers a nice photo op), but I am surprised that he ignores the conflict with ranchers. After all, that led to FDRoosevelt’s reducing the size of the 1932 Monument in 1940, thereby providing a precedent for any future president to do boundary changes, including reductions — an issue Leshy himself became concerned about and ignores here.

His skimpy account may just be a matter of space in an already massive tome, but it is an example of what I think of as having a tin ear on how the Grand Canyon figures into the great public land issues he is deeply involved in.

His emphasis for the Colorado Plateau switches to Reclamation (392) — a subject matter that seems another not-so-favorite of his. His geography is off when he talks of the length of Lake “Mead, more than 100 miles upstream, nearly into the Grand Canyon”. Well, if “nearly” = into 40 miles of it… Beyond that, I suppose he could hardly be expected to be aware of the troubles caused by being forced to use a Recreation Area for Park-worthy land (393).

On 461-3, he talks of Echo Park dam, Dinosaur, and wilderness, but the Grand Canyon doesnt figure.

He does stretch out to take a full page (546-7) on the dams proposed for the Grand Canyon. He summarizes the action with a nice mention of the Sierra Club campaign, especially its ads, like flooding the Sistine Chapel to get closer to the ceiling. However, his presentation of the issues is amiss on electricity and ignores the centrality of the water-short future of the Colorado River — something that again reared its head in his time at Interior. Maybe this doesn’t seem public-land-ish enough, but it is hard to imagine a more damaging impact on public lands than what would have happened had the dams and import of water from the Columbia to the Colorado come about. 

 (Extraneous note: if Senator Jackson and not the Sierra Club campaign were the roadblock that caused the dams to be defeated, as has been opined by anti-environmentalists, how could that have been what stopped California from going for a House vote? A floor victory could have given them a leg up in 1967, and surely the Northwest-import study would not have blocked floor approval. So doesn’t that support the notion that it was the dam controversy in the hands of opponents that really scared California off? (No way to tell without research in California archives). 

It is not clear that First American issues are a major concern for Leshy. In 563-4 he fails to emphasize how central the Hualapai were in the suit to get the full measure of their reservation free and clear, excluding the railroad from the sections which it claimed, in the important Supreme Court decision in 1942. 

The Havasupai redress that narrative imbalance (566-7) in Leshy’s history of the GCNP Enlargement Act. He features the successful repatriation of Havasupai land using the Park Enlargement Act in his chapter on “Public Lands and Native Americans”. His account does ignore the juicy details of the near-century-long history of that repatriation, as well as the Act’s details, but at least, unlike for the Hualapai, the Havasupai are featured actors. 

The 1975 Park Act is also used in his discussion of air traffic overflights of National Parks. He notes the Act’s toothlessness on air control.(549), then goes on to the 1987 Overflights Act effort led by Arizonans McCain and Udall, not noting that the helicopter exception for the Hualapai is a horror for river travelers.

His disinterest in the goal of protecting and presenting GCNP echoes in his lack of mention of Sec Babbitt’s proclamation of GC-Parashant NM, a lack that reinforces that this is not a book of places and their value, but of American political struggles over the laws that govern the disposition of our public lands.

As if in final reinforcement, Leshy uses rafting in the Canyon as his “micro-illustration” of public lands recreational death (597-8).  With boating growing from 1000 total to 30,000 per year (his emphasis), it is not logging or mining, but for land managers it is the “wrestling” to balance recreational use with the protection of wildlife and cultural resources, and whether and how to accommodate hikers, off-road-vehicle users, mountain bikers and e-bikers, bird-watchers, wild horse lovers, target shooters, sport hunters and anglers, climbers, and myriad other enthusiasts. And, we friends of the Grand Canyon could have told him, no better example of the difficulties, whether boater equity or discrimination, protecting the riverine environment, or wilderness classification.

* Numbers are pages in Leshy’s book.