MAKING SAUSAGE IN CONGRESS' FACTORY
So in the 1966-72 period, we had struggled to trim and revise our Park conception to represent “complete” and not transgress against important interests.
At this same time, there were a variety of other proposals, and after the 1968 elections, when Barry Goldwater (another Republican fond of the Grand Canyon) replaced the retired Hayden, he vowed to move legislation forward that would expand the Park, in part to protect it against dams. His leadership would be seconded, then almost taken over by Morris Udall, who became our chief ally. Ironically, as a southern Arizonan and would-be dam-builder in the ’60’s, he had been, like Goldwater, our opponent .
Meanwhile, as Johnson was leaving the Presidency in January 1969, he approved Stewart Udall’s proposal to set Marble Canyon up as a National Monument. Once, this would have been a bold anti-dam move. However, the dam was dead, and given the momentum for Park enlargement, it was just a gesture. Worse, it had sad consequences since the Monument boundary grabbed Navajo land, leaving a vague Monument line that continues to confuse relationships to this day. This bureaucratic land grab, totally indefensible, should have disappeared when that Monument was abolished by Park enlargement.
The Navajo were active on their own, on the one hand, opposing a dam in Marble Canyon; on the other, creating two Tribal Parks, one for the Little Colorado, and the other running north along Marble Canyon and its hinterland. Their Park regulations were a model for avoiding degradation.
Senator Goldwater was not a tenderfoot; he had held the office before. In the 1950’s he had introduced for the Park Service a Park bill that fussed with a few Canyon bits. It went nowhere. Now, the impediment of dams was gone and Park enlargement was feasible. (Indeed that had been an impediment in past decades for those Park Service visionaries, like Roger Toll and Edward McKee, who in the 1930-40’s knew what a magnificent section of the Grand Canyon the western area was. In the face of that time's assumption that dams were an accepted national goal, they could not argue the case as we could in 1966. The same had been true for Glen Canyon, but in that case, no Park was even conceivable in the face of pro-dam sentiment.)
In the 1970's legislative machine, Goldwater, not a law-making craftsman, fumbled. That gave us, working with Udall, the chance to create a very pro-Park bill -- our moment of glory. And not just Park advocates. Even more significantly, after 80+ years of false promises and inhibitory treatment, the Havasupai had gotten Goldwater's ear, and with Hayden gone, he listened and heard. Moreover, the Republican Representative from northern Arizona, Sam Steiger, was already sympathetic to the Havasupai cause, which took the form of asking Congress to remove a couple hundred thousand acres from the Park and the adjoining Kaibab National Forest and repatriate these choice pieces of the Grand Canyon to the Havasupai’s long-denied ownership. Looking back, this was the Havasupai's hinge swinging Grand Canyon affairs open to their future. Fortunately, after the Goldwater fumble, they had found their own skilled legislative carpenter, a Phoenix lawyer named Joe Sparks.
Although Udall had started out, like us, fobbing off the Havasupai claim, Sparks and the Havasupai, in a dramatic meeting, convinced Udall of the justice and necessity of getting their land returned, and he re-structured the Park bill into a Park + Reservation enlargement effort. Udall then led passage of the bill through the House of Representatives. This altered situation was befogged a little because at that time, the Hualapai, allied with Phoenix power and other interests, still wanted to see a dam built. The Navajo, meanwhile, took little part, and Goldwater grabbed for their part of Marble Canyon. Resolving this complex of desires, including our defeat by Arizona hunters and Republicans, occupied the period 1974, ending in the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act of 1975. I have told that dramatic story in detail elsewhere, and those familiar with it will agree that a better title would be the Grand Canyon National Park and Havasupai Reservation Enlargement Act.
For my history here of setting the scene for the unveiling of the Greater Grand Canyon, the Enlargement Act’s first worthy note is that the Havasupai gained their goal, land repatriated to them for a larger, plateau-based Reservation, along with privileges on adjoining land that stayed in the Park.
Second, Grand Canyon National Park was extended to include all of its river and main canyon including Marble Canyon (west side) and a significant spread of the northwestern Canyon (moved out of Lake Mead National Recreation Area).
Third, the Hualapai dam idea was further discredited, and with changes in leadership the Hualapai have re-oriented toward the riches of tourism. It's worthwhile to remember Fred Mahone, a leader in the Hualapai land case, who in the 1930’s developed and put forward a plan for Hualapai Reservation recreation development based on Lake Mead. He was ignored. This too is an indicator of how the concept of the Greater Grand Canyon developed, with fits and starts, over a half century of individual inspiration and political maneuvering.
Even more significant is the fourth worthy result of the 1975 Act, section 6 that “authorizes and encourages” the Secretary of the Interior to have the Park cooperate with adjacent tribes and agencies in pursuit of greater recognition and protection of the Grand Canyon in its entirety. One time this was tried, a Core Team of leaders of the Hualapai and Park & Lake Mead NPS met several times a year, 2000-4, for detailed discussion on river managment issues. Given its success, this short-lived effort deserves to be revived, and used as a model to deal with other substantive matters..
Thus, out of the controversies of 1966-75, we can look back and see the need to face down threats and protect resources, but also a ground-laying for the appearance of strengthened participation that took the form of the Associated Tribes. Most significantly, the Havasupai celebrated their victory as they prepared an official Land Use Plan. The Enlargement Act had many cautions and checks to protect the Park and Havasupai environment, and the latter have shaped their reservation to fit those as well as their own goals and practices.
THE 80’S: DOWN TIME
American politics has not just been the story of unblemished progress for the Grand Canyon, as the election of Ronald Reagan and his appointment of a Secretary of the Interior who hated all that the Canyon means, made too clear. For instance, the Park Enlargement Act ordered a study for a Grand Canyon Wilderness. Successfully accomplished by the Park Service in 1976, the results were endorsed by the President, then got suffocated in a bureaucratic drawer.
Commercial over-exploitation of the river intensified, blessed by the new Secretary.
Another Act section called attention to the growing problem of airplane noise; the 80’s saw the problem grow worse and further degradation was legislated for the lower Canyon.
An Adjacent Lands Study mandated by the Act was conducted showing that there were substantial Park-worthy lands in the Canyon’s northwest. It was shelved in the 1980’s, but frightened the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management enough that they moved one section of this eminently Park ground through the process of becoming the Kanab Creek Wilderness in 1984. The irony for the uses of Wilderness is apparent.
Overall, into the 1990’s, the 1975 Act marked some closures of long-existing issues. Quiet descended. I took a leave of absence.
A (TOO-)BIG EXPANSION: 2000
Then in 1998, the Canyon’s advocates came roaring back. Bruce Babbitt, a very different Interior Secretary, one with substantial personal knowledge and affection for the Canyon, resurrected positive ideas from the Adjacent Lands report, and basing his proposal on the 1968 concept of the Grand Canyon’s drainage, sent forth a balloon for a fourth Grand Canyon Antiquities Act Monument, to comprise the northwestern areas: upper Toroweap, the Uinkarets, Whitmore and Parashant-Andrus Canyons, and the often-neglected (though not by ranchers and hunters) Shivwits Plateau. He held heavily attended, highly opinionated, public meetings in Flagstaff and Colorado City. Gathering his forces, with President Clinton behind him, Babbitt prepared a Park-type “as complete as it can be” recognition for this Grand Canyon - Parashant National Monument.
Entanglements intervened. At a meeting with colleagues from his pre-Secretary days when the Grand Canyon Trust was formed, he was lobbied to use this opportunity to benefit wildlife needs including rewilding-and-wildlife-corridor concepts. He agreed and doubled the acreage going off into the northwest over the Grand Wash Cliffs. Although the name stayed the same, this addition, which can stand on its own conceptual feet, distorted the Monument with 500,000 acres that are not only NOT part of the Grand Canyon (greater or not) but drain off west into the Basin and Range of Lake Mead.
Puzzled by this discombobulating extension, I interviewed two of the three participants at the decisive meeting, but the resulting fog gave no light. I also tried to find and talk to aides and others involved in the great effort Babbitt and Clinton were making for land recognition and protection. Silence. So there that bloated creation sits, more a memorial to the problems of power and secrecy than public enlightenment.
The fix, from the Grand Canyon, the Greater Grand Canyon, point-of-view, is simple. Take the name “Grand Canyon - Parashant” literally, and draw a dividing line along the Parashant drainage boundary. Then set up the northwestern area as a Grand Wash Cliffs Wildlife National Monument. On this map, I have left that northwest non-piece of the Grand Canyon untouched, while decorating the Canyon's parts. Southeast of the double blue line, and further marked by purple diagonals are lands integral to the Grand Canyon; The Toroweap, Whitmore, Parashant and Shivwits drainages.
There was another consequence of the Babbitt moves. He was firm in not putting the lands under the Canyon's NPS administration, but leaving them under Lake Mead NPS and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) administration, hoping that a new Landscape Admiration tilt would lift the latter agency into a more public, less exploitative, orientation. (This choice denied the National Park Service the role of providing a unified administration and presentation of the Grand Canyon lands north of the Colorado River.) Sadly, as we learned, Babbitt could hardly control what would happen to BLM in succeeding administrations. I draw a curtain over that tale, to move to a new champion of the Grand Canyon, vigorous and with a new outlook.
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