Another map; a further reflection

These comments use a map from 1967 put out by the Southern California Automobile Club, one of the best cartographic organizations I know. My purpose is to use it for a further exploration of the mindsets we had and we faced in the 1960's and 1970's. 

Maps showing GCNP and the Kaibab National Forest north and south of it as depicted here would have been much the same since the Park was created in 1919. Grand Canyon National Monument (the second) was a 1930's creation. Lake Mead N.R.A. dates from 1964. The boundary shown here, including the northern portion of the Hualapai Reservation, is incorrect. The Hualapai rejected being included, having their own ideas (see the Sep 27 entry about the visionary, Mahone). The Havasupai Reservation was still miniscule, and although the dam fight was not concluded, the damsites are not shown. Other road maps were not so bashful, like the Shell map I remember from that time, with Bridge damsite a strong black mark across the river. However, Bridge Canyon is labelled, just south of the word "AREA" in the western Canyon.

That was the map we faced and were used to. Insofar as the Grand Canyon is a human concept of a natural construct, it was quite constricted, having no beginning and no ending, its river split among seven jurisdictions, mostly open to exploitation. GCNP and the Kaibab NF represented the pared-down vision of Powell, the pink Park defining, for almost everyone, the Grand Canyon as a spectacular "hole finally giving us a place to dump all our used razor blades in" -- I think thats from Frank Waters' book on the Colorado. 

Another map test

Once again, I am trying to master the process of scanning or copying a map and then getting it  into a blog entry. There are just ins and outs of this that I do not understand; hours of frustration. Enough.
This map is from the Arizona map produced by the federal government in 1879. It accompanied the report by the General Land Office to the Secretary of the Interior on S. 1849, the bill introduced by Senator Harrison in 1882 at the request of (in collaboration with?) J. W. Powell. The original proposal was by latitude and longitude, but the GLO changed it to miles measured from the Little Colorado, 56 miles east-west by 69 miles. 

When the proposal was resurrected as the Grand Cañon Forest Reserve created by President Harrison in 1893, 17 miles were cut off the top, although it was described once again by latitude and longitude. 
The GLO, by the way, referred to the just-proclaimed Yava-Suppai reservation, but did not add it to the map. 
A sign of future entanglements is the dashed line of the 40-mile limits of the grant to the railroad, called then the Atlantic & Pacific; what became known as the Santa Fe. The railroad line itself is solid and labelled, though it was still being worked on.
Now that I have Photoshop Elements, I hope to be able to edit and color, to make boundaries more apparent. 
The darkish line just north of the 40-mile limit is the fold in the map.

The Powell-Harrison partnership succeeds

Senator Benjamin Harrison introduced John Wesley Powell's Grand Canyon National Park bill on May 9 1882, five months into the first session of the 47th Congress. In what would seem to be routine actions, S. 1849 was referred to the Public Lands Committee, and sent to the Secretary of the Interior on May 15 to obtain the Department's views. The Committee chairman was P. B. Plumb, Republican of Kansas, apparently a far-seeing legislator who held the post until 1891, that year overseeing passage of an extensive revision of the public land laws which included this last section:

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.

We will get to that. 

Start with a mystery

Two letters exist between John Wesley Powell and Benjamin Harrison about the Grand Canyon.

There may 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. And Harrison's correspondence contains nothing about the Canyon. Nor is there any other evidence of a relationship between the two. Yet these men -- Powell leading, Harrison taking the actions -- constructed the foundation political framework in which debate about a Grand Canyon National Park took place over the next 40 years and beyond. How come?