Yes, kid, we are there; we've arrived: The Park, 1917-19

1917

JAN, Graves and Albright meet, with Graves' full approval of going with Hayden lines. His handwritten assurance adds, "I will see that no eliminations are made from the portion of the Tusayan or Kaibab Forests without consulting your office and the adjacent lands to the Park will be administered to secure full coordination of the common problems. If it appears that a revision of boundaries is desirable, we can jointly ask for the changes later." His acquiescence is justified, as shown in the resulting map making clear how the Park shrank, not only from any ideal, but from the Monument.

JAN 24, there is a Hayden bill, HR 20447, with tightly girdling boundary:

(though a pencilled note fixes two mistakes). It is the same as S. 8250 introduced by Senator Henry Ashurst. Sent over by Interior, there had been a south line change as Hayden had "suggested" using the road to get closer to rim than the more generous section lines.

 My red drawn boundary is a bit approximate-- the middle southern line is a road; the west line starts out following the west rim of Cataract/Havasu Canyon, then across to the north bank of the Colorado, up that to Tapeats, up that & tributaries to the NM line. The northeast boundary follows the hydrographic divide above Nankoweap, even "by the shortest route" to the east line. These lines seem more the actions of demented Restrictives than a Grand Canyon boundary. Above irony is that the one area above the rim that is Generous is the plateau land that should have been part of any reasonable Havasupai reservation in the 1880's; imagine what heartache might have been saved had the Park boundary been set on the east rim of Great Thumb Mesa? (Be very careful of getting what you ask for.)  Aside from that "Havasu" western section, this boundary is the extreme --the nadir-- of Powell's original misconception that all of the Canyon that was worth celebrating in a Park was the Big Hole. Where was the ASHPS spirit when it was needed? 

THE MONUMENT

Review: A National Forest Commission, and then GLO, had been memoing up a Grand Canyon National Park for ten years, from before the end of the XIXth century. USGS was making excuses for its lack of action. The matters of a survey and railroad lands were agreed to in 1902, and finished with by 1905. TR had included a one-line national Park recommendation in his 1904 and 1905 annual (December) messages. In January 1906, the Santa Fe asked USGS its opinion of a national Park, and urged its advantages.

Marking time; an irrelevance

In May 1898, the GLO had stated there was every reason why the existing Forest Reserve should be merged into a National Park. The status of the Grand Canyon was the concern of more than a government agency, however. The Sierra's champion, John Muir, first visited in 1896;  returning in 1902, 1909 and 10. The 1902 visit produced an article in the November Century Magazine. (See it at http://web.pacific.edu/Documents/school-college/centers/john_muir/Fall2004.pdf starting on page 4). He was a colleague in conservation, a friend, of Pinchot and TR. (Now Pinchot and Muir tend to be treated as sources of two differing streams of environmental thought. At the time, given the enemies of public lands, they were of one cloth.) Certainly, the Canyon's status was a common topic at this high political level.

TR's Antiquities Act Abuse

Before we get back to the chronology, here is one story, about TR's creation of the first Grand Canyon National Monument , as told by Hal Rothman in his 1989 America's National Monuments: The Politics of Preservation (Univ. of Illinois, ch 4. Find the book on the website nps.gov/history). 

1903, TR visits the Canyon, and someone tells him that the railroad, the Santa Fe, having just recently brought its tracks almost to the rim, had decided to build a hotel back from the rim. TR says he is pleased at this restraint. A year later, El Tovar, on the rim, opened. Rothman notes there were no laws preventing such construction in a national forest. No surprise; as Rousseau pointed out, laws are necessary to protect those who would obey them even if they didn't exist from those who break them even when they do. It would have been the gentlemanly thing to do, leaving the rim in a natural condition, so visitors could see the Canyon in its primordial frame.