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.

Still Another Mystery: Monuments; No Park

We celebrate Theordore Roosevelt as one, and the most energetic, of the Grand Canyon's protecting angels. Yet untangling the history of the twentieth-century's first decade does not seem to leave us with much. It should have been a time of triumph, a time to build on the previous years' work to launch a Grand Canyon National Park effort. It was not, and indeed seems a time of splendid words and thin action.

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.

TR to the Fore. No Private Future

At the beginning of the new century, there was no Forest Service, no Park Service. That is to say, there were no professionals, trained, experienced, and/or educated into occupations directly relevant to administering certain types of public lands. A new book by Timothy Egan (The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt & the Fire That Saved America, 2009) gives us a wham-bam picture of the Progressivism of one century ago with TR (as I will call him here), Gifford Pinchot, and the beginnings of the Forest Service, doing battle with the evil ones who tried to throttle public land management in its cradle. A new century, a new president, a new American ideology, new, new, new.

Yet, there was the General Land Office with those forests and lands still in its hands. It is possible to give GLO some praise. We have met some of its field employees. The prevailing laws and ethos for a century had been to move public lands into private hands. All too willing, and often soiled, grasping, hands. The notion of forest RESERVES and NATIONAL parks was a joke, an oxymoron, an offense against common sense and human nature. Yet the GLO, with little incentive, did recognize the Grand Canyon as a public place, not just another carcass to be offered up for carving. And what the Progressives did, led most publicly by the trumpeting TR, was to clear space and imbed the notion of permanent National, Public, Lands as a pillar of American governance. Egan chooses a great 1910 fire in the forests of Idaho/Montana to tell this story. The emergence of the Grand Canyon National Park tells it as well.