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a few new ones during his tenure as president. Only five national parks existed in the spring of 1902—Yellowstone, Sequoia, General Grant, Yosemite, and Mount Rainier—and he was eager to establish a sixth. The National Park Service would not be created until 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act, so all five of these national treasures were managed independently by the Department of the Interior. The Organic Act’s high-minded mandate was to “conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild-life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” But in 1902 the national parks were run by the U.S. Army (Mount Rainier being an exception), with the commanding officer of the troops serving as superintendants, reporting directly to the Secretary of the Interior.1

All other things being equal, President Roosevelt’s first choice for a new national park was the Grand Canyon plateau—then a national forest in which extraction was allowed. Roosevelt had first learned of the Grand Canyon when he read Major John Wesley Powell’s harrowing account of journeying down the Colorado River between 1869 to 1872 as a teenager. There was nothing that President Roosevelt didn’t like about the self-taught Powell—a feisty one-armed Civil War veteran and brave explorer who went on to found the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology. To Roosevelt the Grand Canyon was an immortal landscape. Just as Yellowstone had been ballyhooed in magazines and periodicals during his youth, in 1902–1903 the Grand Canyon was being touted as an unrivaled natural wonder. Gorgeous photographs of the deep gorge with snow around its rim appeared in the popular press, anticipating the heroic work of Ansel Adams (who was born in 1902). One of America’s finest landscape painters—Thomas Moran—celebrated the Grand Canyon in canvas after canvas, to great critical acclaim.

Opposition against declaring the Grand Canyon a national park, however, was fierce. Arizona was a mining territory, where rock blasting was pervasive. Mining claims had already been staked (with encouragement from the U.S. government) for the chance to extract from the Grand Canyon zinc, copper, lead, and asbestos. The Roosevelt’s idea of withdrawing the nearly 300-mile Colorado River gorge from the private sector was anathema to many in Arizona, including the governor of the territory, Nathan Oakes Murphy. Murphy had journeyed to Washington, D.C., in 1902 to lobby against all of Roosevelt’s irrigation and federal forestlands projects. An antigovernment zealot, Murphy wanted to oust Arizona’s Indians from federal reservations so that the land could be sold to Anglo settlers. Popular in the southern counties of Maricopa and Pima, Murphy fancied himself as the voice of small-time miners and land developers. You might say he was allergic to anything stamped “Interior” or “Agriculture.” 2 The Tucson Daily Citizen, in fact, deploring his anti-Roosevelt, anticonservationist bias, fulminated that Murphy “should have retired from the Governorship of Arizona before undertaking to promote the interests of the water stealers and land grabbers. He should have divested himself of his official character before entering the lobby to advocate private monopoly at the expense of public interests.”3

Roosevelt employed cartoonists like Ding Darling to help promote his grand vision for national forests throughout the American West.

“Use Forest Reserve Tonic.” (Courtesy of Ding Darling Estate)

Realizing that turning the Grand Canyon into a national park was an undertaking strewn with hurdles, Roosevelt looked for a softer, less controversial natural legacy to preserve. Turning to Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot for advice, Roosevelt was told that Crater Lake in southern Oregon was perhaps an ideal choice for a relatively conflict-free national park. In hindsight, Pinchot unquestionably gave the president excellent advice. Pinchot’s idea was to save Crater