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By Root 3855 0

Arizonan politicians were in the audience, marked the beginning of Roosevelt’s ceaseless determination to save the canyon from destruction. Overawed by its immensity, enjoying even the ground squirrels running across the naked rock, Roosevelt was in rapture. There is something about the Grand Canyon’s power that makes one consider immortality. It was grander than all the music Roosevelt had heard; it was finer than all the Transcendental poetry he had read. John Burroughs had written in Locusts and Wild Honey about the gospel of the ledge, which was nothing less than “eternity” Roosevelt now understood what Oom John had meant.81 To Roosevelt’s mind this ledge was a no-growth zone. If Roosevelt had done nothing else as president, his advocacy on behalf of preserving the canyon might well have put him in the top ranks of American presidents. Middle Granite Gorge, the Redwall Cliffs of Havasu Falls, Kaibab Plateau, Marble Canyon, Mount Trumball—all topographically part of what would become the Grand Canyon National Park—became treasured places that miners or loggers would never lay to waste, thanks to Roosevelt’s strenuous advocacy. Even industrial activity anywhere near the Grand Canyon wasn’t acceptable to Roosevelt. If Carlyle was correct in saying that all history is forged by the deeds of great men, then Roosevelt earned his place in the American pantheon by simply refusing to let commercial interests desecrate the Grand Canyon.

Clearly, to Roosevelt the Grand Canyon was more than a weather-worn chasm or scarred ledge cutting deep into a mountainous region. It was one the world’s most spectacular examples of the power of erosion. Time was on display at the canyon as nowhere else. At the comfortable El Tovar Hotel on the South Rim, Roosevelt—seeing the Grand Canyon as a symbol of unifying nationalism after the Civil War—told a reporter for the New York Sun that it was one of the “great sights every American should see.”82 Once again, the president sounded like a Baedeker guide to the West. Instead of considering the canyon as just a singular natural wonder (like Crater Lake or Wind Cave), he saw it as an irreplaceable part of the Colorado Plateau landscape, which covered approximately 13,000 square miles in northern Arizona, western Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, and eastern Utah. At meetings of the Boone and Crockett Club he used to insist that Yellowstone was the finest geological site in America, but now he knew better. Taken as a whole, the Colorado Plateau included the Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Glen Canyon, Rainbow Bridge, the Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Arches, Four Corners, Mesa Verde, Petrified Forest, the Painted Desert, San Francisco Peaks, Oak Great Canyon, and dozens of other sedimentary attractions. What a stunning terrain! What a watershed! Although Roosevelt had extensive experiences in the Dakota Badlands moonscape, the Colorado Plateau was beyond anything he’d ever fathomed.83

The plant life around the Grand Canyon also greatly interested Roosevelt, despite his weakness in the realm of southwestern botany. He could identify only 100 or so of the 1,500 species of plants found around the canyon’s rim. He could, however, name most of the 300 types of birds that inhabited the area. The sharp-skinned hawk flying above the South Rim he knew would be headed to Central America come fall, and the broad-tailed hummingbirds that whirred about the Hotel Tovar had arrived because the persimmons had started to bloom. The Townsend’s solitaires and Clark’s nutcrackers simply did not migrate: they changed elevations as the weather changed.84 He didn’t have to be William Rand or Andrew McNally to know that the abrasive Colorado River didn’t start or end in the Grand Canyon. But an impressive 277 twisting miles of the Colorado coursed through the Grand Canyon; it was considered the most exhilarating whitewater run in the American West. Peering down at the immense canyon floor, Roosevelt understood that a working naturalist would try to comprehend the ecosystem from the bottom up. Unfortunately, as a president