The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [475]
So Roosevelt abandoned noisy ideas and went for a premeditated fait accompli in northern Arizona. Purposely oblivious of the legal obstacles, Roosevelt aimed to evict the Kaibab Cattle Company, for example, from the scenic and scientifically invaluable area. In the nineteenth century, explorers such as Robert Stanton, John Hance, and William W. Bass had promoted the Grand Canyon as a magnet for tourists. As tourism increased, the calls for its becoming a national park did too. But Congress was too scared to move, worried about the reaction from miners and ranchers who were against any alteration that would limit their access to public land.12 As the historian Hal Rothman noted in Preserving Different Pasts, designating the Grand Canyon as a national monument allowed Roosevelt to “circumvent the fundamentally languid nature of congressional deliberation and instantaneously achieve results he believed were in the public interest.”13 When the dust cleared, the Grand Canyon was a national monument. More important, Roosevelt had conclusively demonstrated the elasticity—and thus the power—of the Antiquities Act, the new favorite instrument of the conservation movement. As Rothman put it, “no piece of legislation” had ever before (or since) “invested more power in the presidency,” than the Antiquities Act. The elastic clause “objects of historic or scientific interest” made it “an unparalleled tool” for Rooseveltian conservationism.14
The Antiquities Act was to Roosevelt a contraption with which he could dictate land policy in the West, circumventing Congress. Nature may not have proceeded by leaps, but Theodore Roosevelt now did. Roosevelt claimed that those 800,000 acres of Arizona contained prehistoric ruins and hence had scientific value. True, there were ruins in the Grand Canyon, but only very meager ones. There was nothing to match Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, or Montezuma Castle. As for ethnographical research concerning the residents, the Havasupi were a dwindling tribe content with foraging around the Colorado River, as they had done since the arrival of Spanish Conquistadors. Yet Roosevelt wasn’t wrong when he claimed this vast part of Arizona had ruins and had Indians. If the ruins were “diminutive by regional standards,” they nevertheless provided a political pretext for Roosevelt to invoke the Antiquities Act and remove the area for special protection within the public domain.15 As ex-president, in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open, Roosevelt declared all of Arizona and New Mexico an anthropologist’s dreamland.16
The apparent ease with which Roosevelt designated the Grand Canyon a national monument belied what a long slog it had actually been to save the site. Local opposition to such a huge national park at the Grand Canyon—particularly among corporate cattle, sheep, lumber, and mining outfits—was fierce. Communities surrounding the Grand Canyon, such as Flagstaff, Williams, and Peach Spring, saw the resource-rich proposed parklands as their own. The concept of a “monument,” they believed, was a shenanigan, which the courts would rule unconstitutional. Truth be told, their proprietary claims to parts of the canyon were not groundless. The federal government, after all, had encouraged these Arizona pioneers to displace the Hualapai and Havasupai, and to construct their own wagon roads and stagecoach lines. Over time, they had legally purchased grazing lands, mineral deposits, and spring holes. They had developed an interior network of trails at considerable cost. They