The Grand
Canyon is the largest canyon on earth by any standard of measurement, at 277 miles long, 10 miles wide, and a mile
deep. It is also one of the most singularly awe inspiring natural vistas on
Planet Earth. Containing some of the oldest exposed rock on earth, Precambrian
Vishnu schist, formed 1.7 billion years ago, for thousands of years, the canyon has been the
home of the ancient Puebloans and the Hopi, the Hualapai and Havasupai, the
Paiute and the Navajo. Its existence was
first recorded in 1540, when Spanish
conquistadors led by Coronado found themselves halted by its depths.
In 1857, an
American explorer named Joseph Ives
wrecked his boat trying to ascend the river, but brought back the first
sketches of what he called the "Big Canyon of the Colorado." Ives
innocently and erroneously predicted that the "valueless" region
would be "forever unvisited and undisturbed." Twelve years later
, Civil War veteran and geology
professor John Wesley Powell led an
expedition to chart the Colorado and
make the first detailed study of the gigantic stone channel that encloses and directs it. Although
Powell's expedition lost four men and two boats, the expedition brought the Grand Canyon to national
attention.
Early proposals
to make it a national park date back to the 1880s, but all failed in Congress because of fierce
opposition from local ranchers, miners, and settlers who did not want the
federal government imposing restrictions on what they could and could not do.
This is of course precisely the same attitude reflected today in the actions of
the Nevada Bundy clan and their confrères.
In 1893,
President Benjamin Harrison used an executive order to create the Grand Canyon Forest
Reserve. Congress, however, pressured by
influential and well heeled Southwestern
Senators, again refused to create a
national park, so in 1908, citing the Antiquities Act (actually designed for
protecting archeologically significant sites like Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon) President Theodore Roosevelt stretched the
limits of the Antiquities Act to far beyond its intent and established the Grand
Canyon National Monument. The canyon, Roosevelt said, is "the one great
sight which every American should see." Although he advised the people of
Arizona to "leave it as it is," few in Arizona listened to him.
A few log
hotels had already been built, and when the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe
Railway extended tracks to the South Rim
in 1901, construction of even more buildings quickly began. By 1919, the
Grand Canyon was attracting nearly as many tourists as Yellowstone or Yosemite,
but was still a national monument, ergo administered by the Forest Service. This meant
that grazing was permitted and mining claims were allowed wherever a prospector
thought a valuable mineral might be found (or as it turned out the possibility
of tourism was promising). Stephen
Mather, the director of the National Park Service, desperately wanted to change
all that by making the canyon a national park, as President Grant had done with
Yellowstone.
With activist Roosevelt
10 years out of the White House, Mather found national efforts to protect and preserve the canyon blocked by Ralph Henry Cameron, a prospector
and hotel owner who considered the canyon his own private domain and was overtly
hostile to anyone who got in his way. Cameron staked spurious mining claims on the most scenic and strategically
located spots, devoid of mineral wealth but critical to canyon access. As Cameron
viewed Mather's efforts at creating a national park a direct economic and
political threat, he built a log cabin, at one such claim, near the head of the
Bright Angel Trail (which he preferred to call the "Cameron Trail"),named
it Cameron's Hotel and sent employees to hound tourists arriving by train to
patronize it.
On the trail
itself, he erected a gate at the rim and collected a toll of a dollar a person.
When Coconino County was declared the trail's proper owner, Cameron, now a
county commissioner, used his influence to
be awarded the franchise to continue collecting the tolls. Halfway down the
trail, at an oasis, he ran a tent camp
where he charged travelers outrageous prices for the water, then charged again for the only
outhouses between the rim and the river.
Meanwhile in
DC, a lawsuit filed by Cameron working its way toward the Supreme Court, argued
that Theodore Roosevelt's executive order creating the national monument had
been illegal. However, in 1919, Congress finally passed a bill creating Grand
Canyon National Park. A year later, the Supreme Court ruled against Cameron and
ordered him to abandon the phony mining claims he had used to gain control of the
Grand Canyon's most scenic spots. Despite the
rulings against him, Cameron refused to remove his buildings, and used his
political power, as he was now an Arizona senator, to ensure no action was taken to make him
comply. Park rangers opposed to him sent
their mail in code because they suspected that, Cameron's brother-in-law, the
canyon's postmaster, was opening their letters.
When Cameron
proposed two giant hydroelectric dams and a platinum mine within the park,
Stephen Mather decided the senator had gone too far and set out to stop him.
Mather galvanized public support and all of Cameron's projects in the Grand
Canyon were stopped. Furious, Senator Cameron had the entire appropriation for
Grand Canyon National Park removed from the Senate budget. He denounced Mather
on the Senate floor and stirred up spurious claims against Mather's integrity.
It all finally backfired
when newspapers reported that Cameron had used his Senate position to further
his private interests. Park supporters in Congress criticized his vendetta
against Mather, and in 1926, the voters of Arizona refused to re-elect him. Out
of power, Cameron could no longer protect his Grand Canyon empire. His
fraudulent mining claims finally had to be abandoned. Indian Gardens, the
dilapidated rest stop on the trail down to the river where Cameron's outhouses
contaminated the only fresh water, was turned over to the park. And at Bright
Angel Trail, the toll gate was finally removed, so that the public, the people
who actually owned the park, could freely use it.
So if you have
ever felt sympathy for the Bundy clan or their ilk, read the history and reflect
on the damage environmental scofflaws like them could do if public land reverted
to unregulated control of states, vulnerable to the malfeasance of corrupt
Senators like Cameron (or Harry Reid) who see the cessation of Federal
protection of such lands as simply an
opportunity for private economic gain.
Currently AZ Senator,
John McCain is a strong advocate for
continued federal protection of these public lands, actually having helped
place another 3.5 million acres nationwide
into Wilderness Protection. However, his colleague, the aptly named Jeff Flake,
has voted almost diametrically opposite Sen. McCain, opposing essentially every piece of environmentally protective
legislation since being elected. This continues his miserable House record,
only with potentially more impact. Flake has proposed uranium mining just north
of the canyon rim which would significantly threaten to pollute the Colorado
and its tributaries. Of course much of this is Indian reservation land, historically
ignored when the environment is the issue. With clean water already at a premium across a significant portion of the Southwest,
Arizona and southern Nevada among the most deprived, the idea of allowing uncontrolled
private mining interests or cattle to
pollute these scarce resources, and threaten downstream water rights or quality is
foolhardy at best, criminally negligent at worst.
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