Teddy Roosevelt's Grand Canyon Speech and the Eleven-Year Fight

Theodore Roosevelt stood at the South Rim in May of nineteen oh three and delivered a line that has been quoted ever since: leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you.

Then he went back to Washington and spent five years doing nothing about it officially.

The canyon was not uncontested land. Arizona Territory had interests. Mining companies had claims along the canyon walls. A railroad had already reached the South Rim in nineteen oh one, bringing two hundred thousand passengers in its first decade. Tourist concessions had established themselves on the rim with the expectation of permanent operation. Designating the canyon a federally protected area would complicate all of these interests, and Arizona's territorial legislature made clear it opposed federal control over land it expected to manage for development.

In nineteen oh eight, Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to declare the Grand Canyon a national monument, bypassing Congress and overriding Arizona's objections. The monument designation provided some protection but not the full legal apparatus of a national park. Arizona challenged the designation. Mining and development continued in some areas.

It took another eleven years and a specific act of Congress for the Grand Canyon to become a national park in nineteen nineteen. By that point, the railroad was entrenched, the Fred Harvey Company had built its tourist infrastructure along the rim, and copper mining had left its mark on the canyon walls below Grandview Point.

Roosevelt's nineteen oh three speech made him famous as a conservationist. What the speech did not do was stop the decade of extraction that preceded the park's actual establishment.