Grand Staircase-Escalante: The Monument Kanab Didn't Want
Near Kanab, Utah
On September eighteenth, nineteen ninety-six, President Bill Clinton drove to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona and signed a proclamation that reached across the border into Utah. Invoking the Antiquities Act of nineteen oh six, he designated about one point seven million acres of southern Utah as the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. He did not sign the proclamation in Utah. He had not invited Utah officials to the ceremony. He had not publicly announced the plan in advance.
In Kanab, roughly seventy miles to the north, the reaction was swift and furious. Residents filed into the high school gymnasium for their own gathering, wearing black armbands. Schoolchildren released fifty black balloons to warn other states that the federal government could unilaterally restrict the use of their land. The anger ran especially deep because the monument designation blocked a planned coal development on the Kaiparowits Plateau, a large-scale mining project that locals believed would have brought hundreds of jobs and substantial tax revenue to one of the most economically isolated corners of Utah.
The monument's boundaries were reduced significantly under President Trump in two thousand seventeen and then restored and expanded under President Biden in two thousand twenty-one. Legal and legislative battles over its extent have continued since. For Kanab, the nineteen ninety-six designation remains a vivid political memory: the moment a distant president drew a line around their land without asking, and called it a monument.
