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By the time President Theodore Roosevelt made his first visit to the Grand Canyon in 1903, Benjamin Harrison had already invested more than a decade through his career in the Senate and part of his own presidency in an effort to set aside the magnificent canyon for the American people. History hardly notices Harrison’s frustrated attempts and final modest success at creating at least a national forest on the site. It’s Roosevelt and his “bully pulpit” style of using executive powers granted him under the Antiquities Act of 1906 who will always be remembered as the savior of the Grand Canyon.

Even then, though, the idea of creating a federal monument beyond local authority had its outspoken opponents. Among them was an ambitious rancher who had his eye on owning the Bright Angel Trail down to the bottom of the gorge and charging tourists for the mule-back trips. He was C.J. Babbitt, the patriarch of the Babbitt empire in Northern Arizona, and the grandfather of U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt.

As with other small contradictions in his family background, Bruce regards the matter with a sort of wryly-amused arrogance. “In his mellow years,” chortled the Secretary, “my grandfather said he always was in favor of protecting the Grand Canyon. As I told the President, history is on our side.”

It was just 11 days into the new year, or the new millennium as some saw it; the start of a new century, a new era, and the pinnacle of what Babbitt immodestly refers to as “the Golden Age,” of his administration in Interior. Only hours before, he and President Bill Clinton had indeed made history by declaring the sweep of high range and rust red outcrops in Arizona west of the canyon park as the Parashant National Monument. Helicoptered back to Grand Junction, Colo., Babbitt gloated and rocked on his heels like a pompous Mussolini agreeing to a timid few questions from the press.

“Every member of (Arizona’s) congressional delegation except one is opposed to this,” began a reporter’s query. “How do you account for that?...”

With a jowly imperial smirk, the Secretary paused a beat before answering. “I read in the newspaper this morning that 78 percent of Arizonans support the President’s action. I don’t hold myself out as an expert on Arizona politics.” (There was laughter at that point over the former Arizona governor’s understatement.) “I am a student of Arizona culture and history. I’m gratified by that (public) response (in the press).”

“So you don’t want to answer the question?” the reporter followed.

“What was the question?” Babbitt replied.

It’s the one question that never really gets answered–who the hell does Bruce Babbitt think he is?

In Arizona, elected officials from Governor Jane Dee Hull and Senator John McCain on down fumed over the unexpected move by Clinton and Babbitt to grab the Parashant for their own glory, ignoring and effectively double-crossing the state’s own elected leadership, which was then backing a bill in Congress to declare virtually the same expanse of the Shivwitz Plateau a National Conservation Area.

It was the same move Clinton and Babbitt had put on Utah with Grand Staircase Escalante in 1996, and the same autocratic threat Babbitt held over half a dozen other western regions like some Nottingham sheriff controlling the lords and vassals of Prince John.

Only a few months before, at an October congressional hearing in Washington, Arizona Rep. John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) had pressed Babbitt, asking that the Secretary provide Congress with a list of areas under consideration for arbitrary “monument” status.

Babbitt replied with one word, “No.” There was a stunned silence, not really the first of its kind in the many times Babbitt has expressed his defiance of congressional authority. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” the Secretary added without apology.

By December, Babbitt sounded even more contemptuous of the House and Senate. “We’ve switched the rules of the game. We’re not doing anything legislatively,” he said. By then, Babbitt had been on another of his tours of the West, holding court and offering audiences in selected rural areas where he characteristically met with representatives of environmental organizations and followed that up with thinly veiled threats to local ranchers and minor officials about coming to agreement with him or facing the power of executive authority. Wherever he went he generally avoided the press, and the questions. He did it in Colorado, in Arizona, in Oregon, in Montana, each time leaving behind a gauntlet that promised he would return with punishing power unless he got what he wanted. “The clock is running,” he even warned Congress, taking note of the last few months of power left to him.

But Arizona was not the only state in which local representation was unwilling to cave in to the despotic bullying of a cabinet secretary. Almost nowhere did Babbitt get the local rubber stamp agreement to a new “designation” for lands he wanted. Instead, representative groups including resource advisory councils, local and state government committees, and even congressional delegations agreed to hear out the concerns of people who earn their livelihood from the lands and tried to adjust new agreements that would assure them a future. It never came down to granting the additional federal authority Babbitt demanded.

The powerful Secretary sulked at their disobedience from his richly panelled office above the Lincoln Memorial. It was only a short distance to the White House and to his old friend from the Wilderness Society, George Frampton, who is now acting chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Just a few words from the right people, and the President, as required by law, would come up with his “own” idea about what needed to be a national monument–for the good of future generations.

In Denver, a month after his grand grab of the Parashant, Babbitt bragged to students at the University of Denver Law School that he finally went to Clinton at the end of 1999 and told him it was time. “‘We’ve offered to engage the Congress, and what we got in return was a sham piece of legislation,’” Babbitt said he told the President. “That’s the reason that President Clinton went to the Grand Canyon in January.” By then, the area Babbitt had demanded from local officials had doubled in size, from 250,000 to 500,000 acres, a region as large as Connecticut.

Now, with the Parashant hanging from his spear along with the figurative public heads of Arizonans who defied him, Babbitt could make his threats of the previous summer even more clear.

“It would be great to get these protection issues resolved in the congressional, legislative process,” he told the Denver students. “But if that’s not possible, I’m prepared to go back to the President and not only ask, not only advise, but IMPLORE him to use his powers under the Antiquities Act and to say to him: ‘Mr. President, if they don’t and you do, you will be vindicated by history for generations to come’.”

Information provided to the press the day before made it clear Babbitt was talking about a long list, including the Anasazi region in Colorado, Steens Mountain in Oregon, Santa Rosa Mountain in California, and The Missouri Breaks in Montana as part of what he proclaimed to be a new “National Landscape Monument” system run by a revised Bureau of Land Management.

In each case, Babbitt was effectively sending a warning to elected representatives from each of those states who were already at work on agreements and legislation that would more fairly assure the future of those regions and the people reliant on them for their livelihood. Without any legal authority, he was telling them, do it his way, or he would do it himself.

ARIZONA

In his speech at the Denver Law School, Babbitt tried to bring the future lawyers into the chummy club of his own as a western kid who earned a Harvard law degree and went on to become governor of Arizona for nine years. “Someone surveying my successors since I left office said, ‘The progression is conclusive proof that Darwin was wrong’,” Babbitt told them, and when they didn’t seem to get it, he added quickly, “I don’t mean that seriously, obviously.”

But Bruce Babbitt was very serious in compiling a record number of vetoes over legislation during his administration and a reputation for crushing any political views that lacked his approval. By the 1990s, there were few in the political establishment of Arizona who didn’t know about Babbitt’s ham-fisted

Blocked in by Native American reservations and set aside from main roads, the “strip” is a part of Arizona seldom seen even by adventuresome eco-tourists. Most of it, however, had been utilized in peaceful production for generations by the stable Mormon families who had established their ranches there and willingly over the years agreed to the multi-use contracts with federal authorities. As far as any of them could tell, there was no pressure from outside development, nor any outrage of environmental harm, nor even any tourist interest in the region they quietly continued to steward as generations before them had done.

Then, in 1998, as his place in Clinton’s cabinet was nearing its close, Bruce Babbitt returned to what he called “home” on the south rim of the Grand Canyon. “This is a national shrine,” he intoned, “...but there’s something wrong here because the Grand Canyon National Park is not co-extensive with the eco-system of the Grand Canyon.” Citing Roosevelt “and others,” Babbitt looked 300 miles further down the Colorado River and said, “We’ve got to pick up where these people left off, because there’s not a lot of time left.”

What he meant by that seems unclear, but those who participated in the “dialogue” remember that it seemed to be the Secretary himself controlling the clock.

“First he exhibited one map to one group, and then another map to another group, and then it went from a million acres to 260,000 to 585,000,” remembers Bas Aja of the Arizona Cattle Growers Association.

Babbitt already had control of most of it anyway, with over 390,000 acres in the region under management of the BLM. Grazing permits on that public land served as the essential link to the 8,000 acres of deeded homesteads and ranches. But no one could be sure of what Babbitt intended by his plan to extend the set-aside status of the Grand Canyon into these remote regions.

The local ranchers and townsfolk appealed for help from their state legislature and got it in the form of resolutions opposing any new, restrictive, designation for the federally-owned territory, but state action was almost meaningless. In what the local people regarded as needless compromise, the Arizona congressional delegation sought to stave off Babbitt’s arbitrary grab of Shivwitz as a monument by preparing a congressional bill to name it as a National Conservation Area that could include provisions for grazing and mining.

“Well, I kind of bought into that line in a moment of weakness and said, ‘Okay, I’ll stay my hand’,” Babbitt recalled to the Denver students. Actually, however, Babbitt was furious. It had been less than a year, hardly time for a bill to take shape in Congress. Bruce Babbitt declared himself too impatient for the democratic process, and too important to wait on the Arizona delegation. He went to the President.

Betrayed after months of trying to bring local input to the issue, Arizona Cattle Growers President Jed Flake erupted in frustration. “This isn’t about protecting land, it’s about vying for political PR points with an uninformed suburban public,” he said. “The land in question is already protected by the BLM and is depended upon by hundreds of ranch family members who, as stewards, protect the range and its sustainability.

“Most every important detail concerning its [the Parashant Monument] creation proposed at public meetings or town halls has proven absolutely false.”

“They’re hurting people, not protecting anything from anyone,” said area rancher Orville Bundy. “I guess I feel like a Phoenix homeowner who just found out his home was designated as parkland. We’re extremely scared.”

COLORADO

Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.) used to be a Democrat. Part of what pushed him over the edge into changing parties was an encounter with Babbitt’s arrogance over range reform in 1992. Unable to convince western senators of his own plan, Babbitt accused Campbell and others of “torching their own ranchers just to prove their machismo.” It was yet another outburst demonstrating Babbitt’s contempt of any process that disagreed with him.

So when Babbitt went after the Anasazi region in the Four Corners area of Southwest Colorado, Campbell and others were waiting for him. The Secretary took note of the national parks already established around the pre-history ruins of Mesa Verde and other Anasazi sites and sneered at them as “little postage stamps on the landscape.” He wanted at least a quarter million acres, incorporating the grazing land of the very ranching families that had first discovered Mesa Verde and pressed for its preservation. Babbitt called his vision for a vast new monument part of “an anthropological ecosystem.”

What shallow promises Babbitt made for continued multiple-use didn’t fool most people in Colorado. Just as in Arizona, his own anointed Resource Advisory Council (RAC) was not about to give him a rubber stamp for a new designation of the area. The chairperson of the RAC, land use attorney Erin Johnson, supported the idea of protecting the region, but her group was split on Babbitt’s demand for a designation. Nor did the public and community hearings conducted by the Anasazi Working Group put any trust in Babbitt’s demand for a new designation that would increase BLM authority and give it broader enforcement powers in the region. The working group stressed the years of success by community groups and multiple-use protecting their local treasure. They suggested that, with the aid of many willing volunteers, existing BLM management simply be improved.

“The people in the group would have preferred no designation at all,” said Mike Preston, co-chairman of the Anasazi committee, “but we trust a lot more in the legislative process to represent the interests of the people.”

It wasn’t enough for Babbitt, who wrote a rebuking letter to the co-chairmen of the working group. “...I certainly hope we can forge a solution that addresses the concerns and suggestions raised during the public process you led,” Babbitt wrote. “But, I firmly believe that there is a critical need to deliberately and quickly move forward with actions....” He would talk to Colorado’s congressional delegation, Babbitt said, but if they didn’t do it his way, he would go to the White House.

“We are real concerned about that,” admitted Preston.

Senator Campbell knows well the arrogance of the Interior Secretary. Campbell’s own bill to protect 164,000 acres of the Four Corners region as a National Conservation Area took direct note of the public restrictions imposed by Clinton’s 1996 Utah land grab and specifically provided for protection of multiple uses, including grazing and recreation.

“In contrast to the administration’s monument creation, my bill would require public hearings which would allow everyone from local ranchers, recreational users and all local officials to be involved with preserving this area,” said Campbell.

That wasn’t what Babbitt wanted to hear. “Now, the hour is late,” he told the Denver students. “This discussion has been going on for a year now. I am reminded of the Arizona experience... We’re now in, say, the seventh inning and this team isn’t just going to walk off the field.” Not only did he want monument status for the Anasazi, but for another spread of land in southern Colorado around the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. Again citing his “Arizona experience,” Babbitt said, “I’m looking at my watch saying ‘It’s February. It’s a presidential election year. Congress will recess early and often. They will go home early.’ And we must bring this discussion to the kind of resolution that’s important for the people of Colorado and the country.” It was as clear a contemptuous threat as Babbitt could make it, but Campbell wasn’t blinking.

“We’ll see,” said a spokesman for the Senator. ‘‘The game won’t be over this year.”

OREGON

Len Shrewsbury had briefly walked out in a fury when the U.S. Forest Service “facilitator” defied the clear majority intent of the Southern Oregon RAC and suggested they find a name for the new “designation” on Steens Mountain. (See RANGE, Winter ’99) Now, wintering with his ever-roaming RV in Arizona, Shrewsbury saw what he had expected from the Interior Secretary. Despite all the public input and the clear position of not only the RAC, but a working committee of state officials that Steens should be left as it is, Babbitt had it on his list for a “Landscape Monument.”

“I was told we would be used,” said the 74-year-old Shrewsbury, “but I thought we could accomplish something in spite of it. It just makes you feel helpless.”

Babbitt himself had warned them, just as he had warned their counterparts in Arizona and Colorado and elsewhere. “I’m here because I believe there’s a window of opportunity and I intend to bring it to a conclusion on my watch,” he said during a 24-hour visit in August. The working partnership between landowners and federal authorities on the unfenced Steens Mountain was regarded as a model of successful stewardship. Even Babbitt called it, “the best in the West.” But a radically determined group of environmentalists based in Portland and Bend had plans to use Steens as the anchor of a massive six million-acre park and wilderness area. They were questionable even among more established environmental groups, but they had Babbitt’s ear, and Babbitt now coveted the previously little-known mountain in a remote part of south-central Oregon.

He regarded the region’s RAC as stacked enough with interests beyond grazing to be easily led by the tediously tested method of a “facilitator” guiding them to the expected conclusion. But the public hearings on the issue, even loaded with bused-in enviros from Portland, heard ranchers, small businessmen, hikers and fishermen all saying the same thing–Steens works fine just as it is. Drawing even more attention to it, as Babbitt was doing, could only cause problems. Giving it some new “designation” would virtually guarantee that fences would rise between public land and the two-thirds of the mountain that was in private hands. In their plan, the radical environmentalists had in mind to force those private owners out in a willing seller offer that would follow elimination of grazing rights. All that was obvious to the RAC, and certainly to Babbitt, but he left no doubt of what he expected in his “window of opportunity.”

“I’m being ambiguous about that because the press is here,” he said, but everyone knew that he wanted it his way, or he would do it the way he and Clinton had in Utah. Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber was among those who understood it when Babbitt took him on a helicopter tour. But even Kitzhaber couldn’t manage agreement to a new “designation” of Steens from a special committee set up to supercede the RAC.

“Common sense seen by almost everybody is that there is no need to put something in perpetuity to replace what’s working fine now,” said Shrewsbury. Nevertheless, despite obvious and restated local opposition, Steens is on Babbitt’s short list for monument status, along with Soda Mountain to the south.
“We feel victimized,” said Stacy Davies of Roaring Springs Ranch, the 140,000-acre unfenced “model” of public-private stewardship on Steens (see RANGE, Summer ’99). “The whole thing has destroyed the community atmosphere here; put neighbor against neighbor. The [Clinton] administration has no respect for that.” Oregon congressional leaders are working on their own proposal for Steens in a self-defense move already tried in Arizona and Colorado. But if Babbitt does as he has threatened and turns to the arbitrary authority of the Antiquities Act, little can be done except for Congress to overturn the presidential action. Not once, since Theodore Roosevelt first employed it at the Grand Canyon, has such a monument designation ever been overturned by Congress. “It scares us to death,” said Davies.

Len Shrewsbury says he hasn’t slept well this winter, and he’s losing weight. He admits to thinking too much about it, too much about Babbitt. “Who can trust him?” he asked.

MONTANA

The bi-centennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition is approaching with widening public curiosity about how much the West has changed since President Thomas Jefferson sent the Corps of Discovery off to explore it in 1802. That’s probably one reason why they see more and more “floaters” paddling and drifting along the Missouri River these days. That, and possibly the attention drawn by Babbitt to the badlands of the Missouri Breaks as a “landscape monument” he wants as part of Bill Clinton’s legacy.

If anything, the Interior Secretary was even less circumspect in sending out his message to the generational heirs of homesteaders and rugged small towners along the Missouri north of Great Falls, Mont. There seems little likelihood that this region of broken plateaus and deep coulees will be threatened by any sprawl of development. It is, in fact, little changed since Lewis and Clark camped there, except that where they might have seen buffalo, cattle now graze.

“They sent a guy from Babbitt’s office here, and I just couldn’t believe it,” said Wilma Econom, a rancher’s wife from Fort Benton. “He didn’t really want to listen to anybody. It was more like just to threaten them.”

The Missouri in this region is already designated as a wild and scenic river. Nobody has any real problem with that. But Babbitt’s familiar proposal to throw a vast new federal cloak over the checkerboard of public and private lands in the “Breaks” made no more sense here than it had in Oregon or elsewhere. The same thing happened as it had elsewhere: local committees and the RAC Babbitt hoped would fall in line refused last year to set some new “designation” for the already protected area.

“There was a charade of participation, but we knew they weren’t listening,” said Ron Poertner. “It was just a veil in bringing it to the RAC,” said Jim Peterson. “He was hell-bent to make the Missouri River a monument, and common sense didn’t have any place in the process.” Matt Knox, another rancher in the Breaks, saw it as “needless, useless, and ultimately destructive” to what actually is still a living piece of developed history over the last 100 years of settlement and successful stewardship. “They’d eliminate that for the sake of their legacy,” he said.

As elsewhere, the people of Missouri Breaks, along with elected representatives from Montana have fought back with what they have. Poertner and his Missouri River Stewards organization are circulating a petition that urges Babbitt to see that a monument would only “destroy the values we are trying to save.”

They don’t really expect Babbitt himself to listen, of course, any more than a similar organization, Take Back Montana, expects to wisen up the Interior Secretary in this his last “hell-bent” year in office.

“They keep taking more and more, how do we stay?” said Wilma Econom. “You begin to think, is this really a government for the people, by the people?”

CALIFORNIA

Palm Springs calls to mind wealth and celebrity dripping from a securely warm expanse of resorts and golf courses in driving range from Hollywood. Not Bruce Babbitt’s style, really, but his stop at the lush desert oasis wasn’t just to hob-nob with the stars or even the exceptionally well-off Native Americans who still benefit from their historic ownership of the exceptional site. With a little help from an environmentalist group, Mountain Conservancy, Babbitt looked up from the flat greens of the Coachella Valley to the mountains of the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa ranges that seem to leap in a steep western wall around the spectacular setting. That was BLM territory, his ground, and from where he was standing, the Interior Secretary could hardly miss imagining what a great photo opportunity it provided. With hardly any local consultation at all, the mountain ranges were put on his short list for campaign-year monuments.

“We knew he’d do it,” said Ed Kibbey of the Palm Springs Building Industry Association. “Unless we joined in the fun and games, it was going to be a Clinton monument.”

Not that Kibbey and others were opposed to some protections for the surrounding mountain regions, about half of which was in private hands, but scattered in a checkerboard pattern of deeds and inholdings that made any large development unlikely. The question became whether it would be Babbitt and Clinton’s way, which would cast a shadow of control over it all, or whether that could be met with some legislation that would preserve monument status for the region and still protect private rights as well as grazing and recreation opportunities.

Babbitt left behind his usual warnings while Congresswoman Mary Bono (R-Calif.) went to work on her own National Monument Bill, an unusual choice compared to the efforts in other regions to establish Conservation Areas. “We wanted to eliminate the ‘buffer zones’ and the sort of regulations that would spread out from the federal land,” said a spokesman for her office. “The bill is something we think is home-grown and represents the interests of the people in our district.”

“When he heard about that legislation, Babbitt said, ‘okay,’ he’d keep his hands off,” said Kibbey. But the bill was just making its way into the House Resources Committee in February when Babbitt put his list of monument sites before the media, with no mention at all of pending legislation from California or any of the states.

“The people of Chicago and their children are going to live in a big city but know that there is open space forever that belongs to them whether they come and visit or not,” Babbitt proclaimed.

It didn’t bother Kibbey too much. “It’s a gamble,” he said. “Either way we get a monument–our way or Clinton’s way. We know Babbitt’s not too thrilled about the legislation, but what’s he going to do?”

There’s at least 180,000 acres of federal land in the mountain ranges looming above the Coachella Valley. You can almost see it, or at least imagine it, from several sites in Palm Springs that would make excellent spots for a photo opportunity in the late summer of this campaign year.

* * *

In his press proclamation intended to attract the urban “environmental” support he always expects, Bruce Babbitt was not even above condemning his own loyal employees in order to take high stance in an imagined historic legacy.

“This nation’s largest land management agency ought to be induced to have a sense of pride,” Babbitt said, complaining that his own Bureau of Land Management has been too pro-logging and pro-mining and pro-grazing. He told reporters there will have to be changes in the BLM workings as a result of his new “system” created from some four million acres of the West on his list for National Landscape Monuments.

In every case where Babbitt has targeted a monument, from Arizona to Montana, a scratch below the surface finds honest BLM employees proud of what has been the relationship with local people, embarrassed by what Babbitt suggests it will be, but generally too afraid for their jobs to say more. Babbitt, they know, does not tolerate disagreement.

Bruce was born in Los Angeles in 1939. His father brought him back to old C.J.’s ranch when Bruce was six, but Bruce, who grew up in Flagstaff, wasn’t long welcome on the ranch. They say the self-absorbed boy liked to wander out on the range, and that was fine, but he never remembered to close a gate behind him.

Tim Findley is an investigative reporter who has worked for the San Francisco Chronicle and Rolling Stone. He lives in Fallon, Nev.

Section 2 of the Antiquities Act of 1906 says:

“The President of the United States is authorized, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments, and may reserve as part thereof parcels of land, the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected.”

The geologic curiosity of Devils Tower in Wyoming was first–only 1,153 acres. But by 1908, when Teddy Roosevelt employed the act to save over 800,000 acres of the Grand Canyon, the idea of a “smallest area compatible” seemed to have been forgotten in the terms of the law. Although it has been challenged, and, in the case of the Grand Tetons and Jackson Hole legislatively opposed all the way to a threatened veto by President Franklin Roosevelt, no use of the act by executive authority has ever been overturned. Although later adjusted into a broader terminology, President Jimmy Carter even used it to set aside more than 55 million acres of Alaska.

Next to Carter, President Bill Clinton stands to be the only president since Theodore Roosevelt to so actively employ his executive authority under the act. Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush never used it at all.

In virtually every other case in which the act was employed, the land set aside as a monument was put under the authority of the U.S. Park Service. With Grand Staircase Escalante in 1996, President Clinton set a new precedent by assigning management of it to the Bureau of Land Management.

One result of Clinton’s free-wheeling use of the act may be major constitutional challenges to its intent and implementation, leaving it an open question of whether Babbitt and Clinton may be killing the goose while they lay their eggs.

The irony of that may be found in Wyoming, where, after the federal grab of the Grand Tetons, Congress added a rider to prevent any further such intervention in Wyoming lands. So far it hasn’t been challenged and Wyoming appears nowhere on Babbitt’s wish list for the end of the century.--Tim Findley