Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument

Trump's recent attack on the Antiquities Act is deja vu all over again. How many times the foes of conservation have decried the proclamation of a new national monument for being an overreach of presidential power granted under the Antiquities Act, and have tried to get the proclamation undone, only to find that the national monument is popular with the people and is not to be meddled with.

Archaeologist Greg Woodall

This back and forth is at the center of the story of Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument, proclaimed by President Bill Clinton on January 11, 2000.  After Clinton left office, the Bush administration's Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton tried to get the monument unmade only to have her efforts rebuked by the Republican governor of Arizona, who understood how much Arizonans favored preserving the area.

Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument spans more than a million acres of plateau and canyon country abutting the north rim of the Grand Canyon. It protects a large array of archaeological, biological, geological, and historical resources. It includes the northernmost reaches of the Mojave Desert, where the flora and fauna are especially vulnerable to a changing fire regime. It is home to the endangered desert tortoise as well as the imperiled joshua tree.

Among the area's outstanding attributes are its enormous vistas containing scarcely a trace of human imprint. One can stand on Black Rock Mountain at the north edge of the monument and scan the whole country to the south as far as the Grand Canyon - fifty miles - and there is not a single highway, building, parking lot, smokestack, power line, or windmill to be seen.

We are currently writing the administrative history of this area, which is jointly managed by the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

Manzanar National Historic Site

Cemetery obelisk at Manzanar National Historic Site.

This site of one of the infamous World War II relocation camps for people of Japanese ancestry is a shockingly good example of what some have termed "sites of shame" in the National Park System. A healthy democracy needs to feature its failings as well as its great achievements. Manzanar National Historic Site was established in 1992 following more than two decades of growing demand for "redress" for the racist attack on Japanese Americans' civil rights perpetrated during World War II. Writing the administrative history of this site was largely about writing the history of that movement and how it has carried forward from 1992 to the present.

Manzanar National Historic Site is located in the stunningly beautiful Owens Valley of eastern California.  Eager to explore the valley as well as learn about its history, Diane and I turned our usual one- to two-week research trip into a two-month road trip with a five-week sojourn in the Owens Valley in the middle.  If you have never seen the Owens Valley, see it.  If you have not been to Manzanar, go.  The camp that once held 10,000 people is now a World War II-era ghost town with remnants of Japanese gardens excavated from sand drifts and rabbit brush growing up through cracked cement pads. The 1944 high school auditorium building has been renovated into a first-class visitor center and museum.  The place is blessed with an exceptionally dedicated staff.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Great Smoky Mountains was the first big national park established in the eastern United States. The National Park Service was still quite new when the goal of forming a national park in the southern Appalachians began to take shape. Forming the park was a major undertaking because the land was in private ownership and had to be purchased with money raised from private donations. Yet the project was vitally important to make the National Park System truly national in scope. The grassroots effort started in the 1920's and was carried to completion under Park Service leadership in the 1930's and 40's.

Even back then the park's advocates saw the need to have a mountain playground in the East to serve the masses of working families who could not reach the many national parks in the West. In postwar America, as public use of national parks surged, Great Smoky Mountains National Park became the most popular national park in the nation.

Writing the administrative history of this park was an exciting challenge as there were a great many management issues and long-fought conservation battles to cover. I gained a new appreciation for the often maligned director of the National Park Service in the 1930's, Arno B. Cammerer.

It was personally rewarding to work with an old friend on this project. Steve Kemp is with the Great Smoky Mountains Association, and he and I were pals from years ago when we met as summer employees at Signal Mountain Lodge in Grand Teton National Park, each of us still in our teens. That summer we not only forged a deep friendship, we also found a connection to national parks that has served us ever since.

Arkansas Post National Memorial

Enamored with fur trade history in the Great Lakes region, I leaped at the chance to write a Historic Resource Study for Arkansas Post National Memorial in Arkansas. In some ways the story was familiar terrain, but as one of the oldest European settlements in French Louisiana it was also exotic. I never imagined when I was in graduate school that I would one day be studying the exploits of seventeenth-century Frenchmen with poodle haircuts. That is one of the elements of my work I find most enjoyable: I am always being surprised at what I get to research next.

Arkansas Post in 1689

Arkansas Post has a very rich history. Built in 1686 by Henri de Tonty to serve as a trading post with the Quapaw, first the French and then the Spanish made it into a military post to gird their alliance with the Quapaw and other tribes. British and Chickasaw attacked the post at the end of the Revolutionary War. Americans joined the largely French community there after the Louisiana Purchase, after which it became the capital of the new Arkansas Territory. Southern Indians streamed through the place on the Trail of Tears in the 1830's. During the Civil War, the Confederates built a new fort there to prevent a Union advance on Little Rock. Union forces attacked the stronghold with an overwhelming superiority of numbers, making one of the largest captures of Rebel soldiers in the war. The hallowed ground became a state park in 1929 and a national memorial in 1964.

History of the Forest Service Tribal Relations Program

The Forest Service contracted with me to write an administrative history of its tribal relations program. From the outset we wanted to frame the subject broadly and reach a nontechnical audience. I saw it as a companion work to Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks (University of Arizona Press, 1998). The Forest Service and the University of Arizona Press both agreed, and so we were able to proceed with taking a commissioned administrative history straight into the form of a historical monograph. The project was initiated in 2012 and the book came out last year. I was delighted with the process and I think the book is one of my better efforts. A paperback edition is coming out this fall.

Golden Spike National Historic Site

Students and NPS engineers join in a redo of 1869 photo.

This site commemorates the 1869 completion of the first trans-continental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah. We visited the place this past March to interview people and research administrative records in preparation of writing its administrative history. The setting is spacious and fairly pristine, befitting a site so key in the nation's westward expansion. The NPS built replicas of the two colorful steam locomotives that famously met for the Golden Spike ceremony, and they are featured in reenactments, which have been central to the site's interpretive program ever since the site was established in 1965. The passion of both the NPS engineers and the local people who reenact were wonderful to see. Local community involvement is an element in every park's story, but never before have we found it so entwined with the park's interpretive program.

Rainy Lake House

My book about the fur trade weaves together the early life stories of white Indian John Tanner, HBC trader John McLoughlin, and explorer Stephen Long. It is framed by their encounter in the Lake Superior region in 1823 when Tanner was attempting to wrest his children from the Ojibwa. It is written in the spirit of a Rashomon tale, presenting the fur trade from the multiple perspectives of hunter/trader/explorer, labor/capital/imperial, and Indian/British/American viewpoints.

This cover illustration is a painting by Peter Rindisbacher of Fort Garry in 1821. Much of the story centers around this and other trading posts in the northern borderlands. The image aptly conveys a sense of community, hardihood, and wilderness adventure.