With the Stroke of a Pen

Zion National Park was born a hundred years ago this summer

By Lyman Hafen

A hundred years ago this summer President William Howard Taft was just getting his feet wet as chief executive of the United States. He’d gotten off to a rough start when his inauguration just a few months earlier had to be moved inside the Capitol to escape a blinding snow storm. Meanwhile, the immediate past president, Theodore Roosevelt, was off on safari in Africa, a trip underwritten by Scribner’s Magazine and the Smithsonian Institution. Robert Peary had just completed his epic journey to the North Pole, and Alice Huyler Ramsey, a 22-year-old housewife and mother from Hackensack, New Jersey, had just become the first woman to drive across the United States. With three female companions, none of whom could drive, she spent 59 days on the road in her Maxwell automobile traversing 3,800 miles from Manhattan to San Francisco. For many Americans it was probably not a summer to remember. But for those of us who hold a tender spot in our hearts for Zion National Park, it was a monumental time.

In his one term as president, Taft emphasized trust-busting, civil service reform, and strengthening the Interstate Commerce Commission. He pushed for the 16^th Amendment, improved the performance of the postal service, and appointed six new justices to the Supreme Court. In the process, he managed to alienate enough of his key constituencies to assure his overwhelming defeat for a second term in the election of 1912. All in all, he was not a president much remembered a century later. And yet, for those of us who hold a tender spot in our hearts for Zion National Park, his presidency was monumental.

That’s because, on July 31, 1909, President William Howard Taft exercised his authority under the recently passed Antiquities Act. He signed an order declaring a place called Zion Canyon in southwestern Utah, Mukuntuweap National Monument. With the stroke of a pen he set aside for posterity the formidable towers of stone that stand sentinel above the Virgin River—the place we know and love today as Zion National Park. The monument’s original name “Mukuntuweap” was the name the canyon had been known by for centuries. According to a September 1872 report by Major John Wesley Powell, the Southern Paiute people who lived along the Pa’rus (the river now known as the Virgin) called the canyon Mukuntuweap, meaning “straight canyon.” There are other theories as to how to interpret the word Mukuntuweap, but regardless of what it means, it became the original name of the monument signed into law by President Taft.

During the years leading up to President Taft’s action, Americans had become more and more aware that such a place as Zion Canyon existed. The road to Zion was rough and few had actually seen the place, but an artist and writer named Frederick Dellenbaugh had opened many hearts and minds to the canyon’s grandeur with a series of paintings he exhibited in the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, and an article he published in Scribner’s Magazine in January of the same year. Indeed, the Scribner’s article introduced this “New Valley of Wonders,” to hundreds of thousands of Americans from sea to shining sea.

These and other efforts in the years leading up to 1909 played a crucial role in convincing the folks in Washington that a place called Zion Canyon was worth setting aside for posterity. For me, all it would have taken was one sentence from Frederick Dellenbaugh’s Scribner’s article. Upon confronting Zion’s great West Temple he wrote: “Niagara has the beauty of energy; the Grand Canyon, of immensity; the Yellowstone, of singularity; the Yosemite, of altitude; this Great Temple, of eternity…”

Note: Zion National Park Centennial events continue through 2009, with a special commemoration to be held July 31, celebrating President Taft’s monument proclamation. For more information go to: www.zionpark.org

reprinted here with the generous permission of the author-Lyman Hafen