Creating Saguaro National Monument

By Jacob

Saguaro National Park is located in southern Arizona around the city of Tucson. The park is divided into two districts. The Tucson Mountain District is located to the west, on the east side is the Rincon Mountain District. The park was created to protect the vast forest of the massive Saguaro forest that only grows in the Sonoran Desert. The park started as a national monument, and later upgraded to national park status. This is the story of the creation of the national monument.

Saguaro National Park is not the only place where the Saguaro cactus grows, they can be found everywhere in the Sonoran Desert. North of Phoenix on I-17 you can see many spectacular specimens of the cactus. Some of the first efforts to protect the cacti were with small forests being set up to protect the areas. Some of which now make up the national park. At the beginning of the 19th century, Arizona’s population and economy started to grow. This led to citizens wanting places of significance in the state to be protected. The Antiquities Act passed by Congress that could be used to create national monuments from public land to protect scientific or cultural sites. Papago Saguaro National Monument was created in 1914, now Papago Park in Phoenix. More national monuments were created to protect ancient ruins like Montezuma Castle, Walnut Canyon, Case Grande and Waputiaki, all are still protected as monuments by the National Parks Service.

Creating these national monuments was not an easy task. In the expansion of Arizona to ideologies appeared. One, led by William Smyth, saw the desert as a wasteland that should be turned into a “Jeffersonian” farmland using the vast rivers of the southwest like the Colorado to irrigate the land. John Van Dyke disagreed, believing that the desert should be conserved and thought of before development. Going along with the Smyth Philosophy, the 1902 Reclamation Act appropriated money to dams and irrigation systems to create a new area of agriculture. Surprisingly, President Theodore Roosevelt supported this destruction of the desert by signing the bill and visiting a dam with his name. Through the first decade of the 20th century this trend continued, eventually Papago Saguaro National Monument was lost as part of a deal to enlarge Grand Canyon Canyon National Park.

In the early 1930s the director of the National Parks Service, Horace Albright, received a letter from M. R. Tillotson, superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park, about creating a new national monument east of the city of Tucson. This potential new national monument would protect the unique plant life of Arizona, especially the Saguaro. Tillotson described a forest of cacti east of Tucson as the most spectacular of the forests of cactus. They grow taller, larger and more dense. This idea was well taken but the Federal Government no longer had much of the land in that area. Other locations would be inspected before going ahead. This included the Santa Catalina Mountains northeast of the city near Mt. Lemmon.

Outside the NPS, efforts by the local Tucson Natural History Society were being made to protect the Saguaro Cactus and other parts of Arizona. They were made up of scientists from the University of Arizona and conservationists. They helped the NPS pick out potential sites with their vast knowledge of the Tucson area. At this point, some in the TNHS were recommending sites with Joshua Trees and other types of plants. Some recommended the mountains north of the Tucson Mountain Park, which would later become the Tucson Mountain District of Saguaro National Park. The Tanque Verde Cactus Forest kept coming back as the site to create this new national monument. It was near the growing city of Tucson and had the best specimens of Saguaro anywhere. The problem was the land proposed was nearly all owned by private landowners. As Tucson grew east towards the cactus forest and with the bureaucracy and budget of the NPS limiting the creation of the monument, Homer Shantz, President of the University of Arizona, acted and started acquiring the cactus forest. The NPS was still slow to act, the Governor of the state was fighting Washington over the Federalization of Arizona. Soon enough following a report from, Roger Toll, superintendent of Yellowstone, stated that the cactus forest of Rincon Mountain was the best, followed by the forest north of the Tucson Mountain Park. Both were now protected by the University of Arizona.

Near the end of the Hoover Administration, the NPS was convinced after more wrangling to protect both areas as a national monument. Finally, with everyone agreeing, on March 1, 1933, Saguaro National Monument was created by the stroke of a pen on the last few days of the Presidency of Herbert Hoover. The monument was administered by the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service. Grazing rights were upheld and the land was stitched together by private and university lands. The monument did not exist, but its future is still uncertain. Many thought that it would be gone, just like Papago Saguaro. It was the Great Depression that actually may have saved the cactus. The new administration was under President Franklin Denalo Roosevelt. As part of the New Deal he reorganized the National Monument system putting it under control of the Interior Department. Saguaro National Monument was now finally under control of the National Parks Service.