GILA CLIFF DWELLINGS Administrative History

National Park

The next official visit to Gila Cliff Dwellings did not occur until the autumn of 1937, when a team of Park Service staff came down from the new regional office in Santa Fe [15] to assess the merits of creating a national park on the headwaters of the Gila River. In their report, the team recommended establishing a park and suggested that it take in 563,000 acres of the Gila Wilderness—essentially all of the wilderness west of the East Fork. [16] Subsumed in the proposal was Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, the ruins of which were judged by Erik Reed, the regional archeologist and a member of the team, to not merit national park status. They would, in his opinion, make interesting supplements to a park that preserved a dramatic natural area of canyons and pristine forests, however.

The preserved record of this proposal is sparse, and the proximate causes of its failure must be deduced from a larger context and a little close reading. Undoubtedly, the greatest obstacle to the creation of the national park was the fact that the very large tract of land being considered was administered by the Forest Service. In the Southwest, the Forest Service had already seen more than a million acres transferred from its jurisdiction through the establishment of national parks. [17] Recently it had vigorously and successfully resisted the creation of Cliff Cities National Park at what is now Bandelier National Monument, a proposal that would have entailed yet another large withdrawal. [18] Given the perceptions of betrayal that had accompanied the absorption of all national monuments previously administered by the Forest Service and the contemporaneous inter-agency struggles over Olympic National Park and King's Canyon National Park, it was inevitable that any proposal entailing a national monument, large tracts of land, and the creation of a new national park would be viewed through extremely narrowed and wary eyes.

Furthermore, the land proposed for Gila National Park already had unique status as the nation's first wilderness area and as the largest in the Southwest. The Gila Wilderness was a showpiece of Forest Service restraint, demonstrating a commitment to recreation and to the preservation of natural values that matched the efforts of its rival agency. [19] Transferring this wilderness would not only reduce the Gila National Forest by 25%, it would also usurp the efforts of the Forest Service to display clearly and imaginatively its mandate beyond watershed protection and the mere economy of resource development.

Finally, an image of independent responsibility and consequence was especially important during the late 1930s, when Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes was lobbying actively and with substantial—even presidential—support to transfer the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture to his own agency. [20] Even a tacit acknowledgement that the Department of the Interior could do a better job managing the natural values of the Gila headwaters or of any other reach of national forest might be seen as damaging.

In 1938, the proposal for establishing Gila National Park was made. A year later, this proposal had been modified. Instead of a new large national park, an even larger national monument—650,000—was proposed that would again include the current Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. [21] Unclear is whether this modification was an accommodation to the 1,500 acres of patented mining claims, which could then still be legally developed, [22] or was instead the well-known legislative back door that would transfer most of the wilderness by executive order, avoiding in this way opposition that the Forest Service might already have mustered in Congress. Designation as a national park could always come later.

In January 1940, the acting director of the National Park Service circulated drafts of a letter of transmittal to be signed by the Secretary of the Interior [23] and of a presidential proclamation that excluded approximately 654,400 acres from the Gila National Forest. It was, the proclamation stated, "in the public interest to reserve such lands, together with the lands now comprising the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument as a National Monument, to be known as the Gila National Monument." [24] Neither document was ever signed.

A little more than a year later, Minor Tillotson, the new director of Region III of the Park Service, recommended that Gila Cliff Dwelling National Monument "be left as a reserve area with no attempt to popularize it and promote visitation." [25] The gap between this recommendation and the presidential proclamation that had circulated not much earlier is profound; unfortunately, it can only be spanned with inferences based on the broader territorial struggles between the Forest Service and the Park Service, on the specific logic of conflict over the Gila Wilderness, and possibly on the appointment during the hiatus of Newton B. Drury as director of the National Park Service. Drury was a man who quickly proved to be considerably less expansionist than his predecessors. [26]

The idea of Gila National Park failed, and its only documented consequence was the construction in 1938 of a fence to bar cattle from the ruins in Cliff Dweller Canyon. This project stemmed from a complaint made by a member of the park assessment team about livestock trampling the site. [27] Following an exchange of letters, Frank Pooler, the regional forester directed an initially recalcitrant Gila National Forest supervisor to comply with the request for a fence. [28]

Pinkley never saw Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. [29] Given his well-known disinclination to see archeological sites become parks instead of monuments, however—an attitude that he demonstrated over the issue of Cliff Cities National Park—and given his expressed frustration over the elevation of Carlsbad Caverns from national monument to national park, Pinkley's feelings about the proposed Gila National Park can probably be intuited. Perhaps his likely intransigence contributed to the fact that no member of his Southwestern National Monuments staff was included on the 1937 park team to assess the Gila proposal, a curious and provocative omission. At any rate, after 1935 no funding and no staff were allocated to this monument for the rest of Pinkley's life. Pinkley died before the issue of the larger Gila National Monument was shelved.