The southern half of Utah is canyon country, a land of aridity, sparse vegetation, and unique and scenically spectacular topography and geology. It is a land rich in sites of archaeological importance and parts of it are sacred to indigenous people. It is also mostly public land, owned by the American people, part of their national legacy, and for a century it has been contested terrain.

Frederick Swanson, in Wonders of Sand and Stone, tells the story of the century-long battles between those who would preserve large parts of this spectacular landscape and those who would dedicate them to “multiple use,” principally grazing, mining, dams, and oil and gas development. The story begins early in the history of America’s national parks when Utah’s redrock country was virtually inaccessible except to a few intrepid explorers, prospectors, and reaches to the 21st century conflicts over Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.

This century of struggle over public land use has led to five national parks and eight national monuments managed by the National Park Service; the Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, also managed by the Park Service; and the recently diminished Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears monuments managed, if that is the appropriate verb, by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Swanson asks “Why has southern Utah provided the source rock for so many protected places? Geologists point to its stunning landforms, most of which have no equal on this planet, but it does not explain the nearly universal response people have to these cliffs and canyons.”

He notes that Utah guidebook author Ward Roylance “may have come closest when he labeled this strange quality of canyon country as ‘ineffable’ – something that begs for an artistic or contemplative response.” There is need today, writes Swanson, in this Internet age of high mobility, easy accessibility, increased park visibility, and crowding of the great parks like those in Utah, “to envision a high purpose for our national park lands,” which “requires that we know something of their history.” He amply fills that need in this meticulously researched history of Utah’s national parks and monuments.

The story begins with a brief overview of the early exploration of Utah’s portion of the Colorado Plateau Province by John Wesley Powell, Clarence Dutton, and others, and then to the “discovery” of Natural Bridges and Rainbow Bridge that became early national monuments. Stories and anecdotes about this period abound. Ezekiel “Zeke” Johnson, for instance, had grown up in southern Utah and worked as a cowhand, rancher, farmer, and prospector, and was appointed custodian of Natural Bridges in 1923. Paid a dollar a month, he had exclusive right to guide visitors so they could, as he put it, “have a little pioneer blood in their veins and can see beauty in every crack and ledge.”

An affable, outgoing character, Johnson expressed a contagious enthusiasm for the geologic wonders contained in “his” monument. One thing reliably set him off, though: anyone who didn’t come prepared to respect and appreciate this canyon domain. “Tourists,” he claimed, “are people with money and no brains to use it, people just rushing around who can’t appreciate beauty when they find it, littering up lovely places they get into with discarded paper and tin cans. They are always going somewhere and are always disappointed when they get there.”

And this in a time when just getting to Natural Bridges National Monument, not served by a road, was quite a challenge.

Over the decades, as people began to appreciate the scenery at Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Cedar Breaks, access to these parks was a big issue, and roads would be a big part of conflicts over the entire history of Utah national parks. Early in national park history, railroads provided access to the parks, but as Utah parks were established Americans were relying increasingly on automobiles to access them, and the push for roads is a central theme of the story.

Swanson explains in detail the early history of Utah parks development – small entrepreneurs setting up tours, railroads with their capital coming in to build lodges and push small operators aside, and roads gradually winding across the landscape improving accessibility, bringing economic growth to the region, impacting the natural world, and leading to more park initiatives.

Swanson explains how, early in the history of Utah’s national parks, most folks saw economic opportunity in tourism so were all for creating the parks, or national monuments as four of the now iconic Utah national parks were initially because they were established by presidents using The Antiquities Act. They later gained the status of national parks.

Then, in the 1930s, conflict grew between ranchers, mining interests, and those advocating expanding existing parks and creating a huge new one. In January 1936, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes signed off on a National Park Service proposal for a nearly 7,000-square-mile Escalante National Monument to include large parts of the Escalante, Green, and Colorado River areas in the southwest corner of Utah. Of this Swanson writes, “The Park Service had crossed a line with the Escalante proposal, violating the tacit understanding that new parks and monuments would not interfere with existing uses of the land. Southern Utah was now contested ground, and neither its stunning beauty nor its seemingly limitless horizons would overcome the antipathy of local residents to what they saw as the federal bureaucracy’s overreach.”

From this time forward, expansion of existing parks and monuments or creation of new ones was, as Swanson describes in detail, politically fraught.

The Escalante National Monument proposal went nowhere, but in decades after World War II other ideas for protecting what ultimately came to be Canyonlands National Park emerged. Swanson’s account of the very complex political struggles that led to Canyonlands, an expanded Capitol Reef National Park, and ultimately Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, is clearly and brilliantly told. He does a masterful job of recounting the ups and downs of efforts to protect the Canyonlands country from myriad development schemes, and the roles politicians, especially Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, played in bringing Canyonlands National Park to fruition.

Here he summarizes Utah’s position on parks that governed their response to Canyonland proposals and has been essentially their position since the 1960s: “The state’s position was unequivocal: national parks and monuments must be limited to a handful of small, isolated scenic enclaves that would serve as billboards to draw tourists to gateway communities. Outside these reserves, full-scale industrial and agricultural development would eventually fill the map with mines, oil wells, power plants, and dams, all served by a network of roads and highways, built with federal dollars.”

There is more to the story centered around Canyonlands than battles over what would go into the park, and Swanson masterfully describes proposals for dams on the Colorado River, for a parkway, like the Blue Ridge Parkway, that would allow tourists “to drive from Moab to Kanab on one direct route, putting Zion and Bryce Canyon within easy reach.” This would, as opponents of the parkway argued, mean “building highways against the grain of the land – crossing canyons, blasting through hogbacks, and bridging rivers.” A dam was built on the Colorado River in Glen Canyon creating Lake Powell, but other dams were defeated, and the parkway idea died. Swanson explains in accessible detail how these outcomes were achieved.

One of the key figures in the story of Canyonlands was Bates Wilson, who began his Utah Park Service career as “overseer of a minor national monument in the desert hinterlands” [Arches] but became the first superintendent of Canyonlands National Park and an architect of its ultimate expansion.

Swanson describes him as “folksy,” an exceptional bureaucrat who loved to be out on the land and was equally comfortable with the people of Moab, where he was a Rotarian and Boy Scout leader, or with Interior Secretary Udall and other high-powered people.

One feature of Swanson’s book that I find especially attractive is the way he tells the human stories in the grand sweep of public land politics. Whether he is writing of “Zeke” Johnson, Bates Wilson, Stewart Udall, or opponents of park initiatives like Calvin Black, he treats them as committed believers in their roles as park advocates or opponents. Swanson is balanced in his account, though he is clear that he thinks the outcomes of the century-long struggles over southern Utah’s public lands that have led to parks and monument are good for the land and for the country. Here is a passage from his account of the Canyonlands fight that illustrates the sweep of his perspective:

That [Stewart] Udall, a native Arizonan, would be unacquainted with a million-acre expanse of high desert mesas and canyons in his neighboring state suggests that at the dawn of the Space Age, there were still parts of America’s public domain that were segregated from American life. The Mormon pioneers who settled the arid valleys of southern Utah and northern Arizona (Udall’s ancestors among them) rarely shrank from a challenge, but they never attempted a permanent presence within the basin surrounding the Green and Colorado Rivers. For nearly a century they let their cattle and horses wander beneath the Orange Cliffs in search of sparse forage; they cheered as oil companies in the 1920s drilled exploratory wells on the banks of the Colorado downstream from Moab; some of them joined the manic quest for uranium in the 1950s; but they could not find an answer to the near absence of water, the contorted topography, and the unyielding obstacles posed by the river canyons themselves.

All this would change, of course, given America’s century-long push to conquer the West. Great forces were converging on Utah in the opening years of the 1960s, reaching in from Washington, Denver, San Francisco, and other centers of economic and political power for the prize these canyons might contain. It could be a new dam and reservoir, a tourism boom made possible by a transcanyon highway, renewed mineral development – or it might be something very different, as Stewart Udall imagined. A new generation of outdoor lovers was discovering that the complex topography of southeastern Utah offered amazing opportunities for adventure, whether by jeep, on foot, or by water. To them, making a new national park out of this landscape made perfect sense, even if it meant forgoing another mining boom.

This lengthy passage illustrates the scope of Swanson’s analysis and the excellence of his writing. Wonders of Sand and Stone focuses on national parks and monuments, but it is a broader history of this remarkable corner of America.

Drawing boundaries around a piece of land after much negotiation and compromise and making it a national park or monument is, of course, only part of the story. After that it must be managed, and Swanson describes arguments over roads in the parks, the tension between managing parks as wilderness or primarily as recreational areas, the problems arising from ever-rising park visitation, and other management challenges. In a chapter he titles “Smokestacks on the Plateau” he tells of plans to build a huge coal-fired power plant on the Kaiparowits Plateau that, along with other plants in the region, would degrade air quality. It was not built. A nuclear waste repository proposed by the U.S. Department of Energy in Davis Canyon that would extend under Canyonlands National Park was another threat, fortunately stymied. Swanson ably covers these and other threats to the parks.

Finally, he comes to appropriately brief treatments of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments, which are so recent and currently controversial that they are hard yet to see through a historical lens. The struggles to protect parts of the remarkable region of southeastern Utah continue with new and important dimensions in play, as with the core involvement of Native American tribes in the campaign to protect Bears Ears. No one on either side of the Utah park issues historically paid any attention to the original inhabitants of this land, but perhaps that is changing, though the dismemberment of the tribes’ Bears Ears proposal so far suggests otherwise.

In eloquent concluding chapters, Swanson doffs his historian’s hat and makes a plea for a better future for the parks, the land, and the indigenous people of southern Utah. He writes,

The diminished monuments of today continue the past approach of fragmented and spotty protection of important public resources. A different approach would examine the canyon country region on a broad scale, looking for common purposes that might help heal old divisions. This would require all parties to take a hard look at how we have historically treated the land and its longtime inhabitants, then chart new directions that encompass the entire range of values we seek in our public lands. Such a process, though largely untried, offers perhaps the best hope that Utah’s national parks and monuments will remain as living examples of the Earth’s creation.

In my view, this is exactly the right conclusion to draw from the story Swanson has so ably told in Wonders of Sand and Stone. He has given readers insight into how the southern Utah public landscape has come to be what it is today. I think he has achieved his goal of helping us consider the higher purposes of Utah’s national parks and of such parks everywhere. This is a marvelous book that deserves a wide readership.

Traveler postcript: National Parks Traveler Episode 94, coming November 29, features an interview with Frederick Swanson.