February 22, 1897 – Grover Cleveland Established Twenty-One Million Acres of Forest Reserves

On this day in history, President Grover Cleveland – only days before leaving office – signed an executive order creating the “Washington Birthday Reserves.” These included the Olympic and Rainier in Washington, the Flathead and Lewis and Clark in Montana, the Bitterroot and Priest in Idaho, and included more than four million acres in the northern Rockies.

Congress passed a bill to nullify protection for any public land, but Cleveland vetoed the bill.

Unfortunately, the next president, William McKinley, suspended Cleveland’s order. As Timothy Egan wrote in his book The Big Burn, big money interests in America saw as-yet unspoiled land as “a plunderer’s buffet.” He observed that to Congress, funded with money from the biggest landowners of the day,

“The disposal of public land was a one-way proposition – to commerce, to settlement, to profit, with only a few exceptions.”

Today’s Republican Party has embraced that viewpoint and it was of course championed by President Trump. As the Washington Post reported in a 2019 paean to Big Ears National Monument [that includes wonderful photos]:

In 2016, President Barack Obama created the Bears Ears National Monument, named for a pair of tall buttes that resemble the top of a bear’s head peeking over a ridge. His proclamation recognized the area’s ‘extraordinary archaeological and cultural record’ and the land’s ‘profoundly sacred’ meaning to many Native American tribes.

Eleven months later, in early December of 2017, President Trump reduced Bears Ears by 85 percent, an action that Utah officials and some local residents wanted. His rollback also followed a uranium firm’s concerted lobbying, an effort led by Andrew Wheeler, who [then headed] the Environmental Protection [sic] Agency.”

MEXICAN HAT, UT – JUNE 11:
The sun sets over Bears Ears National Monument seen from the Moki Dugway June 11, 2017 north of Mexican Hat, UT.
(Photo by Katherine Frey/The Washington Post)