PUBLIC LANDS: AN AMERICAN TREASURE
The story of America’s public lands is essentially the history of the nation. It is a story of victories and defeats, of hopes and disappointments, of justice and injustices, of men and women looking for better lives, of men and women fighting to keep the lives they have known. It is a story written in blood, sweat, and tears, on landscapes of indescribable beauty and richness.
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| Grand Canyon, Arizona |
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It is interesting to think of the vast continent as it lay for a few hours before dawn in the darkness of that moonlit October night (in 1492) and of its unconcerned inhabitants, still ignorant of that momentous instant. In Mexico, only a few hundred miles west of San Salvador, where Columbus landed, the Aztec civilization was at its height of grace, cruelty, and power . . . In the Southwestern United States, where dawn was not yet at that moment ready to break, the Indians of the Pueblos would wake to the life they had been living for at least a thousand years, worshiping the raingods with ceremonial dances, harvesting their crops, managing their irrigation, fearing nothing . . . Undisturbed in their majesty, giant redwoods that had been growing when Rome was still an empire, looked through the fogs toward the Pacific waves breaking on the California coast. Northward, on the Columbia, Chinook and Klamath had relaxed from the ardors of the salmon fishing. From the Rockies to the forests of Pennsylvania black, gigantic buffalo herds were beginning to stir in the morning and think of grass and forage. Between the Mississippi and the Pacific, the giant grizzlies prowled, lords of plain and mountain, certain of their power, contemptuous of the frail creatures who, with bows and arrows, occasionally disturbed them briefly. And over it all, through the autumn night, swept the miraculous millions of migrant birds.
