PARTING SHOT

Former President Theodore Roosevelt leads a party down the Grand Canyon’s Bright Angel Trail in March 1911. Three years earlier, Roosevelt had designated the Canyon a national monument; it became a national park in 1919. “In the Grand Canyon,” he said, “Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the Canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.” Behind Roosevelt is John Hance, who may have been the Canyon’s first non-Native American resident. The Kolb brothers, who operated a photography studio on the Canyon’s South Rim for decades, made the photo.