History
When the United States acquired the territory comprising Arizona and New Mexico by treaty with Mexico in 1848, those lands not already privately owned, including Spanish and Mexican land grants, nor reserved by treaty for the various Indian tribes, became a part of the “public domain” and open under various laws to settlement, purchase, and use.
In 1898, President William McKinley established the San Francisco Mountain Forest Reserve, at the request of Gifford Pinchot, head of the US Division of Forestry. Local reaction was hostile—citizens of Williams, Arizona held a mass protest, and the Williams News editorialized that the reserve "virtually destroys Coconino County."
In 1905, the Forest Reserves were transferred to the Department of Agriculture. Some 21 million acres (85,000 km2) of public lands, almost one-eighth of the area of Arizona and New Mexico, were now to be administered by the new Forest Service.
In 1908, the Coconino National Forest was established from parts of the Tonto, Black Mesa, Grand Canyon, and entire San Francisco Mountains National Forests.
Read more about this topic: Coconino National Forest
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The true theater of history is therefore the temperate zone.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”
—Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)