In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson signed the act that made the Grand Canyon a national park, upgrading protections first granted when Theodore Roosevelt declared it a national monument in 1908. The law came nearly four decades after Senator Benjamin Harrison first proposed a park there, and it placed roughly 1,000 square miles of Arizona under the new National Park Service. The designation ended years of wrangling with miners and private claimants and set the canyon on course to become one of the most visited parks in the country.
The campaign to protect the Grand Canyon began in 1882, when Benjamin Harrison, then a senator from Indiana, introduced the first of several bills to create a park there. None passed. As president, Harrison settled for a forest reserve in 1893. A decade later Theodore Roosevelt stood at the rim and urged Americans to "leave it as it is," warning that "the ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." In 1908 he used the new Antiquities Act to proclaim the Grand Canyon a national monument, a stretch of a law intended for archaeological sites that critics said far exceeded its purpose.
The fiercest resistance came from Ralph Cameron, a prospector turned politician who had filed mining claims along the Bright Angel Trail, the main route to the canyon floor, and charged travelers a toll to use it. Cameron fought federal control in the courts and later in the Senate. Arizona's congressional delegation, led by Senator Henry Ashurst and Representative Carl Hayden, pushed the park bill through Congress in early 1919, three years after the National Park Service was founded. The following year the Supreme Court, in Cameron v. United States, upheld the 1908 monument and rejected Cameron's claims.
The new park received about 44,000 visitors in its first year. Congress enlarged it substantially in 1975, bringing it to more than 1.2 million acres, and annual attendance now runs to several million people. Visitors who hike the Bright Angel Trail today walk a path that was once, for a time, a private toll road.