The Publisher and the Rim

The meanest thing Pete Berry ever did to the Santa Fe Railway was sell. He'd built up the Grandview Hotel, he felt the railway had ruined him, and he wouldn't give it the satisfaction. So in the fall of nineteen eleven he offered his land to the loudest enemy the railroads had, William Randolph Hearst, who came out in nineteen thirteen and bought. "I was too hard a nut to crack," Berry wrote to Ralph Cameron, so he'd given them something easy to butt up against. You have to admire that. One sore hotel man had aimed a newspaper king at the outfit he blamed. When the bill to make this a national park went through Congress, Stephen Mather's Park Service men ran into an enemy they couldn't name. Horace Albright said later it was Hearst, afraid they'd take his Grandview land. So they bought him off with one line. If your land sits inside three hundred feet of the rim, nobody may raise so much as a tent between you and the edge. It never names him. Three hundred feet just happened to be how far his cabin sat from the rim. The opposition dropped, Albright said. Even this road had to cross a corner of his ground, and he swapped it for the rim. But a government can wait. In September of nineteen thirty-nine the Park Service filed a Declaration of Taking, the only time in the park's history. It offered twenty-five thousand dollars. His appraisers said three hundred and sixty-seven thousand. In October of nineteen forty-one a federal judge ordered eighty-five thousand. Pete Berry's little spite had run twenty-eight years. Back in nineteen thirty-nine, the park engineer noted a report that Hearst had been out to his holdings twice in nine years. Pete Berry had picked his man to spite the railway, and both times that man slept at El Tovar, the railway's own hotel. A law of the United States, bent around one cabin, and I can see the man it was bent for, asleep in a railway bed.