Stabilization: Park Ranger Charlie Steen and the Southwestern National Monuments through the Depression and War

“During my only full day I spent at Tonto, four autos carrying twenty-three passengers stopped by to look us over,” wrote Ranger Charlie Steen regarding his first posting at Tonto National Monument. Steen’s first full-time job with the National Park Service (NPS) was his brief service as Tonto’s first ranger. Steen was twenty-five years old when Frank “Boss” Pinkley hired him on July 19, 1934, sending him to be the first National Park Service “custodian” at the remote Tonto Cliff Dwellings near Roosevelt, Arizona. On Sunday, July 22, after only one full day on site, Steen was dispatched to another of the southwestern monuments. “In the following day while I was wondering how many visitors would break the solitude, Walt Atwell came along, told me to pack my extra pair of socks and toothbrush, that he was taking me to Montezuma Castle.” The regular ranger-custodian at Montezuma, Martin Jackson, was sick and Steen was suddenly temporarily reassigned to take his place.¹ Steen’s description of his brief stay at Tonto would not be his last report from the site.

Ultimately, Charles R. Steen served less than a year as ranger-custodian at Tonto National Monument, but he returned several times and supervised important archaeological research and preservation at the site after his tenure. Tonto was only one small part of Charlie Steen’s thirty-six-year career with the National Park Service. His work as park ranger and archaeologist extended across almost all of the national monuments of the American Southwest. However, his story is more than the experience of one man working in interesting and beautiful places. Steen’s career provides a window into National Park Service development in its early years, and his story helps to illustrate how the national monuments were incorporated into the National Park Service. Frank Pinkley, in his early years as superintendent of the Southwestern National Monuments, relied on monument custodians that he had inherited from the days of the General Land Office. The New Deal in the 1930s brought expanded funding for staff, allowing Pinkley to choose rangers with the education and experience to match the job. Steen’s career helps us to understand how the rangers in “Pinkley’s Outfit” influenced National Park Service development, particularly in the areas of preservation, research, and interpretation.

As custodian of Casa Grande Ruins (1918–1923) and as Superintendent of the Southwestern National Monuments (1923–1940), Frank Pinkley broke new ground regarding national park interpretation. With limited resources and limited formal education, he “cobbled together” an archaeological museum at Casa Grande and partnered in archaeological field research.² Perhaps the most important work that Pinkley accomplished on behalf of the Park Service was to recruit and develop a cadre of well-educated and hard-working “field men.” Each brought his own personality and skills. Charlie Steen is an example of one colleague among equals.

As historian Hal Rothman has noted, for the first decades of the twentieth century, the monuments suffered from neglect: “During the late 1910s and early 1920s, political realities and the view of the leaders of the NPS made national monuments into second-class areas.”³ Rothman writes that the monuments needed a champion, and Frank Pinkley, custodian at Casa Grande Ruins, stepped up to that role:

The NPS realized that in Pinkley they acquired someone with boundless energy. In his letter accepting reappointment at Casa Grande, Pinkley put forth his ideas about care for the national monuments. With fifteen years experience under similar conditions, he thought that he had a comprehensive understanding of the problems facing the monuments. Protection, development, and publicity were Pinkley’s main concerns as custodian.⁴

When it was created in 1916, the National Park Service was challenged with managing several southwestern archaeological sites. Mesa Verde in Colorado had become a national park in 1906, the only national park at the time that featured cultural rather than scenic resources. Casa Grande, near Coolidge, Arizona, had an even longer history of federal protection. President Benjamin Harrison had...