Grand Canyon History
Table of Contents: American
Indian Inhabitation | Historic
Exploration [The Spanish, The Americans]
Tourism [Transportation, Accommodations]
Protection
Efforts | References
 The known history
of the Grand Canyon area stretches back 10,500 years when the
first evidence for human presence in the area started. American
Indians have been living at Grand Canyon and in the area now covered
by Grand Canyon National Park for at least the last 4,000 of those
years. Anasazi, first as the Basketmaker culture and later as the more
familiar Puebleoans, developed from the Desert Culture as they became
less nomadic and more dependent on agriculture. A similar culture, the
Cohonina, also lived in the canyon area. Drought in the late 13th
century was the likely cause for both cultures to move on. Other
cultures followed, including the Paiutes, Cerbat, and the Navajo, only
to be later forced onto reservations by the United States Government.
Under direction by conquistador
Francisco Vasquez de Coronado to find the fabled Seven Cities of
Cibola, Captain Garcia Lopez de Cardenas led a party of Spanish
soldiers with Hopi guides to the Grand Canyon in September of
1540. Not finding what they were looking for, they left. Over 200
years passed before two Spanish priests became the second party of
non-Native Americans to see the canyon.
In 1869, U.S. Army Major John
Wesley Powell led the Powell Expeditions through the canyon on the
Colorado River. This and later study by geologists uncovered the
geology of the Grand Canyon area and helped to advance that
science. In the late 19th century there was interest in the region
because of its promise of mineral resources—mainly copper and
asbestos. The first pioneer settlements along the rim came in the
1880s.
Early residents soon discovered
that tourism was destined to be more profitable than mining, and
by the turn of the century Grand Canyon was a well-known tourist
destination. Most visitors made the grueling trip from nearby
towns to the South Rim by stagecoach.
In 1901 the Grand Canyon Railway
was opened from Williams, Arizona, to the South Rim, and the
development of formal tourist facilities, especially at Grand
Canyon Village, increased dramatically. The Fred Harvey Company
developed many facilities at the Grand Canyon, including the
luxury El Tovar Hotel on the South Rim in 1905 and Phantom Ranch
in the Inner Gorge in 1922. Although first afforded Federal
protection in 1893 as a forest reserve and later as a U.S.
National Monument, Grand Canyon did not achieve U.S. National Park
status until 1919, three years after the creation of the National
Park Service. Today, Grand Canyon National Park receives about
five million visitors each year, a far cry from the annual
visitation of 44,173 in 1919.
American
Indian Inhabitation
Current archaeological evidence
suggests that humans have inhabited the Grand Canyon area as far
back as 4,000 years and at least were passers through for 6,500
years before that. Radiocarbon dating of artifacts found in
limestone caves in the inner canyon indicate ages of 3,000 to
4,000 years. In the 1930s artifacts consisting of split-twig
animal figurines were found in the Redwall Limestone cliffs of the
Inner Gorge that were dated in this range. These animal figurines
are a few inches in height and made primarily from twigs of willow
or cottonwood. This find along with other evidence suggests these
inner canyon dwellers were part of Desert Culture; a group of semi
nomadic hunter-gatherer American Indians.
The Basketmaker Anasazi (also
called the Histatsinom, meaning "people who lived long
ago") evolved from the Desert Culture sometime around 500
BCE. This group inhabited the rim and inner canyon and survived by
hunting and gathering along with some limited agriculture. Noted
for their basketmaking skills (hence their name), they lived in
small communal bands inside caves and circular mud structures
called pithouses. Further refinement of agriculture and technology
led to a more sedentary and stable lifestyle for the Anasazi
starting around 500 CE. Contemporary with the flourishing of
Anasazi culture, another group, called the Cohonina lived west of
the current site of Grand Canyon Village.
Anasazi in the Grand Canyon area
started to use stone in addition to mud and poles to erect
above-ground houses sometime around 800 CE. Thus the Pueblo period
of Anasazi culture was initiated. In summer, the Puebleoans
migrated from the hot inner canyon to the cooler high plateaus and
reversed the journey for winter. Large graineries and multi-room
pueblos survive from this period. There are around 2,000 known
Anasazi archaeological sites in park boundaries. The most
accessible site is Tusayan Pueblo, which was constructed sometime
around 1185 and housed 30 or so people.
Large numbers of dated
archaeological sites indicate that the Anasazi and the Cohonina
flourished until about 1200 CE. Something happened a hundred years
after that, however, that forced both of these cultures to move
away. Several lines of evidence led to a theory that climate
change caused a severe drought in the region from 1276 to 1299,
forcing these agriculture-dependent cultures to move on.[3] Many
Anasazi relocated to the Rio Grande and the Little Colorado River
drainages, where their descendants, the Hopi and the 19 Pueblos of
New Mexico, now live.[2] The Hopi people believe they emerged from
the canyon and that their spirits rest here.
For approximately one hundred
years the canyon area was uninhabited by humans. Paiutes from the
east and Cerbat from the west were the first humans to reestablish
settlements in and around the Grand Canyon. The Pauite settled the
plateaus north of the Colorado River and the Cerbat built their
communities south of the river, on the Coconino Plateau. Sometime
in the 15th century the Navajo, or the Dine, arrived in the area.
All three cultures were stable
until the United States Army moved them to Indian reservations in
1882 as part of the removal efforts that ended the Indian Wars.
The Havasupai and Hualapai are descended from the Cerbat and still
live in the immediate area. Havasu Village, in the western part of
the current park, is likely one of the oldest
continuously-occupied settlements in the contiguous United States.
Adjacent to the eastern part of the park is the Navajo Nation, the
largest reservation in the United States.
The first Europeans reached the
Grand Canyon in September 1540. It was a group of about 13 Spanish
soldiers led by García López de Cárdenas, dispatched from the
army of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado on its quest to find the
fabulous Seven Cities of Cibola. The group was led by Hopi guides
and, assuming they took the most likely route, must have reached
the Canyon at the South Rim, probably between today's Desert View
and Moran Point.
The report indicates that they
greatly misjudged the proportions of the gorge. On the one hand,
they estimated that the Canyon was about three to four leagues
wide (8-10 miles), which is quite accurate. At the same time,
however, they believed that the river, which they could see from
above, was only 2 meters (6 ft) wide (in reality it is about a
hundred times wider). Being in dire need of water, and wanting to
cross the giant obstacle, the soldiers started searching for a way
down to the Canyon floor that would be passable for them along
with their horses. After three full days, they still hadn't been
successful, and it is speculated that the Hopi, who probably knew
a way down to the Canyon floor, were reluctant to lead them there.
As a last resort, Cárdenas
finally commanded the three lightest and most agile men of his
group to climb down by themselves (their names are given as Pablo
de Melgosa, Juan Galeras, and an unknown, third soldier). After
several hours, the men returned, reporting that they had only made
one third of the distance down to the river, and that "what
seemed easy from above was not so". Furthermore, they claimed
that some of the boulders which they had seen from the rim, and
estimated to be about as tall as a man, were in fact bigger than
the Great Tower of Seville (which then was the tallest building in
the world, measuring 270 feet. Cárdenas finally had to give up
and returned to the main army. His report of an insurmountable
barrier squelched all interest in the area for the next two
hundred years.
Only in 1776 did two Spanish
Priests, Fathers Atanasio Dominguez and Silvestre Velez de
Escalante travel along the North Rim again, together with a group
of Spanish soldiers, exploring southern Utah in search of a route
from Santa Fe, New Mexico to Monterey, California.
James Ohio Pattie and a group of
American trappers and mountain men were probably the next
Europeans to reach the Canyon in 1826. There is little in terms of
documentation to support this, however.
The signing of the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 ceded the Grand Canyon region to the
United States. Jules Marcou of the Pacific Railroad Survey made
the first geologic observations of the canyon and surrounding area
in 1856.
Jacob Hamblin (a Mormon
missionary) was sent by Brigham Young in the 1850s to locate easy
river crossing sites in the canyon. Building good relations with
local American Indians and white settlers, he discovered Lee's
Ferry in 1858 and Pierce Ferry (later operated by, and named for,
Harrison Pierce) the only two sites suitable for ferry operation.
George Johnson lead an expedition by stern wheeler steam boat that
reached Black Canyon in 1857.
A U.S. War Department expedition
led by Lt. Joseph Ives was launched in 1857 to investigate the
area's potential for natural resources, to find railroad routes to
the west coast, and assess the feasibility of an up-river
navigation route from the Gulf of California. The group traveled
in a stern wheeler steamboat named Explorer. After two
months and 350 miles of difficult navigation, his party reached
Black Canyon some two months after George Johnson. In the process,
the Explorer struck a rock and was abandoned. The group
later traveled eastwards along the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.
A man of his time, Ives
discounted his own impressions on the beauty of the canyon and
declared it and the surrounding area as "altogether
valueless", remarking that his expedition would be "the
last party of whites to visit this profitless locality".
Attached to Ives' expedition was geologist John Strong Newberry
who had a very different impression of the canyon. After
returning, Newberry convinced fellow geologist John Wesley Powell
that a boat run through the Grand Canyon to complete the survey
would be worth the risk. Powell was a major in the United States
Army and was a veteran of the Civil War, a conflict that cost him
his right forearm in the Battle of Shiloh.
More than a decade after the Ives
Expedition and with help from the Smithsonian Institution, Powell
led the first of the Powell Expeditions to explore the region and
document its scientific offerings. On May 24, 1869, the group of
nine men set out from Green River Station in Wyoming down the
Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. This first expedition
was poorly-funded and consequently no photographer or graphic
artist was included. While in the Canyon of Lodore one of the
group's four boats capsized, spilling most of their food and much
of their scientific equipment into the river. This shortened the
expedition to one hundred days. Tired of being constantly cold,
wet and hungry and not knowing they had already passed the worst
rapids, three of Powell's men climbed out of the canyon in what is
now called Separation Canyon. Once out of the canyon, all three
were killed by Shivwits band Paiutes who thought they were miners
that recently molested a female Shivwit. All those who stayed with
Powell survived and that group successfully ran most of the
canyon.
Two years later a much
better-funded Powell-led party returned with redesigned boats and
a chain of several supply stations along their route. This time,
photographer E.O. Beaman and 17-year-old artist Frederick
Dellenbaugh were included. Beaman left the group in January 1872
over a dispute with Powell and his replacement, James Fennemore,
quit August that same year due to poor health, leaving boatman
Jack Hillers as the official photographer (nearly one ton of
photographic equipment was needed on site to process each shot).
Famed painter Thomas Moran joined the expedition in the summer of
1873, after the river voyage and thus only viewed the canyon from
the rim. His 1873 painting "Chasm of the Colorado" was
bought by the United States Congress in 1874 and hung in the lobby
of the Senate.
The Powell expeditions
systematically cataloged rock formations, plants, animals, and
archaeological sites. Photographs and illustrations from the
Powell expeditions greatly popularized the canyonland region of
the southwest United States, especially the Grand Canyon (knowing
this Powell added increasing resources to that aspect of his
expeditions). Powell later used these photographs and
illustrations in his lecture tours, making him a national figure.
Rights to reproduce 650 of the expeditions' 1,400 stereographs
were sold to help fund future Powell projects. In 1881 he became
the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Geologist Clarence Dutton (photo)
followed up on Powell's work in 1880–1881 with the first
in-depth geological survey of the newly-formed U.S. Geological
Survey. Painters Thomas Moran and William Henry Holmes accompanied
Dutton, who was busy drafting detailed descriptions of the area's
geology. The report that resulted from the team's effort was
titled A Tertiary History of The Grand Canyon District, with
Atlas and was published in 1882. This and later study by
geologists uncovered the geology of the Grand Canyon area and
helped to advance that science. Both the Powell and Dutton
expeditions helped to increase interest in the canyon and
surrounding region.
Prospectors in the 1870s and
1880s staked mining claims in the canyon. They hoped that
previously-discovered deposits of asbestos, copper, lead, and zinc
would be profitable to mine. Access to and from this remote region
and problems getting ore out of the canyon and its rock made the
whole exercise not worth the effort. Most moved on, and some
stayed to seek profit in the tourist trade. Their activities did
improve pre-existing Indian trials, such as Bright Angel Trail.
A rail line to the largest city
in the area, Flagstaff, was completed in 1882 by the Santa Fe
Railroad. Stage coaches started to bring tourists from Flagstaff
to the Grand Canyon the next year—an eleven-hour journey.
Tourism greatly increased in 1901 when a spur of the Santa Fe
Railroad to Grand Canyon Village was completed. The first
scheduled train with paying passengers of the Grand Canyon Railway
arrived from Williams, Arizona, on September 17 that year. The 64
mile long trip cost $3.95, and naturalist John Muir later
commended the railroad for its limited environmental impact.
Competition with the automobile
forced the Santa Fe Railroad to cease operation of the Grand
Canyon Railway in 1968 (only three passengers were on the last
run). The railway was restored and reintroduced service in 1989,
and has since carried hundreds of passengers a day.
The first automobile was driven
to the Grand Canyon in 1902. Oliver Lippincott from Los Angeles,
California, drove his Toledo Automobile Company-built car to the
South Rim from Flagstaff. Lippincott, a guide and two writers set
out on the afternoon of January 4 that year anticipating a
seven-hour journey. Two days later, the hungry and dehydrated
party arrived at their destination; the countryside was just too
rough for the 10 horsepower auto. A three day drive from Utah in
1907 was required to reach the North Rim for the first time.
Trains, however, remained the
preferred way to travel to the canyon until they were surpassed by
the auto in the 1930s. By the early 1990s more than a million
automobiles per year visited the park. Air pollution from those
vehicles and wind-blown pollution from Flagstaff and even the Las
Vegas area has reduced visibility in the Grand Canyon and
vicinity.
West Rim Drive was completed in
1912. In the late 1920s the first rim to rim access was
established by the North Kaibab suspension bridge over the
Colorado River. Paved roads did not reach the less popular and
more remote North Rim until 1926, and that area, being higher in
elevation, is closed due to winter weather from November to April.
Construction of a road along part of the South Rim was completed
in 1935.
John D. Lee was the first person
who catered to travelers to the canyon. In 1872 he established a
ferry service at the confluence of the Colorado and Paria rivers.
Lee was in hiding, having been accused of leading the Mountain
Meadows Massacre in 1857. He was tried and executed for this crime
in 1877. During his trial he played host to members of the Powell
Expedition who were waiting for their photographer, Major James
Fennemore, to arrive (Fennemore took the last photo of Lee sitting
on his own coffin). Emma, one of Lee's nineteen wives, continued
the ferry business after her husband's death. In 1876 a man named
Harrison Pearce established another ferry service at the western
end of the canyon.
The two-room Farlee Hotel opened
in 1884 near Diamond Creek and was in operation until 1889. That
year Louis Boucher opened a larger hotel at Dripping Springs. John
Hance opened his ranch near Grandview to tourists in 1886 only to
sell it nine years later in order to start a long career as a
Grand Canyon guide (in 1896 he also became local postmaster).
William Wallace Bass opened a
tent house campground in 1890. Bass Camp had a small central
building with common facilities such as a kitchen, dining room,
and sitting room inside. Rates were $2.50 a day, and the complex
was 20 miles west of the Grand Canyon Railway's Bass Station (Ash
Fort). Bass also built the stage coach road that he used to carry
his patrons from the train station to his hotel. A second Bass
Camp was built along the Shinumo Creek drainage.
The Grand Canyon Hotel Company
was incorporated in 1892 and charged with building services along
the stage route to the canyon. In 1896 the same man who bought
Hance's Grandview ranch opened Bright Angel Hotel in Grand Canyon
Village. Cameron Hotel opened in 1903, and its owner started to
charge a toll to use Bright Angel Trail.
Things changed in 1905 when the
luxury El Tovar Hotel opened within steps of the Grand Canyon
Railway's terminus. El Tovar was named for Don Pedro de Tovar who
tradition says is the Spaniard who learned about the canyon from
Hopis and told Coronado. Charles Whittlesey designed the arts and
crafts-styled rustic hotel complex, which was built with logs from
Oregon and local stone at a cost of $250,000 for the hotel and
another $50,000 for the stables (a huge sum in 1905). An IMAX
theater just outside the park shows a reenactment of the Powell
Expedition.
The Kolb Brothers, Emery and
Ellsworth, built a photographic studio on the South Rim at the
trailhead of Bright Angel Trail in 1904. Hikers and mule caravans
intent on descending down the canyon would stop at the Kolb Studio
to have their photos taken. The Kolb Brothers processed the prints
before their customers returned to the rim. Using the
newly-invented Pathé Bray
camera in 1911–12, they became the first to make a motion
picture of a river trip through the canyon that itself was only
the eighth such successful journey. From 1915 to 1975 the film
they produced was shown twice a day to tourists with Emery Kolb at
first narrating in person and later through tape (a feud with Fred
Harvey prevented pre-1915 showings).
By the late 19th century, the
conservation movement was increasing national interest in
preserving natural wonders like the Grand Canyon. U.S. National
Parks in Yellowstone and around Yosemite Valley were established
by the early 1890s. U.S. Senator Benjamin Harrison introduced a
bill in 1887 to establish a national park at the Grand Canyon. The
bill died in committee, but on February 20, 1893, Harrison (then
President of the United States) declared the Grand Canyon to be a
National Forest Preserve. Mining and logging were allowed, but the
designation did offer some protection.
U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt
visited the Grand Canyon in 1903. An avid outdoorsman and staunch
conservationist, he established the Grand Canyon Game Preserve on
November 28, 1906. Livestock grazing was reduced, but predators
such as mountain lions, eagles, and wolves, were eradicated.
Roosevelt added adjacent national forest lands and redesignated
the preserve a U.S. National Monument on January 11, 1908.
Opponents such as land and mining claim holders blocked efforts to
reclassify the monument as a U.S. National Park for 11 years.
Grand Canyon National Park was finally established as the 17th
U.S. National Park by an Act of Congress signed into law by
President Woodrow Wilson on February 26, 1919. The National Park
Service declared the Fred Harvey Company to the official park
concessionaire in 1920 and bought William Wallace Bass out of
business.
An almost 310 square mile area
adjacent to the park was designated as a second Grand Canyon
National Monument on December 22, 1932. Marble Canyon National
Monument was established on January 20, 1969, and covered about 41
square miles. An act signed by President Gerald Ford on January 3,
1975, doubled the size of Grand Canyon National Park by merging
these adjacent national monuments and other federal land into it.
That same act gave Havasu Canyon back to the Havasupai. From that
point forward, the park stretched along a 278 mile segment of the
Colorado River from the southern border of Glen Canyon National
Recreation Area to the eastern boundary of Lake Mead National
Recreation Area. Grand Canyon National Park was designated a World
Heritage Site on October 24, 1979.
In 1935, Hoover Dam started to
impound Lake Mead south of the canyon. Conservationists lost a
battle to save upstream Glen Canyon from becoming a reservoir. The
Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1966 to control flooding, provide
water and hydroelectric power. Seasonal variations of spring high
flow and flooding and low flow in summer have been replaced by a
much more regulated system. The much more controlled Colorado has
a dramatically reduced sediment load, which starves beaches and
sand bars. In addition, clearer water allows significant algae
growth to occur on the riverbed, giving the river a green color.
With the advent of commercial
flight, the Grand Canyon has been a popular site for aircraft
over-flights. However, a series of accidents resulted in the
Overflights Act of 1987 by Congress, which banned flights
below-the-rim and created flight-free zones. The tourism flights
over the canyon have also created a noise issue, and the number of
flights over the park has been restricted.
In order of greatest use.
- Account of the Expedition to
Cibola which took place in the year 1540
,
Pedro de Castañeda of Najera (Seville; 1596; English
translation in: The Journey of Coronado, 1540-1542,
George Parker Winship (Golden, Colorado; Fulcrum Publishing;
1990; pages 115-117)) ISBN 1-55591-066-1
The Grand Canyon,
Letitia Burns O'Connor (Los Angeles, California; Perpetua Press;
1992; pages 16-19, 30-32) ISBN 0-88363-969-6
Secrets in The Grand Canyon,
Zion and Bryce Canyon National Parks: Third Edition,
Lorraine Salem Tufts (North Palm Beach, Florida; National
Photographic Collections; 1998; pages 12-13) ISBN 0-9620255-3-4
Geology of U.S. Parklands: Fifth
Edition, Eugene P.
Kiver, David V. Harris (New York; John Wiley & Sons; 1999;
pages 395-397) ISBN 0-471-33218-6
Geology of National Parks: Fifth
Edition, Ann G. Harris,
Esther Tuttle, Sherwood D. Tuttle (Iowa; Kendall/Hunt Publishing;
1997; page 7) ISBN 0-7872-5353-7
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