Grand Canyon National Park
History
The Paiutes call it Kaibab, or "Mountain Lying down." John Wesley
Powell dubbed it the "Grand Canyon" in 1872. No matter what name it
is known by, Grand Canyon is as awe-inspiring today as it must have
been to the first people to stumble upon it.
Native Americans
More than 11,000 years ago, paleo-hunters wandered the
Southwest chasing big game. They left few signs of their passage. In
time, these mysterious travelers were followed by hunter-gatherers
of the Desert Archaic culture, who inhabited the Grand Canyon region
until about 1000 b.c. Evidence of their presence at the Canyon was
found in 1932. Small animal hunting fetishes made from willow twigs
were discovered secreted away in hard-to-reach crannies in the
Redwall Limestone cliffs of the Inner Gorge. Radiocarbon dating has
revealed the figurines to be approximately 4,000 years old.
Hunting and gathering predominated until the introduction of
agriculture allowed family groups to settle in one place,
supplementing game and native plants with cultivated corn. By a.d.
500, a new culture, known as the ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) could
be found at Grand Canyon. They inhabited dark, smoky,
semisubterranean pithouses, hunted deer, rabbits, and bighorn sheep,
and made fine baskets, leading archaeologists to name them ancestral
Puebloan Basketmakers. The Basketmakers lived peacefully alongside
the Cohonina people, who shared many similar cultural traits.
About 2,000 ancestral Puebloan sites have been found within park
boundaries, the most impressive of which is Tusayan Pueblo,
which was constructed in a.d. 1185 and occupied by about 30 people.
By the time Tusayan Pueblo was built, the ancestral Puebloans were
reaching the apex of their culture. The Spanish word pueblo,
meaning "town," referred to the apartment-style masonry compounds
the ancestral Puebloans now excelled in building. Communal living
had led to many new breakthroughs, such as irrigation farming of
corn, squash, and bean crops, elaborate ceremonial rituals in
underground chambers called kivas, beautiful black-on-white and
corrugated utilitarian pottery, and extensive trade with other
cultures in the Southwest, in Mesoamerica, and along the Pacific
Coast.
It was too good to last. Eventually, a prolonged drought
exhausted natural resources, and perhaps internal strife and
overpopulation led the Cohonina and the ancestral Puebloans to
systematically abandon their homes in the late 1200s. The ancestral
Puebloans moved to more reliable water sources beside the Rio Grande
and the Little Colorado drainages, where their descendants - the
Hopi and the 19 Pueblos of New Mexico - continue many of the
traditions of their ancestors.
Native Newcomers
About 150 years later, a new hunter-gatherer tribe, the
Cerbat, moved into Grand Canyon in the 1300s. Descendants of
these people make up the Hualapai and Havasupai tribes, who occupy
reservations in the western Canyon. At the same time, small bands of
hunter-gatherer Southern Paiutes began venturing to the Grand
Canyon's North Rim. The Southern Paiutes worked closely with the
Mormons, who colonized southern Utah and the Arizona Strip in the
1850s.
The last Native Americans to arrive at the Grand Canyon were the
Navajo, or the Dine, Athabascan people related to the Apache,
who moved here from the northwest around a.d. 1400. The Navajo were
hunter-gatherers who learned agriculture from the Pueblos and later
obtained horses and sheep from Spanish settlers. Their adaptability
allowed them to dominate this region. After centuries of sporadic
intertribal conflict, as well as clashes with new Spanish, Mexican,
and Anglo arrivals, the Navajo are today the largest, strongest
Native American tribe in the United States. Their huge reservation
abuts the eastern section of the Canyon.
The Spanish
In 1540, a Spanish nobleman called Francisco Vásquez de
Coronado led the first expedition of Europeans from Mexico into the
Southwest in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cíbola that were
reputed to contain great riches. While Coronado continued to
modern-day New Mexico, he dispatched Garcia Lopez de Cárdenas and
several men northward. With the help of Hopi guides from the nearby
mesas, Cárdenas became the first European to see the Grand Canyon,
but the single-minded Spaniards left frustrated - unable to cross
the impassable void. Coronado and his men returned to Mexico
empty-handed, where their lack of success on behalf of the Spanish
Crown led to their court-martial. Not until the late 1500s would the
Spanish return - this time as colonists.
By 1776, the Spanish were headquartered in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
and attempting to convert the natives to Christianity and extract
tribute from them for Spain. In that year, two Franciscan friars,
Francisco Atanasia Dominguez and Sylvestre Velez de Escalante, left
Santa Fe in search of an overland route to Monterey, California.
Their punishing journey took them through the Rockies, the Arizona
Strip, and up into Utah, before they gave up and returned to Santa
Fe, crossing the Colorado River in Glen Canyon. They missed seeing
the Grand Canyon, but their trailblazing journey through hostile,
unexplored territory would not be forgotten.
America's Westward Expansion
When the Santa Fe Trail linking Missouri to New Mexico
opened to east-west trade in 1821, intrepid fur trappers, traders,
and fortune hunters traveled through the region en route to
California. In 1848, much of the Southwest was ceded to the United
States following the U.S. war with Mexico, leading the government to
dispatch army surveyors to chart the unknown southwestern territory.
In 1857, a U.S. Army Survey party led by Lieutenant Joseph Ives
explored the Grand Canyon region. In his 1858 report, Ives was
pessimistic: "The region … is of course altogether valueless …. Ours
has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites
to visit this profitless locality." But Ives was soon to be proved
wrong.
John Wesley Powell
In 1869, Major John Wesley Powell, a fearless, one-armed
Civil War veteran, and his nine companions became the first men to
journey 1,000 miles on the Colorado River going through the Grand
Canyon. Equipped with four flimsy wooden boats and meager rations,
Powell and his party braved dangerous rapids, searing heat, sinking
morale, and the loss of three men to complete their remarkable feat.
Powell's notes about the trip, and a second in 1871-1872, provided
invaluable information about one of the last unexplored parts of the
region. Like John Muir, Powell was one of a distinctive 19th-century
breed. A self-taught Renaissance man, he traveled extensively,
advocated wise use of water in the West, and defended Native
American rights. He went on to found the U.S. Geological Survey and
the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology and to negotiate Native
American peace treaties with the government.
The Canyon Booms
In the late 1800s, the U.S. government promoted the West
as a land of abundant resources waiting to be exploited, and the
discovery of zinc, copper, lead, and asbestos in the Grand Canyon in
the 1870s and 1880s led many miners to stake claims there.
Extraction and transportation of ore from the canyon to the rim
proved difficult, though, and some miners abandoned their claims in
order to pursue a more lucrative, less dangerous option: tourism.
One settler who catered to visitors was Captain John Hance.
As a new century dawned and transportation improved, Americans
were changing how they viewed their country. Writers, artists, and
photographers led the aesthetic revolution and, along with
environmentalists, newspaper magnates, and railroad barons, fought
for establishment of protected recreational areas called national
parks. At Grand Canyon, writer/geologist Clarence Dutton and painter
Thomas Moran produced imaginative works that celebrated the glory of
the Canyon; soon, visitors clamored to see for themselves.
Fred Harvey Company
In the early 1900s, the Fred Harvey Company undertook to
provide the finest visitor services of any national park. The
elegant El Tovar Hotel, designed by Charles Whittlesey, opened in
1905. The forerunner of "rustic architecture," its style was later
promoted by architects like Gilbert Stanley Underwood and the
National Park Service as a means of surreptitiously blending
buildings into park environments. In 1902, Fred Harvey Company hired
Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter as company architect. Colter remained
with the company until 1948, during which time she was responsible
for many of the distinctive buildings at the Grand Canyon. Fred
Harvey Company, with its long tradition of fine hospitality and its
famous "Harvey Girls," became the principal concessionaire at the
South Rim in 1920.
National Park Status
President Theodore Roosevelt visited Grand Canyon in 1903
and was much impressed. The 1906 Act for the Preservation of
American Antiquities paved the way for Roosevelt, a devoted
outdoorsman and park supporter, to change Grand Canyon's status from
national forest and game reserve to national monument in 1908.
Congress authorized the expansion and upgrading of the monument to a
national park in 1919. An act doubling the size of the park was
signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1975. Grand Canyon was
named a World Heritage Site in 1979, in recognition of the universal
value of its exceptional natural and cultural features.
