People and the Grand Canyon

Route of the Coronado Expedition

Spanish conquistadors led by the explorer Cardenas were the first party of Europeans to see the Grand Canyon. Detached from the main body of the Coronado Expedition, the Cardenas party reached the South Rim somewhere between Lipan Point and Moran Point in 1540. Although their Hopi guides almost certainly knew of routes to the river, they weren't telling, and the Spanish searched in vain for ten days before giving up. Still, just reaching the Grand Canyon across the dry and dangerous deserts was a major accomplishment less than 50 years after Columbus first reached the New World.

More than two hundred years would pass before the next Spanish party saw the Grand Canyon. Traveling alone, Father Garces approached the canyon from the lower Colorado River in 1776. He befriended the local Indians who clearly gave him good advice, because he was guided to the village of Supai and then made his way along the South Rim in the area of Grandview Point.

Ruins of the cookshack at the Last Chance Mine on Horseshoe Mesa

After the Mexican-American War of 1848, the United States acquired the southwestern portion of North America north of the Gila River and energetically started to explore the hostile deserts of the region. A flood of gold seekers and emigrants sought routes to the California gold fields in 1849, and soon a wagon road was established across the Coconino Plateau south of the Grand Canyon. But the course of the Colorado River, and the Grand Canyon itself, was still a mystery.

Lt. Joseph Ives

In 1857, Army Lieutenant Joseph Ives was sent up the lower Colorado River in a steamboat to find the head of navigation. After wrecking on a rock in Black Canyon below the present site of Hoover Dam, Lieutenant Ives continued overland. He descended Peach Springs Wash to the Colorado River and visited Supai. Members of his party included John Newberry, the first geologist to study the Grand Canyon, and Bavarian artist and cartographer Baron Friedrich von Egloffstein, who produced the first detailed maps of a portion of the Grand Canyon. But the Grand Canyon still didn't even have a name, usually being referred to as the "big canyon." And all of these early visitors regarded the Grand Canyon with horror, as a useless place with a completely inaccessible river.

Powell's River Expeditions

During 1869-71, Major John Wesley Powell, a geologist and one-armed American Civil War veteran, led two expeditions down the Green and Colorado River systems. He also explored the plateaus surrounding the canyon and studied the local Indian tribes. He literally put the canyon on the map, naming it "The Grand Canyon of the Colorado." He published several professional papers on the canyon as well as a popular account of his journeys. His and the accounts of other members of his parties helped to popularize the Grand Canyon.

Stanton's River Expedition

Robert Brewster Stanton led an expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1889-90 to survey it for a river-level railroad. Several accidents, including the loss of the company president by drowning early on the first attempt to run the river (for some reason Stanton did not include life jackets on the trip), and difficulties getting financing, doomed the proposed railroad. But Stanton did have one effect- he wrote a book about his adventures in the Grand Canyon that popularized river running.

Miners

Attracted by the large expanses of rock open to exploration, prospectors and miners began to explore the canyon. In the 1880's, William Wallace Bass came to the Grand Canyon from the east coast for his health, and the dry air worked it's magic. He raised a family at Bass Camp on the South Rim to the west of the present village, built the Bass Trail, the first trail across the canyon, and developed copper mines on both sides of the river. At about the same time, Pete Berry developed the Tanner and Grandview trails in the eastern Grand Canyon. Berry's Last Chance Mine on Horseshoe Mesa was one of the few Grand Canyon mines to show a profit, if only for a short time. John Hance built trails down Red and Hance canyons to reach asbestos deposits on the north side of the river. Fibers from his mines were used in fireproof theater curtains as far away as Europe.

Grand Canyon Railway Station

In 1901, the Santa Fe Railroad completed a spur track from Williams to the present Grand Canyon Village area on the South Rim, replacing the arduous all-day stage trip from Flagstaff with a short, comfortable train ride. Grand Canyon Village quickly developed as the new focal point of Grand Canyon tourism, replacing Bass Camp to the west and Grandview Hotel to the east. To accommodate the increasing flood of visitors, the railroad completed the El Tovar Hotel in 1912.

Original boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park in 1919

Stephen Mather was appointed to head of the newly-formed National Park Service in 1916. Shortly afterward, on February 26, 1919, Congress created Grand Canyon National Park and the new park was turned over to the Park Service. Preservation had firmly been established as the management philosophy for the Grand Canyon.

Kaibab Trail suspension bridge soon after its completion in 1928. Today the bridge is known as the Black Bridge, to distinguish it from the nearby Silver Bridge, which was completed in 1966

The Park Service, frustrated by repeated failures to buy the Bright Angel Trail, finally built its own trail to the east of the village. Construction of both the South and North Kaibab trails required the extensive use of explosives, but when the new trans-canyon trail opened in 1928 it became the focus of tourism below the rim and resulted in the establishment of Phantom Ranch near the mouth of Bright Angel Creek.