How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History Book

Arizona-based environmental historian Stephen J. Pyne has fought fires on the Grand Canyon's north and south rims, traveled on foot and muleback into its depths, floated its length down the Colorado River, explored its hidden recesses--and spent years looking into its history, especially into what he deems the "intellectual miracle" of the canyon's transformation into a celebrated symbol of the American wild lands. American explorers, who first came to the canyon's walls after the U.S. took the Southwest as the spoils of victory over Mexico, were inclined to describe it in harsh terms. As Lt. Joseph Ives remarked in a report to Congress in 1858, "The region is, of course, altogether valueless...." But 11 years later, when John Wesley Powell surveyed the length of the Colorado River, he brought to the canyon a poetic, even romantic sensibility. Through Powell and his companions, especially the geologist Clarence Dutton, the harsh landscape of the Grand Canyon would come to be regarded as "the coliseums, temples, and statuary of an inspired nature." "The Canyon claims standing," Pyne remarks, "not because of its size or antiquity but ... by virtue of its ever-evolving ensemble and the ideas continually made available by which to interpret it." Those ideas--from men and women like Theodore Roosevelt, Wallace Stegner, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, and Ann Zwinger--would come to influence the national discussion on all public lands. As such, Pyne suggests, the Grand Canyon became a laboratory for the environmental movement as a whole, influential far beyond the borders of the arid Southwest--in short, as Pyne calls it, "a planetary monument." --Gregory McNamee Read More