Grand Canyon National Park History

From the first paleo-hunters to the 5 million modern-day sightseers that visit Grand Canyon National Park each year, the Grand Canyon has enjoyed a colorful history.

HOME TO NATIVE AMERICANS/AMERICAN INDIANS

• Over 10,000 years ago, the first paleo-hunters passed through the dramatic plateaus of northern Arizona and left their mark on what we now know as the Grand Canyon. Later, members of the Desert-Archaic culture, itinerant hunter-gatherers, used the floor and the surrounding region as their primary hunting ground until 1000 B.C.
• In fact, it was not for another 1,500 years that a people called the Grand Canyon "home." These "Basket weavers," the Anasazi, built more than 2,000 home sites in 500 A.D., developing extensive irrigation farming, ceremonial "kiva" shelters, beautiful black-on-white pottery, and making use of an extensive inter-tribal trading system all over the Southwest and into the Baja peninsula.
• These ancestral Pueblans abandoned the canyon around 1200 A.D. for unknown reasons, perhaps after an extreme drought. In the 1300s, both the hunter-gatherer Cerbat tribe (ancestral forebears to the modern-day Hualapi and Havasupai people) and the Southern Paiutes settled in the region.
•  The Paiutes, who settled on the North Rim, were the first to give the plateau a designated name, and the rock formation became known as "Kaibab," or "Mountain Lying Down."
• One thousand years later, the Navajo arrived, and over time controlled much of the region's resources, and even today occupy a reservation adjacent to the eastern portion of the Grand Canyon National Park.

EXPLORERS AND DISCOVERERS

• Garcia Lopez de Cárdenas, accompanying Spanish explorer Francisco Vasquez de Coronado on a quest for the Seven Cities of Cibola, became the first European to view the Kaibab in 1540. The Spanish settled in the Southwest some time later, but finding no gold in the Grand Canyon, left the area alone.
• Three hundred years later, a U.S. Army expedition was equally disappointed, describing the majestic landmark "altogether valueless."
• John Wesley Powell, the first to coin the phrase "Grand Canyon," disagreed. The one-armed future founder of the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology led two trips into the canyon in the late 1860s and early 70s, sparking initial interest, albeit a subdued one, in the American Southwest.
• Eventually, with the dawn of a new century and a flourishing artistic revolution of travel artists, writers, and photographers, the American tourism bug was born. The Grand Canyon earned National Park status in 1908, and became a World Heritage Site in 1979.
• Today, millions of people visit each year to discover that same wonderment first experienced by the ancient settlers and John Wesley Powell.