Grand Canyon. Arguably the single best‐known American place, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River is about a mile deep, twelve miles wide on average, and winds for 279 miles across the desert plateaus of northern Arizona. The chasm begins fourteen miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam (1966), which forms Lake Powell. The lower forty miles of the Grand Canyon contains the headwaters of Lake Mead, which results from Hoover Dam (1936).
Although long known to and used by American Indians, the Grand Canyon was first viewed by Europeans in 1540, when Francisco Vásquez
de Coronado sent a small detachment of explorers to the South Rim. But the complex region below the rim was still unknown wilderness in 1869 when the one‐armed
Civil War veteran, John Wesley
Powell, led a small group down the Colorado River and through the canyon. Powell's three‐month journey made him a legend of the American imagination. Thomas Moran's paintings of the 1870s and Ferde Grofé’s
Grand Canyon Suite (1931) confirmed the Grand Canyon's status as an icon of sublime, romantic scenery.
A spur line from the Santa Fe Railroad to the South Rim, completed in 1901, opened the era of modern
tourism. Parts of the canyon were designated a national park in 1919, but the act left a loophole for hydropower dams. In 1968, after a bitter political struggle, Congress prohibited the damming of the Grand Canyon. By the 1990s, the Canyon was most threatened by the five million people who visited its rims and the 25,000 who traveled the river every year.
See also
Environmentalism;
National Park System.
Bibliography
Robert Wallace , The Grand Canyon, 1972.
J. Donald Hughes , In the House of Stone and Light: A Human History of the Grand Canyon, 1978.
Roderick Frazier Nash
