Latest / Wildlands Podcast — National Parks, Public Lands & Survival / #013 - Grand Canyon, Part 1: The History | Deep Time, Eleven Tribes & the Fight to Protect It

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#013 - Grand Canyon, Part 1: The History | Deep Time, Eleven Tribes & the Fight to Protect It · Wildlands Podcast — National Parks, Public Lands & Survival

0:11
Stand on the south rim and look down, and the
0:15
first thing that happens is your brain simply
0:18
refuses the scale of it, a mile down, 18 miles
0:22
across at the widest point, 277 miles long. Your
0:30
eyes tell you there is a canyon in front of you.
0:32
What they cannot really tell you, what nothing
0:35
can quite tell you, until you have spent time
0:37
with it, is that you are looking at very close
0:40
to two billion years of the Earth's history,
0:43
stacked in visible layers, one on top of the
0:46
last. Almost half the age of the planet itself,
0:50
exposed in cross -section, like someone sliced
0:53
the world open just to show you how it was built.
0:57
I have stood. at that rim more than once, and
1:00
it does something to your sense of time that
1:02
very little else does. Most places show you their
1:06
present. The Grand Canyon shows you its entire
1:09
past, all at once, color -coded by era. Try this.
1:13
Imagine the whole history of the earth compressed
1:15
into a single calendar year, January 1st to December
1:19
31st. On that scale, the oldest rock at the bottom
1:23
of this canyon, the Vishnu Schist, would form
1:26
sometime in early June. The great unconformity,
1:29
that missing billion years we will get to, would
1:32
represent losing most of the summer. The canyon
1:34
itself, the actual carving by the river, would
1:37
not begin until the final hour of December 31st.
1:40
And every human being who has ever lived, every
1:43
civilization, every war, every national park,
1:46
all of it happens in the last few seconds before
1:49
midnight. That is the timescale you are looking
1:52
at when you look into this canyon. This is Wildlands.
1:58
I'm Sean. Know the land before you reach it.
2:01
Grand Canyon Part 1. The History. This is a park
2:05
with almost too much story for one episode geology,
2:08
on a scale that breaks normal comprehension.
2:11
Eleven tribes with living, unbroken connections
2:14
to this canyon, one of the great expeditions
2:18
in American exploration, and a fight over who
2:21
gets to own a piece of God's country that ran
2:23
for three decades. and involved a United States
2:26
Senator refusing a direct order from the Supreme
2:28
Court. And I want to say up front, understanding
2:32
this history is not just trivia for the drive
2:35
out. When you are standing at the rim or hiking
2:38
below it, knowing what you are actually looking
2:40
at changes the experience completely. A layer
2:43
of rock stops being just a pretty color and becomes
2:46
a fossilized desert with reptile tracks in it.
2:49
A rest stop on the Bright Angel Trail stops being
2:53
a random bench in the shade. and becomes a place
2:55
with a name and a family and a history let's
2:58
get into all of it start with the rock because
3:03
the rock is the reason everyone comes the oldest
3:06
stone at the bottom of the canyon the vishnu
3:09
schist exposed in the inner gorge where the colorado
3:13
river runs today is about 1 billion 800 million
3:18
years old to put that in perspective the earth
3:23
itself is roughly 4 .5 billion years old. So
3:27
the rock at the bottom of this canyon formed
3:29
when the planet was already less than half its
3:31
current age, and life on Earth was still confined
3:34
almost entirely to single -celled organisms in
3:37
shallow seas. This rock was ancient before anything
3:40
resembling a plant or an animal existed. It formed
3:45
deep in the crust, under intense heat and pressure,
3:48
as part of mountain -building events so old that
3:51
the mountains they built have long since eroded
3:53
to nothing. Picture a mountain range, on the
3:56
scale of the modern Himalayas, thrust up by colliding
3:59
continents, and then imagine that entire range
4:02
eroding down to nothing over hundreds of millions
4:06
of years, grain by grain, washed away, until
4:10
only the deep roots remain, the parts that were
4:13
once miles beneath the mountain's surface. That
4:16
is what the Vishnu Schist actually is. Not the
4:20
mountain, the buried skeleton of a mountain that
4:22
no longer exists, exposed only because a river
4:25
spent millions of years cutting down far enough
4:28
to reach it. What is left is just the roots,
4:30
the deep, metamorphosed core of mountains that
4:33
vanished before dinosaurs were a concept. Above
4:36
the Vishnu Schist sits something geologists call
4:39
the Grand Canyon Supergroup, a set of tilted
4:42
sedimentary layers running from about 1 ,200
4:46
,000 ,000 years old down to roughly 740 million
4:51
years old. These rocks tell the story of ancient
4:54
coastlines, shallow seas, and the layered muck
4:57
of tidal flats laid down over hundreds of millions
5:00
of years and then tilted by later mountain building.
5:03
And then this is one of the strangest features.
5:06
In all of geology, there is a gap. Geologists
5:09
call it the Great Unconformity. Directly above
5:13
those ancient tilted layers, the rock record
5:15
simply skips forward more than a billion years,
5:18
a billion years of Earth's history missing, eroded
5:21
away completely, leaving no trace, before the
5:25
next layer was deposited on top of it. Nobody
5:28
fully agrees on what happened during that missing
5:30
billion years. Though there are theories involving
5:33
global glaciation and continental collision,
5:37
the idea that the entire planet may have frozen
5:40
over, scouring the surface down to bare rock
5:43
before life had really gotten started on land
5:46
at all, what everyone agrees on is that an almost
5:49
unimaginable amount of time simply is not there.
5:53
You can walk to certain points in the canyon,
5:56
put your hand flat against the rock face, and
5:59
touch that exact boundary. One side of your palm
6:02
is resting on stone from a billion years before
6:05
the stone your other side is touching. There
6:07
is no rock in between, no transition, just a
6:11
line and then a different world entirely. Geologists
6:14
have been arguing about that missing billion
6:16
years since the 19th century, and the argument
6:19
is nowhere near settled. The layers above the
6:23
Great Unconformity are the ones that make the
6:25
canyon famous for color. The reds, oranges, creams,
6:29
and grays stacked up toward the rim. These are
6:33
the Paleozoic rocks, laid down between about
6:36
525 million and 270 million years ago, when this
6:41
part of North America sat near the equator and
6:43
was alternately covered by shallow tropical seas,
6:46
coastal swamps, and desert dune fields, over
6:50
and over as sea levels rose and fell across tens
6:53
of millions of years. The Redwall Limestone,
6:57
Supai Group, Hermit Shale, Coconino Sandstone,
7:01
and Kaibab Limestone at the very top. Each one
7:05
is a different chapter of that story, and a trained
7:07
eye can read the ancient environment straight
7:10
off the color and texture of the rock. The Redwall
7:13
Limestone, that band of deep red -orange color
7:15
you see partway down most viewpoints, is actually
7:18
gray limestone underneath. The red color is a
7:22
stain. Iron oxide washed down from the layers
7:25
above over millions of years, coating the surface
7:28
like a dye job on rock that has nothing to do
7:30
with its original composition. It is one of the
7:33
more visually dominant layers in the whole canyon,
7:36
and it is, in a sense, wearing someone else's
7:39
color. The supine group beneath it represents
7:41
alternating river deltas and coastal plains.
7:45
Deposited as sea level rose and fell repeatedly
7:48
over tens of millions of years, you can see the
7:51
rhythm of that rise and fall preserved in alternating
7:53
bands of sandstone and shale, a tide chart written
7:57
in stone. And the hermit shale, softer and more
8:00
easily eroded than the layers around it, is why
8:03
so many of the canyon's dramatic overhangs and
8:05
step terraces exist at all the shale erodes back
8:09
into slopes, while the harder layers above and
8:12
below it hold their shape as cliffs. The Coconino
8:16
Sandstone, for instance, is fossilized desert
8:19
dunes, cross -bedded in exactly the pattern wind
8:22
makes in dry sand, with the tracks of ancient
8:25
reptiles still preserved crossing the dune faces.
8:29
It is one of my favorite details in the whole
8:31
canyon footprints from close to 270 million years
8:34
ago, walking across what was once loose sand
8:37
and is now solid rock a mile above the river.
8:41
Small Reptiles walking uphill across dune faces
8:45
in a desert that existed roughly 70 million years
8:48
before the first dinosaurs. Whatever animal left
8:51
those tracks had no way of knowing that a footstep
8:54
taken on a random afternoon in an ancient desert
8:57
would still be visible a quarter of a billion
8:59
years later to a completely different species
9:02
on a completely different continental configuration
9:05
in a canyon that did not yet exist and would
9:08
not exist for hundreds of millions of years after
9:11
that footprint was made. There is something almost
9:14
unbearably strange about that when you actually
9:17
sit with it. So that explains the rock. Now,
9:21
how do you get from a stack of ancient sediment
9:24
to an actual canyon? That is where the Colorado
9:28
Plateau and the Colorado River come in. Between
9:31
roughly 70 and 30 million years ago, tectonic
9:35
forces pushed a massive block of the Earth's
9:37
crust upward, creating the Colorado Plateau a
9:40
huge relatively flat region lifted between 5
9:44
,000 and 13 ,000 feet above sea level. The flatness
9:48
matters. Because the uplift was even rather than
9:52
jagged, a river crossing that plateau would not
9:54
be forced around obstacles it would cut straight
9:57
down, following gravity in the most direct line
10:00
available. That is exactly what the Colorado
10:03
River did. Most geologists place the beginning
10:06
of serious canyon cuttings somewhere around 5
10:09
to 6 million years ago. Though newer research
10:12
using radiometric dating techniques on mineral
10:16
grains, tracking how radioactive uranium and
10:19
thorium atoms decay into helium as rock cools
10:22
and rises toward the surface, has suggested the
10:26
process may have started considerably earlier,
10:29
and the exact timeline is genuinely still debated
10:32
among geologists. This is not a settled textbook
10:34
fact. Researchers are still publishing competing
10:37
papers on exactly when and how fast this canyon
10:40
was cut, which is a useful reminder that even
10:43
something as seemingly permanent and finished
10:45
as the Grand Canyon is still an active area of
10:48
scientific argument. Regardless of the precise
10:51
start date, the mechanism is well understood.
10:55
A river, carrying sand and gravel that act like
10:58
liquid sandpaper, grinding downward through layer
11:01
after layer of rock, for millions of years, while
11:05
the plateau continued slowly rising beneath it.
11:09
The river did not carve around the rock. It carved
11:12
straight through nearly 2 billion years of it,
11:14
and it is still doing that work today, every
11:16
time it floods. Now the people, because humans
11:20
have been present in this canyon country for
11:22
an extraordinarily long time, and the canyon
11:25
is not just something people have visited. For
11:27
11 tribes today, it is not history. It is ongoing,
11:31
living, present tense relationship. Evidence
11:35
of human presence in the Grand Canyon region
11:38
stretches back at least 12 ,000 years. Split
11:41
twig figurines, small animal effigies woven from
11:44
willow branches, tucked into caves deep within
11:47
the canyon have been found dating back roughly
11:49
4 ,000 years, left by people whose purpose for
11:53
them we can only partially reconstruct, likely
11:56
ritual objects tied to hunting success. Ancestral
12:01
Puebloan peoples built structures throughout
12:03
the canyon between roughly 1 ,500 and 800 years
12:07
ago, granaries, dwellings, and ceremonial spaces
12:12
tucked into alcoves and perched on ledges, some
12:15
of which are still visible today along popular
12:17
trails, including a well -preserved granary visible
12:21
from the South Kaibab Trail that thousands of
12:24
hikers walk past every year. The Hopi and other
12:27
Pueblo peoples trace direct ancestry to these
12:29
builders. and Hopi oral tradition includes detailed
12:32
knowledge of specific migration routes and settlement
12:35
sites throughout the canyon that predates and,
12:38
in many cases, has since been confirmed by archaeological
12:41
survey. The relationship between oral tradition
12:45
and the archaeological record here is one of
12:48
the more interesting ongoing collaborations in
12:51
American archaeology tribal knowledge, held for
12:54
a thousand years, guiding where scientists look
12:57
and how they interpret what they find. Eleven
13:01
tribes today maintain formal, federally recognized
13:04
connections to the Grand Canyon. The Havasupai,
13:08
the Hualapai, the Hopi, the Navajo Nation, the
13:12
Yavapai Apache Nation, the Pueblo of Zuni, and
13:16
the Southern Paiute peoples including the Kaibab,
13:19
Las Vegas, and Moapa bands, the Paiute Indian
13:22
Tribe of Utah, and the San Juan Southern Paiute
13:25
Tribe. That is not a historical footnote. Those
13:29
are living nations with living relationships
13:31
to this specific canyon consulted by law on how
13:34
the park is managed today. The Havasupai, the
13:37
name means people of the blue -green water, have
13:39
perhaps the most intimate relationship of all
13:42
with this landscape. Before European -American
13:45
settlement, they moved seasonally across roughly
13:48
1 .6 million acres of the Colorado Plateau and
13:52
the canyon itself. Farming the fertile side canyon
13:55
around Havasu Creek, in the warmer months and
13:58
moving up to the plateau rim in winter to hunt.
14:02
They have lived in and around this canyon for
14:04
more than 800 years, and they still do the village
14:08
of Supai, deep in a side canyon accessible only
14:12
by an eight -mile trail, mule, or helicopter,
14:15
remains home to the tribe today, and the famous
14:18
blue -green waterfalls that draw hikers from
14:21
around the world sit on their land. I want to
14:26
tell you one specific story, because it captures
14:28
something important about how this park's history
14:31
actually gets written and rewritten. Partway
14:35
down the Bright Angel Trail, there is a spot
14:38
with reliable shade and running water, a genuine
14:41
relief on a brutal, exposed hike. The Havasupai
14:45
called it Ha -A -Gyo. Havasupai families lived
14:49
and farmed there for generations, including a
14:52
farmer named Captain Burrow. who the National
14:54
Park Service forcibly removed from the site in
14:57
1928. After removing him, the Park Service renamed
15:02
the site Indian Garden, a generic, almost dismissive
15:05
label, erasing the specific people who had actually
15:08
gardened there. That name stuck for nearly a
15:11
century. Then, in 2022, the Havasupai tribe formally
15:15
petitioned the U .S. Board of Geographic Names
15:18
to correct it. The board approved the change
15:20
unanimously. In 2023, Descendants of Captain
15:24
Burrow himself attended a ceremony to bless the
15:27
newly renamed site, Havasupai Gardens. A hundred
15:32
thousand hikers a year now pass through a rest
15:35
stop that finally carries the name of the people
15:37
who built it, rather than the name the government
15:39
gave it after forcing them out. Ah, that is not
15:43
ancient history. That happened within the last
15:46
few years, and it is still happening. This park's
15:48
relationship with its indigenous history is actively
15:51
being corrected in real time. I think about that
15:54
every time I walk through there now. It is easy
15:58
to treat a trail sign as neutral, as just information.
16:02
It rarely is. Every name on every map in this
16:06
canyon was a choice made by somebody at some
16:10
point. And some of those choices are only now
16:13
getting fixed. The Hopi hold an even deeper cosmological
16:18
stake in this canyon. In Hopi tradition, The
16:21
Grand Canyon contains the Sipapuni, the place
16:24
of emergence, where their ancestors first entered
16:27
this world from the previous one, and the portal
16:30
through which spirits return after death. For
16:34
the Hopi, the canyon is not a scenic backdrop.
16:36
It is the origin point and the destination, the
16:39
beginning and the end, in the most literal cosmological
16:42
sense their tradition holds. When you stand at
16:45
the rim as a visitor, you are standing at the
16:47
edge of what is, for eleven distinct nations.
16:50
sacred ground with an unbroken living claim stretching
16:53
back thousands of years. And that relationship
16:58
is not purely historical or symbolic. Federal
17:01
law requires the National Park Service to formally
17:04
consult with all 11 affiliated tribes on management
17:08
decisions that affect the canyon trail changes,
17:10
development proposals, resource management, interpretive
17:14
signage. Tribal members work inside the park
17:17
as rangers, cultural interpreters, and consultants.
17:21
The Hualapai run their own tourism operation
17:23
on their reservation at the western end of the
17:26
canyon, including the glass skywalk platform
17:29
that extends 70 feet out over the rim. This is
17:33
an active, ongoing, occasionally contentious
17:36
partnership between the federal government and
17:39
11 sovereign nations, not a relationship frozen
17:42
in a museum display. When you see interpretive
17:45
signs at the park today describing tribal history
17:47
and perspective, in many cases the tribes themselves
17:50
wrote or approved that language. That is a meaningfully
17:54
different arrangement than existed for most of
17:56
this park's first century. The first Europeans
18:00
to see the canyon were Spanish. In September
18:03
of 1540, a detachment from Francisco Vázquez
18:07
de Coronado's expedition, led by García López
18:11
de Cárdenas, and guided by Hopi scouts, reached
18:14
the south rim, searching for a river route to
18:17
resupply the main expedition. They stood at the
18:20
edge, looked down, and according to the accounts,
18:23
concluded the canyon was essentially impassable
18:26
and of no practical use. They left, and for the
18:31
better part of the next 300 years, almost nobody
18:34
of European descent came back. The canyon simply
18:37
was not seen as useful. Too remote, too rugged,
18:41
too dry. offering nothing that fit into the economic
18:44
frameworks of the time. That changed with John
18:49
Wesley Powell, and Powell's story deserves real
18:51
attention because it is one of the great expeditions
18:54
in the history of American exploration. Powell
18:57
was born in 1834, the son of English immigrant
19:00
farmers who moved constantly through Ohio, Wisconsin,
19:04
and Illinois during his childhood. He lost his
19:07
right arm at the Battle of Shiloh during the
19:09
Civil War, serving as a Union artillery officer,
19:12
and he did not let that stop him from anything.
19:14
By 1869, Powell was a self -taught geologist
19:18
with a fierce curiosity about the unmapped canyon
19:21
country of the American West, and he organized
19:24
an expedition that, by any measure, was audacious
19:27
to the point of reckless. Ten men. Four wooden
19:33
boats. Built for the trip, but not really tested
19:35
for what they were about to attempt. No reliable
19:38
maps of the canyon country they were entering
19:40
in 1869. Huge stretches of the Green and Colorado
19:44
Rivers were, to American cartography, simply
19:48
blank space. They launched from Green River,
19:52
Wyoming in May of 1869 and spent the following
19:56
months descending through canyon country that
19:59
had never been mapped or run by boat before.
20:03
The rapids were violent and unpredictable. And
20:06
remember, this was before anyone had run these
20:09
specific stretches of water, so every rapid was
20:12
an unknown quantity, approached blind. Boats
20:15
capsized. Supplies were lost, including a significant
20:19
portion of their food, forcing the party onto
20:21
short rations for the final weeks of the trip.
20:24
At several points, the party had to portage around
20:27
water too dangerous to run. hauling loaded wooden
20:30
boats up and over canyon walls by rope in summer
20:33
heat with dwindling food having no real idea
20:36
how much farther the canyon extended or what
20:39
waited around the next bend powell himself with
20:42
one arm had to be lowered and hauled up canyon
20:44
walls using ropes and the remaining strength
20:47
of his men this was not an adventure in the modern
20:51
recreational sense it was a genuine open -ended
20:54
gamble with their lives, with no rescue possible
20:57
and no way to communicate with the outside world,
20:59
even if something went wrong. On August 17th,
21:02
they reached what is now called Separation Rapid,
21:06
deep in the Grand Canyon, and three of the men,
21:09
worn down, terrified of what lay ahead, and convinced
21:12
the expedition would end in death, chose to climb
21:15
out of the canyon rather than continue. Powell
21:19
and the remaining six pressed on through the
21:21
rapid. The three men who left were never seen
21:24
alive again, very likely killed, according to
21:27
later accounts, in a confrontation with a group
21:29
of southern Paiute shortly after leaving the
21:32
canyon, in circumstances that remain disputed
21:35
and were shaped considerably by later self -serving
21:37
retellings. Powell's group, meanwhile, made it
21:41
through. Two days later, the remaining boats
21:43
emerged from the canyon's western end, and the
21:46
expedition that nobody was certain would survive
21:48
had, in fact, succeeded. Powell returned to the
21:52
canyon on a second, better -funded and better
21:55
-documented expedition in 1871, this time producing
21:59
the maps, photographs, and detailed scientific
22:03
observations that introduced the Grand Canyon
22:06
to the American public and to the scientific
22:09
community. His writing on the canyon's geology
22:12
helped establish foundational ideas about deep
22:15
time and the erosional power of rivers that are
22:17
still taught today. Powell went on to direct
22:20
the U .S. Geological Survey and became one of
22:23
the most important and most prescient voices
22:26
arguing for water -conscious settlement of the
22:29
arid West. He argued, decades ahead of his time,
22:32
that the standard homestead allotments being
22:34
handed out across the West assumed a rainfall
22:37
pattern that simply did not exist west of the
22:40
100th meridian, and that settlement based on
22:43
eastern farming assumptions would eventually
22:45
run into hard limits on water. He was largely
22:48
ignored. Politicians and land speculators wanted
22:52
the West settled quickly, not carefully, and
22:55
Powell's warnings about water scarcity were seen
22:57
as an obstacle to growth rather than useful information.
23:01
The consequences of ignoring him are still being
23:04
litigated today in the form of water rights disputes
23:07
across the entire Colorado River Basin that show
23:10
no sign of resolution. But it was the 1869 expedition
23:16
Ten men, four boats, no real idea what they were
23:19
getting into that put the Grand Canyon on the
23:21
map of American consciousness for the first time.
23:25
For the next several decades after Powell, the
23:28
Grand Canyon existed in a strange legal limbo
23:31
recognized as spectacular, but with no formal
23:34
protection, which meant it was open to exactly
23:37
the kind of development its scale should have
23:40
made unthinkable. Under the mining law of 1872,
23:44
Anyone could stake a claim on public land by
23:47
asserting they had found a valuable mineral deposit.
23:50
At the Grand Canyon, this law became a loophole
23:53
almost immediately obvious to anyone paying attention.
23:56
You did not actually need to find valuable minerals.
23:59
You needed to file the right paperwork asserting
24:02
that you had, and you could then control prime
24:05
real estate trailheads, viewpoints, water sources
24:08
indefinitely, while running an entirely different
24:11
and far more profitable Business on top of it.
24:15
Tourism. A number of prospectors figured this
24:19
out. Pete Berry built hotels at Grandview Point
24:22
under cover of a copper claim. Bill Bass ran
24:25
a lodge at his bass camp. Dan Hogan operated
24:27
out of the orphan mine. But the man who took
24:30
this strategy further than anyone, and who became
24:33
the central antagonist of the entire fight to
24:35
create Grand Canyon National Park, was Ralph
24:38
Henry Cameron. Cameron filed mining claims covering
24:42
the head of the Bright Angel Trail at the time,
24:44
the single best route down into the canyon from
24:47
the south rim, and used them to build a hotel,
24:50
a stable, and other structures at the trailhead.
24:53
He then charged tourists a toll simply to use
24:56
the trail. He controlled the water sources tourists
25:00
needed. He ran, in effect, a private toll booth.
25:03
on the most scenic canyon in America, built entirely
25:07
on paperwork claiming there were valuable minerals
25:10
underneath a trailhead where none were ever seriously
25:13
extracted. Cameron was also, it is worth saying,
25:18
a genuinely skilled political operator. He served
25:22
as Coconino County Sheriff, County Supervisor,
25:25
and remarkably, given everything else in this
25:27
story, was elected a United States Senator from
25:30
Arizona in the 1920s. all while this fight over
25:34
the canyon was ongoing. President Theodore Roosevelt
25:38
visited the canyon in 1903 and delivered a line
25:42
that gets quoted at nearly every overlook to
25:44
this day. Leave it as it is, he said. You cannot
25:48
improve on it. The ages have been at work on
25:51
it, and man can only mar it. Roosevelt meant
25:55
it. In 1906, he designated the area a game preserve,
25:59
largely aimed at protecting deer, though this
26:02
did little to slow private land acquisition.
26:04
Then, on January 11, 1908, Roosevelt used the
26:09
Antiquities Act of 1906 to designate more than
26:13
800 ,000 acres as Grand Canyon National Monument.
26:17
It was, at the time, an enormous exercise of
26:22
presidential authority. and it set off exactly
26:25
the fight you would expect. Cameron's lawyers
26:28
sued, arguing that a monument that large exceeded
26:31
what the Antiquities Act actually allowed, the
26:34
law -specified monuments should be confined to
26:36
the smallest area compatible with proper care
26:39
of the resource, and 800 ,000 acres did not sound
26:42
small to Cameron's legal team. The case reached
26:45
the Supreme Court. In 1920, the court ruled against
26:49
Cameron. Upholding the president's authority
26:52
to designate monuments at whatever scale the
26:55
resource genuinely required a decision that became
26:58
a foundational precedent for the entire American
27:01
system of large -scale land. Conservation, cited
27:05
in monument disputes for the centuries since.
27:08
A fight over one trailhead at the Grand Canyon
27:11
in 1908 is still quietly shaping arguments about
27:16
who controls public land in the American West
27:18
today. But winning in court and actually removing
27:22
Cameron were two very different things. Even
27:26
after the Supreme Court ruled against him, Cameron
27:28
refused to abandon his buildings or vacate the
27:31
trailhead. He used his political power, including,
27:34
eventually, his seat in the United States Senate
27:37
to block funding and stall enforcement for years.
27:40
Park Rangers, convinced that Cameron's brother
27:42
-in -law, who happened to be the local postmaster,
27:45
was reading their mail, took to sending sensitive
27:48
correspondence in code. When Cameron later proposed
27:52
building two hydroelectric dams and a platinum
27:55
mine inside the park boundaries, Stephen Mather,
27:58
the first director of the National Park Service,
28:00
decided enough was enough and mounted an all
28:03
-out campaign against him. Mather used every
28:06
tool available, political pressure in Washington,
28:09
public relations campaigns, painting Cameron
28:12
as exactly the kind of profiteer the parks were
28:14
meant to be protected from, and slow, grinding
28:17
bureaucratic attrition. A newspaper profile at
28:20
the time described Cameron sympathetically as
28:23
a self -reliant Westerner fighting single -handed
28:26
against corporate and government power, which
28:28
tells you that even at the time, this fight was
28:31
genuinely contested in public opinion, not a
28:34
simple story of a villain and a hero. It is a
28:37
genuinely remarkable story, one of the most spectacular
28:41
landscapes on the planet, and for the better
28:44
part of three decades, Its fate hinged on a very
28:48
personal, very petty, very American fight between
28:52
a national park director and a single stubborn
28:55
senator who happened to control the best trailhead
28:57
in the canyon on the strength of a mining claim
29:00
that never produced an ounce of mineral. By 1919,
29:05
the Grand Canyon was drawing crowds nearly the
29:08
size of Yellowstones and Yosemites, and it was
29:11
still, on paper, just a national monument managed
29:14
by the Forest Service. With grazing and mining
29:17
claims still technically permitted throughout,
29:20
Mather pushed hard for full national park status,
29:23
which required an actual act of Congress, a higher
29:27
bar than a presidential proclamation. But one
29:29
that came with permanent protection, a monument
29:32
designation, could not fully guarantee. On February
29:35
26, 1919, Congress passed the Grand Canyon National
29:40
Park Act, and President Woodrow Wilson signed
29:44
it into law. The Grand Canyon officially became
29:47
the 15th national park in the United States system.
29:52
Cameron's specific mining claims were not fully
29:54
resolved for years afterward. Some of his structures
29:57
stood for a long time after the ruling against
29:59
him. a testament to how much friction there still
30:02
is between declaring a place protected on paper
30:05
and actually making that protection real on the
30:07
ground. It is worth remembering that the fight
30:10
over who controls this canyon did not end cleanly
30:14
in 1919 with a single signature. It ground on,
30:19
in courtrooms and in the actual physical landscape,
30:22
for years afterward. Protection, it turns out,
30:25
is rarely a single moment. It is usually a long,
30:29
unglamorous process of actually enforcing the
30:32
moment after it happens. Step back and look at
30:36
the full shape of it. Close to 2 billion years
30:39
of rock, deposited as ancient seas and deserts
30:43
and mountain ranges that no longer exist, tilted,
30:46
buried, and then cut straight through by a river
30:48
that has been working at it for something like
30:50
5 or 6 million years, a river still cutting today,
30:53
every time it floods. And that cutting has not
30:56
stopped just because we built a dam upstream
30:58
at Glen Canyon in the 20th century. The dam changed
31:01
the river's sediment load and flow patterns dramatically.
31:04
And scientists still study exactly how that has
31:07
altered the canyon's ongoing evolution. Even
31:10
our modern engineering has become another layer
31:12
in this story. Another force acting on a landscape
31:15
that has been shaped by force after force for
31:18
2 billion years. 12 ,000 years of continuous
31:22
human presence. with 11 tribes today holding
31:25
an unbroken, living, legally recognized relationship
31:28
to this specific canyon, a relationship this
31:32
park's own naming conventions are still actively
31:35
in the process of getting right. A Spanish expedition
31:40
that looked down, decided the canyon was worthless,
31:43
and left for three centuries, which is its own
31:45
remarkable footnote. since it means the single
31:48
largest tourist attraction in the American Southwest
31:50
today was, for the majority of recorded European
31:53
contact with this continent, dismissed as an
31:56
obstacle rather than a destination. A one -armed
31:59
Civil War veteran who ran it by wooden boat with
32:02
no map and lost three men doing it. And then
32:05
a three -decade fight between a president who
32:07
called it unimprovable, a park service director
32:10
who wanted it protected properly, and a senator
32:13
who ran a private toll booth on the best trail
32:15
into it. and fought the Supreme Court itself
32:18
to keep it. Every layer of that story is still
32:21
visible if you know where to look in the rock
32:23
beneath your boots, in the names on the map,
32:26
and in the fact that 11 nations still call this
32:28
canyon home in every sense that matters. The
32:32
Vishnu schist at the bottom does not know or
32:36
care about any of the human drama that happened
32:39
on top of it in the last few centuries. It was
32:42
ancient before the concept of a nation, a mining
32:46
claim, a national park, or a supreme court existed.
32:49
And yet the human story is real too, and it shapes
32:52
how you actually experience the place today,
32:55
which trail you are allowed to hike, whose land
32:57
you are standing on when you take a photograph,
32:59
whose ancestors are buried in ground you are
33:02
walking across without necessarily knowing it.
33:06
Deep time and human time exist in the same canyon,
33:09
at the same moment, and neither one cancels out
33:12
the other. That tension between the almost incomprehensibly
33:16
ancient and the very recent, very human, very
33:19
political, is, more than anything else, what
33:23
makes the Grand Canyon the Grand Canyon. Next
33:26
episode, part two, The Visit. The real difference
33:29
between the South Rim and the North Rim, why
33:32
hiking down into the canyon is a fundamentally
33:34
different and far more dangerous proposition
33:37
than hiking up out of it. and the current water
33:40
and heat realities that every single visitor
33:43
needs to understand before they take a single
33:45
step below the rim. Everything for the Grand
33:48
Canyon Series geology trail guides, tribal cultural
33:51
information, current conditions, is at wildlandsnews
33:55
.com. I'm Sean Spanauer. This has been Wildlands.
34:01
Know the land before you reach it. See you Thursday.