GRAND CANYON TIMELINE

4.6 Billion Years--Earth Forms

1.9 Billion Years--Oldest Rocks in Grand Canyon are Formed

5-6 Million Years--Grand Canyon is Formed

2000 BC-- Archaic Indians crafted split-twig animal figures, the earliest evidence of humans at the Grand Canyon.

1540--The first Europeans arrived at the Grand Canyon. Spanish Conquistadors of the Cornando Expedition stumbled upon the Canyon by accident while on their quest for the fabled Lost Cities of Gold.

1869--Major John Wesley Powell makes first expedition through the Grand Canyon.

1871-72--Major John Wesley Powell leads second expedition through the Grand Canyon.

1882--William Henry Harrison first proposes the Grand Canyon as a National Park.

1883--John Hance became the first non-native resident at the Grand Canyon. This marked the beginning of early tourism.

1889-Robert Brewster Stanton and Frank Brown try to find a railroad route from Colorado to California along the Colorado River.  Brown Drowns in Soap Creek Rapid.

1892--Famous paintings by Thomas Moran for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway in 1892 promote tourism.

1893---Grand Canyon was first set aside as a forest reserve in 1893 by now President Benjamin Harrison (Presidential Proclamation #45).

1896-1897--George Flavell makes boat voyage through the Grand Canyon

1896-1897--Nathaniel Galloway makes boat voyage through the Grand Canyon.

1901--Train service began between Williams and the South rim.

1902--The first automobile, a Toledo Eight Horse, made it to the canyon.

1905-- The Santa Fe railway opened the El Tovar Hotel.

1906-- President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed the Grand Canyon Game Preserve.

1908--President Theodore Roosevelt established Grand Canyon National Monument by Presidential Proclamation #794.

1909--Julius Stone organized expedition hiring Nathaniel Galloway as one of his guides.

1911-Emery & Ellsworth Kolb make movie about floating the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. 

1912--Arizona becomes a state.

1919--Administration was under the United States Forest Service until the establishment of Grand Canyon National Park on February 26, 1919. The actual administrative transfer takes place on August 15th.

1923--USGS makes expedition through the Grand Canyon to determine possible Dam Sites.

1932--President Herbert Hoover established another national monument west (downstream) of the park.

1937--Buzz Holmstrom makes 1100 mile solo rafting trip which includes the Grand Canyon.

1954--First motorized pontoon rafts are used.

1956--The Colorado River Storage Project Act authorizes the Glen Canyon Dam upstream of the park. The gates of the dam were closed in 1963, flooding the area upstream of the dam; forming Lake Powell.

1960--Only successful uprun of the Grand Canyon.

1969--On January 20, 1969, just before leaving office, President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed Marble Canyon National Monument. This finally prevents efforts to create further dams that would have flooded the canyon.

1975--The park was enlarged by the Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act, passed on January 3, 1975. Marble Canyon on the west and Grand Canyon National Monument on the east were added bringing protection to the entire area between Glen Canyon to Lake Mead.

"We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft."

-Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you -- beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."

— Edward Abbey

“You cannot see the Grand Canyon in one view, as if it were a changeless spectacle from which a curtain might be lifted, but to see it you have to toil from month to month through its labyrinths.”

--John Wesley Powell

“We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things.”

---John Wesley Powell