How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History

by Stephen J. Pyne

Dismissed by the first Spanish explorers as a wasteland, the Grand Canyon lay virtually unnoticed for three centuries until nineteenth- century America rediscovered it and seized it as a national emblem. This extraordinary work of intellectual and environmental history tells two tales of the the discovery and exploration of the physical Canyon and the invention and evolution of the cultural Canyon--how we learned to endow it with mythic significance.Acclaimed historian Stephen Pyne examines the major shifts in Western attitudes toward nature, and recounts the achievements of explorers, geologists, artists, and writers, from John Wesley Powell to Wallace Stegner , and how they transformed the Canyon into a fixture of national identity. This groundbreaking book takes us on a completely original journey through the Canyon toward a new understanding of its niche in the American psyche, a journey that mirrors the making of the nation itself.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Natural History, Geography, Nature

199 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I saw the Grand Canyon for the first time last summer. I thought, "Wow, it looks just like the pictures." Then "it fills me with awe just like everyone says, just like I've seen people react in movies." Then I spent minutes trying to take it in and being genuinely moved. I assumed that my reaction was typical, universal. It is now, but as Stephen Pyne explains, it was not always so.

When the Spanish first saw it in the 1500s, they peered over the rim, saw nothing of value, and left. Other Europeans, new Americans, and Mormons did the same. Then after the Civil War, Pyne tells us, John Wesley Powell and his contemporaries began to see it differently. He credits Clarence Dutton with distilling the view we all now have, making the canyon grand. Standing on the rim that afternoon in June, I would have sworn my response was natural, innate, the only possible way a human could feel. What a mind-blowing thought that no, the feeling in my gut was shaped by culture and history.

[Karin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended Soundtrack (learned about this piece in the book and I love the first movment): The Grand Canyon Suite by conducted by Arturo Toscanini with photos and paintings (and an ad showed up after the first movement before the second) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xc6oY... is the entire suite

conducted by Leonard Bernstein and the NY Philharmonic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19-Av... has just the first movement (I think I prefer the Toscanini, but am not sure) and no changing photos, etc.,

This book is erudite and well written, with some lovely language--for the first chapter I was ready to give it 5 stars. However, I realize that this is partly because I have a solid background in the history of science and ideas, and a few parts later were a bit dry for me. This book was written by a history professor, which explains why it is full of vocabulary that can be off-putting if you aren't familiar with it.

What this is is a history, but not of the Grand Canyon, but about it's exploration, the science and mindsets that were around when various Europeans, et al, came across it (for example, when the Spanish found it the world of science and ideas was significantly far behind where it was when other explorers came there a few hundred years later), In its chapters there is discussion about art, some of the artists that depicted it (one didn't bother to keep it real, but moved things around to make a better composition, for example), explorers, geologists, people such as Teddy Roosevelt (this is the second book in 2 days I have read where he is important in his pre-presidential years). The list goes on.

I was going to put in quotes, but can't even choose--I put markers in 22 of the 161 pages, so more than 10 percent of them, and those were just a few highlights (some for the great writing which creeps in, some for important points, one for this piece of music.)

[J. Wootton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deserves three stars, but the writing is too overwrought. (Among other excesses, Pyne's habit of immediately undermining his every metaphor with a cheap simile is particularly ruinous).

Read it through despite the style; found it much too long but still interesting. Pyne situates the history of the Canyon's "discovery" by early Spanish explorers and eventual incorporation into the U.S.'s fledgling National Park system within the context of Euro-American colonial history, scientific history, art history, and the activities of the cultural elite. This wide-ranging syntopic reading, focused on through the Grand Canyon's narrow aperture like so many threads on the far side of a needle's eye (see what I did there? Imagine that, for 160 pages), was really quite impressive and inspired me to rabbit-trail down a few other branching lanes of history to uncover things of which I was previously unaware.

Still, with appropriately ruthless editing, this book could have been under 100 pages and not lacked for substance.

[René · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very insightful. Gave detail of how many different groups first dismissed the Canyon, but later other groups came and felt there was something here. Glad they did. At times the boom read like a textbook but very informative. Made me respect the Canyon even more.

[Stephanie Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Verbose. A very interesting analysis that could have been made in about 1/3 the word count. I made it through but did a lot of eye rolling to get there. Still, highly recommend for the treatment of the canyon as a societal phenomenon.

[Greg Marcinkowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read sporadically over about a year in between other books. Good to reminisce about my time in the Canyon, and a very thorough telling of it's history in our imaginations.

[Riley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not quite the book I was hoping it would be. I was looking for the history of Grand Canyon tourism and commercialism. This was more about the early discovery and exploration of the canyon itself.

[Ben Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good stuff in here. I was hoping this would be a little more Geo focused. It’s mostly about American culture. Probably could have focused a bit more on indigenous culture.

[Addie Waldrop · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ⭐️ good if you want to read about the grand canyon. i did not want to read about the grand canyon, but alas, i needed to pass a quiz. however the book did hold my attention and was well written

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Upon seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time two years ago, it was hard for me to know what to do. It feels strange to sit and stare for long stretches of time, but there it seems called for in order to take in all that is the Grand Canyon: the geological wonder, the roiling river, and the stark landscape. When perusing books in the gift shop on the South Rim, I was immediately drawn to Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon. The concept of falling, jumping or tripping over the edge was intriguing to me, as was the idea that someone had used an entire book to document it. But after getting my fill of entertainment and gore, I turned to How the Canyon Became Grand to get a more in-depth idea of its background, and to peel my eyes away from simply staring at the canyon walls.
Known as the foremost historian on fire, Stephen J. Pyne tackles an entirely different topic, but one that he is not unfamiliar with. As a Forest Service firefighter for 15 years on the canyon’s North Rim, he became fascinated with how this monument came to be. Far from your standard tourist guide fair, Pyne jumps right into the rich history of the Canyon through three ages of exploration, beginning with how Spanish Conquistadors deemed it worthless. Pyne explains this shocking idea by stating that people did not have the value attached to such monuments as we do today, and thus explorers weren’t prepared to appreciate a sight like the Canyon.
It took society’s evolution as a whole for the Canyon to earn the respect it deserved, and Pyne fluidly explains how around the mid-1800s most Americans feared rather than revered the Canyon, leaving it to geologists and photographers to explore themselves. This eventually led to the Canyon’s beauty becoming the subject of everything from photos and paintings to music and books. With a dedicated few devoted to the Canyon’s wonder, the idea spread that this was a monument the country was meant to cherish, not fear. Over the years notable persons ranging from Ed Abbey to Theodore Roosevelt championed the Canyon, but it was lesser-known people like geologist Clarence Dutton who brought its value to light. By explaining the Canyon in these larger cultural contexts, Pyne easily highlights its evolution and gives credits to the major players who for a long time have gone relatively unnoticed.
One of the most interesting aspects of Pyne’s book comes near the end, when he delves into the idea that new planetary histories of earth and research of geological formations on other planets may reduce the importance of our very own Canyon. While this can be hard to picture at first, Pyne shows aerial photos of the Grand Canyon that seem to be “reducing its immense complexity to the status of a mudcrack” (138).
Adding to Pyne’s rich history is a number of pictures that bring this tale to life. Early photos and drawings of the canyon attempt to show those in the East just what lies in wait for them in Arizona, while old maps highlight Pyne’s three eras of exploration in the canyon. Photos of the people prominent in the canyon’s history, like the Kolb brothers, John Wesley Powell and Edwin McKee are also included.

Thanks to Pyne’s in-depth research and smooth writing style, reviewers had little to complain about in regard to How the Canyon Became Grand. Donna Seaman of Booklist states:
“…this tightly focused work guides readers toward a fresh view of a revered landscape, the Grand Canyon. Pyne explains that physical and cultural forces shape our sense of place and that few sites evince this as resoundingly as the Grand Canyon, where the power of water on rock created a unique and formidable terrain and where what Pyne so aptly calls "the chisel of the mind" infused a natural wonder with so much meaning it became symbolic of the very essence of a nation.”
The New York Times went even further, claiming the book was a “tour de force” and “This extraordinary book, complete with photographs, maps, and charts, but sized to fit into any backpack, casts fascinating new light on a natural phenomenon that mirrors the making of our nation.” It’s hard to dispute that Pyne’s history takes on nearly every aspect of Grand Canyon history, and it’s the best I’ve read so far. However, some readers on the Amazon.com website faulted Pyne for his writing style, saying “Pyne's writing is wordy and florid, which some people find makes his books difficult reading.” If readers can look beyond this seeming flaw, they will find a wealth of information that makes any such defect forgivable.
Today the Grand Canyon attracts over five million visitors a year, and is regarded as one of the great natural wonders of the world. It is surprising to think that once upon a time this amazing landscape was considered useless. But Pyne brings this and other less-known histories to light in this fascinating history of one of America’s most popular attractions.

[Kathy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quotable:

The Colorado River was identified and mapped long before the St. Lawrence, the Columbia, the Hudson, or even the Mississippi. Yet the Canyon was among the last of these wonders to be assimilated, much less celebrated. As far as Spain and the rest of Europe were concerned, the discovered Canyon quickly became a lost Canyon. While the sails of European expansion had swiftly reached the Colorado River, the Renaissance died on the voyages upstream and the overland entradas across its chromatic rocks.

The Grand Canyon was a scenic innovation. It required a new eye, a new voice, and a new perspective.

[W]hen he approaches the brink, {Captain Clarence E.] Dutton separates himself from nearly everyone who has crept, strolled, or driven to its edge because he resists the temptation to stare down the precipice. He steps back. He measures his distances, checks to reestablish his position. Only then does he peer over the edge.

[John Wesley] Powell introduced two photographers, E. O. Beaman to the river, and J. K. Hillers to the rim. Their photo portfolios, done under impossibly laborious conditions, made the Grand Canyon one of the first western spectacles to receive a through photographic inquiry, the [George] Wheeler and Powell survey pictures coming at nearly the same time as the photographs of Yellowstone taken by W. H. Jackson for the Hayden Survey.

[William Morris Davis] summed his insights in the concept of a geographical cycle. This was a model that synthesized geologic structure, erosional processes, and boundless time into regular patterns of land sculpture and, especially, of landscape evolution. Every climate, every geomorphic province had its distinctive variants, but each played out a universal trend. Landscapes were closed systems that eroded: they began as uplifted, high-energy systems and then decayed through the entropy of erosion into level, low-energy systems. Landscapes proceeded through cycles in the same thermodynamic sense that heat engines did. The process was irreversible, though it was possible to restart the cycle with renewed uplift. Thus landscapes were a kind of entropy clock, and sculpted landforms, a variety of earth fossil. Recognize the pattern, and you know a landscape’s stage of evolution; you know its age.

The Colorado River had been dammed by volcanic flows during the Pleistocene and had flooded the Canyon more than once; the soils farmed by the Havasupai were deposits of one such episode.

Before 1963 fewer than 100 people had boated through Grand Canyon. By 1967 some 2,000 tourists were on the river, and by 1972, 16,400; the National Park Service found it necessary to regulate access with permits.

"You cannot grasp the scope of the Grand Canyon from the rim, however you try," explained Philip Hyde, photographer. "It is at the meeting of the river and the rock that those little things happen that make the landscape have meaning and sympathetic scale."

[Bob R Bogle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books I bought a long time ago ― about 16 or 17 years ago I think ― and that I started reading then before setting it aside temporarily, as I supposed, and turning to other matters. When I stumbled across it again a few weeks ago I decided to have another go at it: the planets were in alignment and, after all, it's only 199 pages long, including the end matter.

The 1998 book is Stephen J Pyne's How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History, the canyon in question being, of course, northern Arizona's Grand Canyon. I was not far into my recent second attempt at this book before remembering why I set it aside the first time, after about 35 pages. The book title is deceptive ― at least, it had deceived me ― and this is not the book I thought it would be. From the title I'd expected a geo-centric text, one spanning millions of years of successive continental depositions of sediment and magmatic intrusions, to be followed likewise by millions of years of erosive activity in which the canyon was duly carved and sculpted by the wild Colorado River and supplementary erosive forces. In brief, I thought I'd bought a book about the canyon itself.

That's not what we have here, except in relatively brief passages. Instead, this curious book concerns itself with the impact of human consciousness and aesthetics on the canyon and its geomorphology, and the inevitable feedback loop of the vice versa. Pyne is concerned with the Grand Canyon of the mind and how Homo sapiens, with its ever-evolving philosophies and perceptions, became conceptually capable of perceiving of a canyon as being grand. It therefore becomes a book of historical encounters with the canyon by various larger-than-life personalities with unique perspectives. The book reads sometimes as biography, sometimes as an adventure story, sometimes as scientific analysis and synthesis, sometimes like a travelogue, sometimes as a chronicle of political conflict, meaning the usual clash between short-sighted financial gain vs. the ageless potency of wilderness.

Once I'd recognized that this is not the book I wanted it to be, I commenced reading it for the book it is. Although it seems to me an unusual artifact among Grand Canyon literature, it is an interesting one. And Pyne is a very good writer too, blending an impressive vocabulary with his unfamiliar abstract connections. I found the graphs at the end to be of little use, but they are easily ignored if you feel the same way.

Don't be deceived by the title as I was. Perhaps it might more fittingly have been titled something along the lines of: Grand Canyon of the Mind: How Perceptions of the Canyon Have Evolved.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book! I enjoyed the geology, the art and the intellectual discussions. A lot of history here. The writer also has some beautiful descriptions that read like poetry.

"I have heard rumours of visitors who were disappointed. Thebsame people will be disappointed at the Day of Judgement. In fact, the Grand Canyon is a sort of landscape Day of Judgement. It is not a show place, a beauty spot, but a revelation." - J.B. Priestely (page 1)

"But nothing lead to the Canyon. It came as a phenomenon, an idea, and an aesthetic almost wholly without precedent. The Canyon suddenly was." (page 2)

"Ironically, although Spain was perhaps the most advanced nation of Europe in its ability to mount expeditions and establish colonies, it was among the most retarded in its capacity to absorb its discoveries within the context of the new ideas and new sensibility that raged across the rest of Europe." (page 8)

"...the United States, a self-consciously new nation as eager for a past as for a future, for which nature often substituted for culture and the westward migration of which coincided precisely with the broader parameters of European expansion." (page 32)

"It gave the New World natural wonders to compete with decaying castles and lofty cathedral so fundamental to the cultural adornment of the Old World." (page 53)

"The law of the persistence of rivers...for it not only permanently forged the perspective of the Grand Canyon from the river but confirmed that that the river was the Canyon's essence. The flow of one provided the narrative structure for the other." (page 60)

"Dutton's was the great innovation, the view from the rim." (page 70)

"The shape of the land involved mind as well as rock, reason together with impression." (page 77)

"Within the Canyon itself, however, the record is writ large on lithic parchment with the quill of erosion." (page 80)

"The river appears only as a patch, as though stone curtains had parted to reveal it." (page 97)

"...modernism was rewriting the software of American culture like a computer virus." (page 121)

"...this brief era was a kind of Lava Falls, books foaming out of presses like white water again rock, as ideas met politics." (page 155)

[Bob Finch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This brief, insightful and compelling narrative about how the "idea" of the Grand Canyon has evolved over time is a real gem. Pyne writes with a clarity that is rare, with gentle wit, compassion, and prose that border on the poetic. Bringing together cultural influences as experienced by explorers, scientists, writers, and painters, Pyne's delicious tale reveals the often surprising multi-layered impressions and meanings the Canyon has managed to impart on so many of those who have written about it, studied it, traversed it, gazed upon it, even avoided it. I have visited the Canyon several times, looked in awe from the rim, hiked within, and even flown through once (long ago). It always impresses. But I may never see it quite the same after having read this remarkable little book.

[Bern J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Newsday said "This extraordinary book puts the national landmark in the context of nothing less than the intellectual history of western civilization-in 200 pages" and that's exactly what it does.
Have a dictionary along side, the author has a wide ranging vocabulary.
Excellent scholarship,well written,highly recommended.

[Jeffrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting story of how the Grand Canyon was mapped, explored and studies by geologists, biologists and the like. It gave a story of how it became famous and an American icon. A bit dry though. This book was okay.

[MattA · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just too dense. Had I been more familiar with the people or with the geology of the canyon, it might have been a good read. But as an introduction to the history of the canyon, I'm afraid it fails.

[John · Rating 2 out of 5]

I now know way too much about the Grand Canyon.