Grand Canyon

For most of the nineteenth century the Grand Canyon was hard to reach and therefore barely photographed. Getting to the rim meant a full day in a stagecoach from Flagstaff over rough ground, and the people who did it were prospectors rather than tourists.

That changed in September 1901, when the Santa Fe Railway ran a spur line to the South Rim. The ride became a few hours and cost a few dollars, and the canyon turned into a destination almost overnight. Nearly every photograph in the archive dates from after that line opened.

The Fred Harvey Company built what the visitors needed. El Tovar opened in 1905 within a hundred yards of the edge, a long hotel of Oregon pine and local stone that looked like a hunting lodge and had electric light and a solarium. Around it went a series of buildings by Mary Colter, an architect who worked for Harvey for four decades and designed against the fashion of her day. Hopi House in 1905 was modeled on the pueblo at Oraibi and built by Hopi masons. Lookout Studio and Hermit’s Rest in 1914 were made deliberately rough, with uneven stone and soot left on the fireplace, so they read as though they had been there a long time. Desert View Watchtower came in 1932.

The photography business on the rim deserves its own note. Emery and Ellsworth Kolb built a studio hanging off the canyon wall at the head of the Bright Angel Trail in 1904 and photographed every mule party that started down. They then ran four and a half miles to the nearest water suitable for developing, made the prints, and had them ready when the riders came back up. In 1911 they ran the Colorado from Wyoming to the Gulf of California with a motion picture camera, and Emery showed that film in the studio nearly every day until he died in 1976.

Mule trains on the Bright Angel switchbacks are the single most reproduced Grand Canyon image of the period, and the trail itself was originally a Havasupai route, later a prospectors’ path, then a toll trail before the park took it over.

The canyon did not become a national park until 1919, later than Yellowstone or Yosemite, because mining and grazing interests fought it for years. Theodore Roosevelt made it a national monument in 1908 by executive action to get around the delay.

One caution for captions: a great many rim photographs are labeled simply Grand Canyon with no point of view named, so the same overlook appears under half a dozen descriptions.

Saved by a Committee of Women