About 4,000 years ago, a prehistoric hunter-gatherer culture lived in the Grand Canyon region until 1000 B.C.
The ancestral pueblo people arrived in the area about A.D. 500. Departing in 1150, they left behind remnants of some 2,000 village sites. In 1300, ancestors of the modern Hualapai and Havasupai migrated to the western areas of the Canyon.
Over the next 300 years, a succession of explorers and mountain men came and gaped, but to most it was a giant obstacle designed, as one fur trapper put it, “to deprive all human beings of the ability to descend … and make use of its waters.”
The Canyon remained largely unknown (and virtually unexplored) until Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell led a famous boat expedition through the gorge in 1869.
The one-armed Army Major and nine men accomplished this feat in four small wooden boats. Powell’s party was probably the first ever to make such a trip. After a second journey in 1871-72, he aptly named it Grand Canyon.
Early residents soon discovered that tourism was destined to be more profitable than mining, and by the turn of the century Grand Canyon began earning a reputation as a popular tourist destination. Early tourist accommodations were not so different from the mining camps from which they developed. Most made the grueling trip from nearby towns to the South Rim by stagecoach.
When in 1901 the railroad was extended to the South Rim from Williams, the development of formal tourist facilities on the rim increased dramatically.
Although first afforded federal protection in 1893 as a forest reserve and later as a national monument, Grand Canyon did not achieve national park status until 1919, three years after the creation of the National Park Service.
Today Grand Canyon National Park receives over five million visitors annually - a far cry from the yearly visitation of 44,173 which the park received in 1919.
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