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South Rim October 20, 2008 |
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| The first serious non-Indian scientific expedition down the Colorado through the Canyon wasn't until 1869 when a one-armed
college professor with no whitewater experience named John Wesley Powell led an adventurous expedition with four boats
downriver, which cost three men their lives, and nearly killed Powell and the others as well. The rest
did survive, however, and Powell actually went on to repeat the trip in a more organized fashion.
There were some attempts at mining, but the cost of survival and transportation proved prohibitive. In fact, tourism proved much more lucrative. Some far-sighted entrepreneurs in Williams and in Flagstaff attempted to get the railroad to build spurs to Grand Canyon Village. The Santa Fe railroad demurred however, because, why would anyone pay money to ride a train to look at a hole in the ground? Thus the Flagstaff project failed. Williams took another tack, using the mining companies as a front. The Grand Canyon Railroad was thus built, but by the time it was finished, the mining companies were out of business. Still, the railroad was a booming success story, so much so that it built its own hotel which managed to put all the locally owned hotels out of business within a decade. [1] |
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