CORONADO

Aura doesn’t want to hear about it, but though environmentalists favor the current development of mass transit in Grand Canyon National Park as a means of easing traffic congestion, there was, once upon a time, a dream of a different kind of railroad....

And here I’m quoting from an anthology that no less than Bruce Babbitt put together. He was not only Governor of Arizona but also Secretary of the Interior, so you know he’s as much on Aura’s team as anybody is likely to get:

Bruce Babbitt, ed., Grand Canyon: An Anthology, (Flagstaff: Northland Press, 1978), pp. 7-9:

"After Powell opened the [canyon country to the U.S.], the focus of activity shifted from exploration to commercial exploitation. Prospectors, homesteaders, surveyors, railway engineers and cattlemen swarmed throughout the southwestern region. Grand Canyon was no exception...

"The inevitable western railroad speculation got off to an early start. Today it seems, by any measure, a wildly improbable, quixotic adventure. But the nineteenth century was an age of gilded optimism and headlong expansion. Anything was possible.

"…[Denver dreamer Frank Brown hired] a talented railway engineer, Robert Brewster Stanton, … organized the Denver Railway Company, … and together they started down the river to survey a ‘water level’ railroad through the Colorado’s canyons from the Rocky Mountains to California...

"[Brown and others died in the attempt.] But Stanton would not quit. A year later he returned to the river with new improved boats and life preservers. After an initial mishap, he completed the railway survey without further incident. Stanton spent much of his remaining life promoting Colorado River development projects and arguing the feasibility of his railroad. There were no takers. Stanton was a grandiose dreamer. In his account of the second river trip, he reveals his thoughts during a quiet stretch below Hance Rapid. ‘I dreamed one of my daydreams and saw each cove with its picturesque Swiss chalet, and its happy mountain people with their herds of sheep and mountain goats, developing local business for our future railroad’…. At the banks of the Colorado River on Bass Trail … Stanton planned a railroad switchyard...

AURA

Jesus !

CORONADO

The prospectors were not far behind . . . Perhaps the most audacious and flamboyant of all the early prospectors and promoters was Ralph Henry Cameron. At one time or another he promoted schemes for the development of mining claims, dams for electric power, a scenic railway along the rim and a tourist hotel. Fighting to control the canyon as a commercial venture, Cameron brazenly staked fraudulent mining claims at strategic locations to control trail access and springs and to frustrate the development plans of the Santa Fe Railway. In 1920 he was elected to the United States Senate where he spent most of his one and only term promoting his claims and trying unsuccessfully to do in his rivals, the National Park Service and the Santa Fe.

And if that’s not enough for your, here’s a little something from a book none other than the Grand Canyon Natural History Association put out called Geology of the Grand Canyon. Listen up, Sine:

J. Breed and Evelyn C. Roat, eds. Geology of the Grand Canyon, (Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona & Grand Canyon Natural History Assn., 1974), courtesy of Grand Canyon Conservancy: pp. 170, 172, 178:

"Prospectors roamed the Grand Canyon region in the late 1860s through the middle 1900s.... Most prospects located in and around the Grand Canyon are small and unprofitable but virtually every tributary canyon has been prospected at one time or another. Copper is the most popular mineral extracted from the mines along with smaller amounts of uranium and to a lesser extent, silver and gold...

"[Some evidence of past mining is still visible. John Hance] .… built a trail, now called the Old Hance Trail, to the Colorado River. Across the river from Red Canyon, he located an asbestos mine in a tributary canyon now called Asbestos Canyon...

AURA

Asbestos. And uranium, too ?

CORONADO

I’m still reading -

Hance built the Red Canyon Trail (now called the New Hance Trail) in 1894.… Much of the mining equipment [is] still there.

AURA

I’ve never seen that.

CORONADO

In western Grand Canyon, mile 265.9 on the Colorado River from Lees Ferry, are large steel towers on the north side of the canyon about 800 feet above the Colorado River. These towers are the remains of a cable transporting system used to transport bat guano to the South Rim ... [for] market.... (Bat guano! (Laughs) Mining ... continued until the middle 1950's when the introduction of less expensive nitrate fertilizers made the mine an uneconomical venture.

And the pursuit of oil might not have stopped at the Grand Canyon if it had produced results:

The first oil well drilled near Grand Canyon was in 1906 in northwestern Arizona. Eighteen test wells were drilled up to 1961 but no oil was produced and all holes are classed as dry and abandoned. The deep erosion by the Colorado River and tributary canyons across the northern Arizona plateaus may have had a negative influence on the preservation of oil. No wells were closer to the Colorado River than 25 miles…

Well, that oughtta’ make you happy.

And I know you’ve got a soft spot for the Indians. But it seems those guys I was just telling you about are only the latest in a long line hell bent on extracting from the Canyon what might be of use to them. Here’s something from a Smithsonian publication called the Ice Age History of Southwestern National Parks:

Scott A. Elias, Ice Age History of Southwestern National Parks, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), pp. 120, 122, 123:

… People have been living in and around the canyon for several thousand years, beginning with the temporary hunting camps of Clovis and Folsom peoples.... During the Archaic Period, people began occupying sites in the canyon on a more frequent basis. One of the most fascinating sets of Archaic artifacts that has been discovered in the Southwest is a series of figures made of split willow twigs, twisted and bent into the shapes of animals.… [These] figurines … have been radiocarbon dated … [to] between 4000 and 3000 yr B.P....

AURA

Well that’s nice –

CORONADO

Right.

"The Grand Canyon was a crossroads for a variety of late prehistoric cultures, especially the Anasazi. Other cultures were only marginally represented in the Grand Canyon, but Anasazi village ruins are the most extensive in the park, having been found on both the north and south rims, as well as down near the river along canyon walls...

The first evidence of permanent farming settlements in the Grand Canyon region comes from the south rim, where farmers began working about 700 A.D.... Pueblo people began living in the canyon about 1050 A.D., growing crops on nearly every patch of arable land in the canyon. However, this agricultural experiment was doomed to fail because of a lack of moisture.

And I found this thing called 4000 Years of Human History in the Grand Canyon that says:

Robert C. Euler, "The Canyon Dwellers: 4000 Years of Human History in the Grand Canyon," in The Grand Colorado, ed. T. H. Watkins (Palo Alto: American West Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 24-26, in Babbitt:

"The few Developmental sites that have been discovered are marked on the surface only by fine-lined black-on-white pottery fragments.

(Now that should give you a nice cozy feeling.)

"These are mostly in the eastern reaches of the Canyon, but at least one such site has been recorded near Deer Creek, 136 miles down the Colorado River from Lees Ferry. In all probability, these and later Pueblo Indians approached the great gorge from the heartland of their territory to the east.... The overwhelming majority of prehistoric ruins in Grand Canyon consists of small, surface masonry pueblos with associated storage rooms, mescal pits, and occasional kivas. Frequently these were built on open, relatively flat terraces. Many Indians did take advantage of the towering cliffs and built against them at the tops of steep talus slopes, but true cliff dwellings are not often encountered.

"The ruins are now visible as low remnants of masonry walls that mark room outlines. The ground around them usually is littered with broken pottery and stone tools, such as arrow points, scrapers, and milling stones. Storage rooms and the talus-top pueblos are usually found in a better state of preservation, and in a few instances the original wooden roofs are still intact. At one site in Shinumo Canyon, for example, the masonry walls of a room are spanned by cottonwood timbers, crossed at right angles with smaller poles, slabs of rock, and finally a layer of earth, as is typical of Pueblo architecture elsewhere. The storerooms, placed in protected niches or overhangs, ordinarily are well preserved, but except for an occasional corncob, their contents have long since been consumed by rodents. Mescal pits, where the roots and tender young shoots of the Agave plant were roasted, are marked by large circular depressions, some with diameters of 20 to 25 feet, ringed with masses of small, charred rocks.

"Today, visitors viewing Grand Canyon only from the ... rim may wonder ... why [Indians] entered it in the first place.… [Food.] While deer-hunting undoubtedly was excellent on both north and south rims, such other game animals as mountain sheep and rabbits were to be found below the rims. Wild food plants grew in abundance on the rims, but only those ecologically adjusted to the high plateau elevations (7,000 to 8,000 feet). In the Canyon below, many other staples could be gathered: the tasty fruits of certain varieties of cactus, the edible beans of the mesquite, the catclaw, and the Agave. Furthermore, successful farming of beans, squash, corn, and cotton depends upon a rather long, frost-free growing season and sufficient water. Both were obtainable at Canyon elevations below 3,000 feet. While both rims are relatively devoid of dependable water sources, the recesses of the Canyon contain many springs and, particularly in the side canyons near the north rim, permanently flowing streams. While there undoubtedly have been some climatic changes in the several centuries since the Pueblo occupation was at its height, particularly changes in rainfall pattern, it is worthwhile to note that in some side canyons where there are permanent streams or springs today, there are ruins; where there is no water now, prehistoric sites are lacking.

Environmentally, then, the Canyon provided excellent resources to sustain Pueblo life, though in all probability occupation was in large part seasonal.… Throughout many tributary canyons, especially in the eastern portions of Grand Canyon, are similar Pueblo masonry ruins in association with low check dams. At one site there is a long stone wall that was apparently built to divert sheet drainage from the hills above to agricultural fields. There is abundant evidence that these Indians practiced erosional control and other conservation measures.

And here’s one last bit from that Ice Age History book:

Elias, p. 123:

By 1150 A.D., not only had settlements in the canyon been abandoned, but agriculture on the north and south rims had also failed. The only settlement to survive the drought that doomed these sites was that in and around Havasu Creek, one of the most consistent sources of water near arable land in the region. Agriculture and human occupation have continued there to the present time, but never again would people try to farm other regions of the Grand Canyon.

Global warming, huh ?

AURA

I want a drink.

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