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December 2024

Naming the Grand Canyon : with an Appendix, Grand Canyon Echoes

The origin of the name “Grand Canyon” is unknown. It was not the neological invention of John Wesley Powell in 1869, as is often retold. Earlier in the 19th century it was known as “Big Canyon” and “Great Canyon,” perhaps the translation of the term by which French-speaking mountain men may have described it—un grand cañon. Both appellations inattentively survived the coming of “Grand Canyon,” but only for a couple of decades. The earliest known non-Indigenous term, Puerto de Bucareli, was conferred in the diary of the Franciscan friar Francisco Garcés when he visited the Havasupai people in 1776, the first non-Native person known to have reached the Grand Canyon since a party of Spanish conquistadores arrived on the rim 236 years earlier, in 1540 (who are not recorded as having given it a name). Ingenious misspellings of the puerto appeared on manuscript and printed maps in the 18th and 19th centuries but its association as Garcés’s mountain pass for the Colorado River was never remembered, nor did it label an entire canyon. The origins for each “Canyon” name, though, remain mysteries, includ­ing the first known appearance of “Grand Canyon” in 1857 that disappointingly lacked an admission of neologism or credit to another source. This has not dissuaded travelers and writers from exploiting the name for other landscapes around the world or from exercising it in a superfluity of analogies and metaphors. In the end, an answer to the question, “Who named the Grand Canyon?” may be unessential, given that Native peoples have had words from time immemorial that affirm long spiritual and cultural associations with the canyon.