How the Canyon Became Grand

Dismissed by the first Spanish explorers as a wasteland the Grand Canyon lay virtually unnoticed for three centuries until nineteenth- century America rediscovered it and seized it as a national emblem. This extraordinary work of intellectual and environmental history tells two tales of the Canyon: the discovery and exploration of the physical Canyon and the invention and evolution of the cultural Canyon--how we learned to endow it with mythic significance.Acclaimed historian <b>Stephen Pyne</b> examines the major shifts in Western attitudes toward nature and recounts the achievements of explorers geologists artists and writers from <b>John Wesley Powell</b> to <b>Wallace Stegner</b> and how they transformed the Canyon into a fixture of national identity. This groundbreaking book takes us on a completely original journey through the Canyon toward a new understanding of its niche in the American psyche a journey that mirrors the making of the nation itself.