Jack Hiller photograph looking from atop the 3,000 foot-high cliffs of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Note: There is a man sitting on the edge of the cliff on the upper left hand side of the picture.

In 1858, Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives said that the Grand Canyon was “altogether valueless,” claiming that his expedition would be “the last party of whites to visit this profitless locality.” Three hundred years earlier, Capt. Garcia López de Cárdenas of the Coronado expedition reported similarly, seeing the canyon as an obstacle to travel.
It was not until Maj. John Wesley Powell, Union Army veteran and geology professor, led the first expedition on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon did the public first begin to read about the natural wonders to be seen there.
Although Powell’s book, “Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries,” begins with dull scientific geology reporting, the rest is full of adventures and beautiful descriptions of the most fascinating locations in the United States. Powell lost his right forearm at the Battle of Shiloh, and his description of hanging by his good hand off a Grand Canyon cliff is breathtaking, even though you know he survived to tell the tale.
Then in 1871, Lt. George Wheeler led a party from the newly created U.S. Geological Survey of the West to collect an accurate physical description of the territory west of the 100th meridian. Wheeler hired Timothy O’Sullivan, renowned Civil War photographer, to capture the canyon on film. An artist whose life centered around his work, his compatriots on the trip said he always smelled of mules and photographic chemicals. O’Sullivan’s photographs were most likely the first taken of the Grand Canyon. He commanded his own boat, The Picture, which was lost in the tortuous river journey, but the negatives survived the trip.
In 1872, Powell returned to the canyon with a better-funded expedition. He fired the original photographer hired for the trip, E. O. Beaman, after an argument. His replacement, James Fennemore, gave up because of his health, and a 28-year-old boatman named Jack Hillers became the official photographer by default. The Paiute Indians of the Kaibab Plateau called Hillers “Myself in the Water.”
Using the older wet-plate development process on large glass negatives in wooden frames, hundreds of pounds of photographic equipment was needed to process the photographs. Stereoscopic cameras, with their interchangeable lenses and lighter weight, were often preferred for field use. More than 200 negatives were processed on the second Powell expedition.
This expedition included Thomas Moran, already famous for his Yellowstone landscapes published as woodcuts in Scribner’s Monthly, a popular magazine. Congress paid him $10,000 for his massive work, “The Chasm of the Colorado.” Moran’s first sight of the canyon made a great impression on him.
“The whole gorge for miles lay beneath us and it was by far the most awfully grand and impressive scene that I have ever yet seen,” he wrote to his wife. “A suppressed sort of roar comes up constantly from the chasm but with that exception everything impresses you with an awful stillness.” Moran’s artwork probably did more to convince people of the beauty of the Grand Canyon up to that time.
But of all its photographers and artists, Ellsworth and Emery Kolb left the longest and most permanent impression of the canyon. Adventurous Ellsworth came to the canyon in 1901, followed soon after by his younger brother Emery. By 1903, they set up a darkroom in a cave near the head of the Bright Angel Trail. The next year they blasted a 55 x 20-foot shelf out of the canyon wall and built a two-story wooden studio.
Ellsworth said, “We were there as scenic photographers in love with our work, and determined to reproduce the marvels of the Colorado’s canyons, as far as we could do it.” They were the first to record the Colorado trip with a movie camera. Emery ran the film daily at their studio from 1915 until his death in 1976, making it the longest running film in the world.
The Grand Canyon was seen as a worthless obstruction by those who first set eyes on it. But once the technology was set in place so that large audiences could appreciate the stories and pictures conveyed by explorers, painters and photographers, it truly became a “grand canyon” by popular acclaim.
— Jim Turner. Photo courtesy of Arizona Historical Society.