Grand Canon

Gustave Baumann

The Grand Canyon, a mile-deep gorge in northern Arizona, began taking shape approximately six million years ago as the Colorado River began to carve a deep channel through layers of rock. The canyon is over 270 miles long and up to 18 miles wide. The human history of the canyon stretches back 12,000 years and Native Americans have inhabited the Grand Canyon and the surrounding area for at least 4,000 years. Ancestral Pueblo people following by Paiute, Navajo, Zuni and Hopi tribes once inhabited the Grand Canyon. Today the Havasupai people claim the Grand Canyon as their ancestral home and, in 1975, the Havasupai people regained a large portion of their land from the federal government. President Benjamin Harrison protected the Grand Canyon in 1893 as a forest reserve, and in 1919 Woodrow Wilson signed the Grand Canyon National Park Act.

Grand Canon was Gustave Baumann’s final color woodcut of the Grand Canyon. Baumann wrote about the vastness of the Canyon: “When one's working radius, which was four miles in my Nashville days, expands to twelve hundred it gives one a kind of all-over-the-lot feeling in the southwest where intimacy of landscape is hard to find if at all. The mountains are too high and the Grand Canyon too deep to behave properly within the limits of a frame, and yet as a discipline to put man in his place there is nothing like the Grand Canyon. You see it and then you don’t as clouds suddenly tear into it from nowhere. It is a bewildering place, distance means nothing. The nearest habitation on the North Rim is fourteen miles, but you travel two hundred to get there unless you are willing to take a chance on a shaky bridge that crosses the river. Some day ‘Old Cautious’—that’s me—is going to take the long way around. Probably what I’ll find is that I could have staid [sic] where I was just as well, sitting in my favorite hiding place just under the South Rim.”