Who helped the grand canyon to become a tourist attraction?
Although the National Park Service has played a big role in developing and promoting the Grand Canyon that we know today, the canyon was already a famous place and major tourist attraction long before the park service was even founded in 1916 (and even longer before Ansel Adams ever went there). Probably the first person to bring the canyon to wide public attention was Major John W. Powell who led the first successful river trip through the canyon in 1869. He gave lectures and wrote a very popular book about it which raised a lot of national interest in the canyon. Powell later brought famous landscape painter Thomas Moran to the canyon and his paintings of it were very popular in the east. President Theodore Roosevelt was also a big fan of the canyon area and would come to explore, camp and hunt. He made several famous speeches about the need to preserve it and had the land set aside as a National Monument in 1908. However, probably the group that played the single biggest role in mak
