The canyon's ghosts: Powell's deserters, a name fought over for 94 years, and the mine the 2023 ban couldn't touch

Most Grand Canyon writing treats history as scenery — a plaque to read on the way to the view. That is a mistake. The corridor a trekker walks in 2026 was shaped by specific decisions with dates and names attached: an expedition that lost three men, a place-name held hostage for 94 years, three federal designations, a 900,000-acre monument, and a uranium mine that keeps working through all of it. The canyon is older than thought can hold. The fights over who controls it are very much alive.

Human presence here runs more than 10,000 years, and eleven tribes are officially affiliated with the park through the National Park Service consultation framework — Havasupai, Hualapai, Navajo Nation, Hopi, Zuni, and six more. Keep that number in mind. It is the through-line for everything below.

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Powell 1869: the men who quit two days too early

The Grand Canyon has no marquee first-ascent culture. Its founding-exploration event is a river descent, and it carries the same kind of ghost story that Cerro Torre carries for climbers.

Major John Wesley Powell — a one-armed Civil War veteran and geologist — led the first recorded passage through the whole canyon. Nine men left Green River Station, in Wyoming Territory, on May 24, 1869. Ninety-eight days later, on August 30, 1869, six of them reached the mouth of the Virgin River and the end of the canyon.

Six, not nine. The gap is the story. Two days before the survivors floated out of the worst water, three men — the brothers Oramel and Seneca Howland, and William Dunn — decided the rapids ahead would kill them. They left the party and climbed out to the rim. They were never seen alive again. The men who stayed on the river ran the rapids that had frightened the deserters and reached safety within 48 hours. The men who climbed to apparent safety died on the plateau.

The cause is still argued 150 years later — attributed variously to Shivwits Paiute or to Mormon settlers, with no settled verdict. That uncertainty is part of why the episode endures. It is the canyon's version of a decision made one move from the top: three men quit right before the worst was over, and the safe choice turned out to be the fatal one. Powell went on to map and name much of the region and to run the U.S. Geological Survey. The Howlands and Dunn went into the canyon's lore. A trekker on the corridor trails is walking a route whose exploration lineage runs through that river, not through any summit.

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Ha'a Gyoh: a name contested for 94 years

Walk down the Bright Angel Trail and, near mile 4.8, you reach a green shelf with water, shade, and campsites. For most of the last century, maps and guidebooks called it Indian Garden. That name was an act of erasure, and it was corrected only recently.

The site is Ha'a Gyoh in Havasupai — Havasuʾ Baaja, "people of the blue-green water." The Havasupai farmed this inner-canyon shelf in spring and summer and moved to the rim plateau to hunt and gather in the colder months, a vertical pattern of transhumance tuned to the canyon's climate. The U.S. government renamed the place "Indian Garden," forced the Havasupai off it, and in 1928 removed the last resident, Captain Burro.

The name stood for 94 years. Then, in November 2022, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names voted unanimously to restore it as Havasupai Gardens, at the request of the Havasupai Tribal Council. Local reporting recorded the vote and the tribe's role in driving it.

This matters for a practical reason on top of the moral one. Most guides say "refill at Indian Garden." The place has been Havasupai Gardens since November 2022, and any source still using the old name is, by that fact, out of date on more than a label. When a page hasn't updated a name changed four years ago, treat its logistics with the same caution.

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Monument, park, restoration: three federal decisions

The canyon's protected status was not a single event. It came in escalating steps, and the most important one for the corridor trekker is the one people skip.

President Theodore Roosevelt used the Antiquities Act to make the Grand Canyon a national monument on January 11, 1908, explicitly to block private mining and tourism claims on the rim. The monument survived a Supreme Court challenge to the Antiquities Act's reach — a detail worth holding, because the same reversibility question returns with the 2023 monument below.

Eleven years later, the Grand Canyon National Park Act was signed by President Woodrow Wilson on February 26, 1919 (Grand Canyon National Park). That is the date on the founding plaque. It is not the date that fixed the canyon's modern human geography.

That date is 1975. The Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act (S. 1296, 93rd Congress) roughly doubled the park — and restored land to the Havasupai (Congress.gov, S.1296). From 1882, the tribe had been confined to about 518 acres at the canyon bottom, having lost more than 90% of their aboriginal land. The 1975 Act returned 185,000 acres on the rim and designated a further 95,000 acres inside the park as a permanent Havasupai traditional-use area, with mining and commercial timber forbidden on the restored land. It stands as one of the largest land restorations to a tribe in modern U.S. history, and it is the reason the Havasupai run their own trekking economy at Havasu Falls today, under tribal rather than federal rules.

The village at the South Rim, by contrast, has no founding-settlement story at all. It exists because the Santa Fe Railway finished a spur from Williams to the rim in 1901 and built a hotel to sell the view. The honest one-line origin: a railroad company built a hotel at the edge of a hole and charged admission. Sovereignty and dispossession — not tourism — are where the real history sits.

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Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni: the 900,000-acre answer

On August 8, 2023, the Antiquities Act was used again, this time in the tribes' favor. President Biden established the Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument, protecting more than 900,000 acres ringing the park.

The name is bilingual and deliberate. Baaj Nwaavjo means "where tribes roam" in Havasupai; I'tah Kukveni means "our ancestral footprints" in Hopi. This was not a designation handed down to the tribes. It was won by them. A tribal coalition had fought for the protection since at least 1985 — a 38-year campaign — and the monument's central effect is to make permanent a uranium-mining ban that would otherwise have lapsed. Conservation lawyers framed it plainly as protection from uranium mining.

One caution belongs here, because honesty requires it. Monuments created by presidential proclamation can be shrunk or reversed by later proclamation — that has happened to other monuments before, and the 1908 monument's own court fight is the reminder. The Baaj Nwaavjo boundaries are law today. Whether they hold is a political question, not a settled one. A trekker's access to the corridor is federal and not at stake; the water quality of the inner-canyon springs is another matter, and that is the next section.

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Pinyon Plain: the mine the ban couldn't reach

Here the geopolitics stops being historical and becomes a question about the water in your bottle.

The 2023 monument bans new uranium claims. It does not touch old ones. The Pinyon Plain Mine (formerly Canyon Mine) sits on Havasupai ancestral land near the sacred Red Butte, less than ten miles from the park, and it began extracting ore in December 2023 — four months after the monument was declared. It is exempt from the ban because of a valid pre-existing claim under the 1872 General Mining Law, a statute older than the national park itself. A law from 1872 overrides a monument from 2023.

The stakes are hydrological. The mine sits above the Redwall-Muav Aquifer, which feeds Havasu Creek — the sole drinking-water source for Supai Village. A 2024 study associated with the USGS found that contamination from the mine could reach south-rim springs and Havasu Springs near Supai. That is the same blue-green water the Havasupai are named for.

The fight moved to the roads in 2024. When the mine reopened, the Navajo Nation and Arizona's attorney general challenged the safety of hauling uranium ore across the reservation, and hauling was temporarily paused. The Navajo Nation carries a specific memory here: decades of Cold War uranium mining left hundreds of abandoned mines and lasting contamination on its land. The objection is not abstract.

For most trekkers this changes nothing about the corridor trails, which are federal ground with their own water system. For anyone walking to Havasu Falls — sovereign Havasupai land, reached under a tribal permit — the creek at the bottom of that hike is the exact water the mine sits above. The history and the hydrology are the same story.

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The under-staffed year: a caveat, not a headline

One more piece of 2026 context belongs in a history-and-geopolitics piece, and it needs to be handled carefully.

Through 2025, the National Park Service shed staff. Interior laid off roughly 1,000 probationary NPS workers in February 2025, with about 700 more taking buyouts, and signaled further reductions. Budget proposals for later fiscal years sought deep cuts to NPS funding, and reporting described the Grand Canyon as still working through the aftermath of the 2025 wildfires that gutted the North Rim's historic lodge.

The honest framing: those are proposals and mid-cycle reporting, not a confirmed final appropriation. This article does not publish a hard budget number, because the enacted figure for the current year is not confirmed here. What can be said is narrower and better-sourced. The NPS's own release after a June 2026 heat event that killed three inner-canyon hikers warned plainly that rescue may be delayed by staffing and call volume.

The practical takeaway is not a percentage. It is a mindset: do not plan around the ranger presence the Grand Canyon had a decade ago. The canyon's oldest safety rule — turn around before you have to be rescued — matters more in a thinned-out year than in a fat one. In that sense the newest fact on this page rhymes with the oldest one on it. The Howlands and Dunn climbed toward what looked like safety and did not make it. The canyon still rewards the party that reads its own margin honestly and quits the plan, not the climb-out.

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📚15 Sources▾

1. en.wikipedia.orgPowell Geographic Expedition of 1869 — Wikipedia, expedition dates and roster
2. usgs.govUSGS — 150th Anniversary of the 1869 Powell Expedition (Aug 30 emergence)
3. history.comHistory.com — Three men leave Powell's Grand Canyon expedition, 28 Aug 1869
4. nps.govNPS — Indian Garden officially renamed to Havasupai Gardens (1928 removal, 2022 restoration)
5. knau.orgKNAU — Grand Canyon "Indian Garden" renamed to Havasupai Gardens, 21 Nov 2022
6. grcahistory.orgGRCA History — Havasupai culture and canyon transhumance (Tier-2 history site)
7. mygrandcanyonpark.comMy Grand Canyon Park — NPS consultation list: 11 affiliated tribes, 10,000+ years (Tier-2)
8. history.comHistory.com — Theodore Roosevelt makes the Grand Canyon a national monument, 11 Jan 1908
9. en.wikipedia.orgGrand Canyon National Park — Wikipedia, 1919 National Park Act and 1901 railway
10. congress.govCongress.gov — S.1296, Grand Canyon National Park Enlargement Act of 1975
11. bia.govBIA — Land near Grand Canyon restored to the Havasupai (185,000 / 95,000 acres)
12. en.wikipedia.orgBaaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints monument — Wikipedia (>900,000 acres, 8 Aug 2023)
13. grist.orgGrist — Biden designates Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni; tribal campaign since 1985
14. grandcanyontrust.orgGrand Canyon Trust — Pinyon Plain Mine, Dec 2023 ore extraction, Havasu Creek aquifer
15. science.orgScience/AAAS — Uranium mine may pose threat to Grand Canyon drinking water (2024 study)