After Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, hunters and fur trappers explored the Colorado River and its tributaries at either end of the canyon. One, James O. Pattie, described his 1827 venture as a horrid ordeal. Trappers and traders created new routes west, and after 1848, gold hunters followed. Next came the army and government surveyors interested in identifying transportation routes and resources.

At Fort Yuma, steamboats plied the Lower Colorado, transporting settlers, soldiers, and supplies to California. In 1857 the army sent Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives upriver via a sternwheel steamer, which ran aground far downriver from the Grand Wash Cliffs. Ives continued his explorations on foot with the help of Havasupai guides, abandoning eastward progress after a couple weeks and heading south for the army’s Beale Road (present day I-40). He summed up the region as “uninhabitable,” “impassable,” and “altogether valueless.”

While exploration and settlement continued north, south, west, and east of Grand Canyon, the canyon itself remained as one of the last blank spots on the U.S. map. The man who would change that, John Wesley Powell, was a 35-year-old Civil War veteran turned college professor. Powell’s expedition was remarkable in many ways, including the fact that he didn’t receive government funding for it. He undertook the trip mostly out of a desire for knowledge.

After Powell’s first and second runs through the canyon in 1869 and 1872, only a handful of expeditions followed over the next half century. One of most dramatic was led by Robert Brewster Stanton, an engineer surveying the inner canyon for a possible rail line. Though that scheme sounds preposterous today, Stanton made two attempts at running the canyon. He aborted his first run in 1889 after three of his crew drowned in Marble Canyon, then successfully navigated the canyon the following year, becoming only the second man to do so.