"Dismissed by the first Spanish explorers as worthless, the Grand Canyon was nearly doomed to be forgotten, an incidental landform. Luckily, as Stephen Pyne explores in this book, in the next four hundred years we learned to see - and also to make maps, to understand geology and measure the earth's history, to embrace nature rather than shun it. A complex coalescence of science, art, literature, nationalism, and personalities allowed us to create a cultural canyon as deep and resonant as the physical one."--BOOK JACKET. "How the Canyon Became Grand is both a chronicle of discovery, recounting the achievements of explorers, geologists, artists, and writers, from John Wesley Powell and Clarence Dutton to Wallace Stegner, and a provocative explanation of how they turned the Canyon into a symbol of American grandeur, and later of wilderness - in other words, how they transformed an almost overlooked phenomenon into a fixture of the American identity."--BOOK JACKET.