Nobody Knows Who First Called the Grand Canyon 'Grand'

Nobody knows who first called the Grand Canyon grand, but the name was in print by 1857, a dozen years before John Wesley Powell’s river trip. You’ll often read that Powell named it, and the park itself said so in 1933. The earliest printed use anyone has found is in a book about the weather.

Father Garcés names a “pass”

In June 1776, Francisco Garcés, a missionary priest, was crossing the high plateau south of the Colorado River, and a Havasupai leader had offered to come along. On June 26 he stopped “at the sight of the most profound” canyons, “and within these flows the Rio Colorado.” Then he wrote: “I named this singular (pass) Puerto de Bucareli.”

Elliott Coues, who translated and annotated the diary in 1900, explains that the name was for “the great viceroy,” and that the “pass” “is the Grand cañon of the Colorado itself.” Calling a place nobody could get through a pass sounds odd, and Coues admits “it may seem singular.” His answer: “the impassability is for man, not for the river.” The name didn’t last, though Washington’s official list of place names still files it among the canyon’s old names.

A climate book gets there first

In 1857, Lorin Blodget published Climatology of the United States, a big survey of the country’s climate. Describing the high plateaus of the Southwest, he mentions a range reaching toward the Colorado River, “forming the Grand Cañon, in regard to which little is positively known.”

A footnote a few pages later says a bit more: “The Grand Cañon of the Colorado as known to trappers and hunters, though not yet visited by scientific engineers.” That’s it. Blodget doesn’t say who those trappers and hunters were, and he doesn’t claim the name for himself.

Earle E. Spamer, who wrote a whole study of the canyon’s names in 2024, calls Blodget’s footnote “by far the earliest known publication of the name.” His bottom line is blunt: “The origin of the name ‘Grand Canyon’ is unknown.”

Big, Great and Grand at the same time

The other names didn’t vanish when “Grand” showed up. In the spring of 1858, Lieutenant Joseph C. Ives led an Army survey party from the Colorado River up onto the plateau, and his report, printed in 1861, calls the gorge the Big Cañon, right in the chapter titles: “Mojave Valley to Big Cañon.” On April 3, he wrote, “The famous ‘Big cañon’ was before us.” Famous. So that name was already going around too, and Ives didn’t claim it either.

From the plateau, he added, the walls “were over a mile high.” He also left a prediction that aged badly: “Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality.” If you’ve ever stood on the rim, you’re living proof he was wrong. The 1933 park bulletin notes that Ives and J. S. Newberry wrote of it as “Big Canon” and “Great Canon.”

“Grand” kept turning up in the years before Powell. A railroad survey report by William J. Palmer, dated December 1, 1868, says that to the north, “the field of investigation was terminated by the Grand Cañon of the Colorado,” and it prints C. C. Parry’s account of the prospector James White’s raft trip under the heading “Grand Cañon of the Colorado.” Samuel Bowles of Springfield, Massachusetts, who signed the preface of his travel book Our New West in March 1869, called “the Grand Canyon of the Colorado” “the great mocking mystery of our geography,” a blank on the government maps. He spelled it with a y, and he mentioned Powell, the “enthusiastic geologist of Illinois” who was planning to go down the canyon that summer.

Powell’s “known as”

Powell’s boats left Green River City on May 24, 1869. In his 1875 report, the chapter that opens on August 13 is titled “The Grand Cañon of the Colorado,” and it starts like this: “We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown.”

Later, describing the plateaus, Powell says the river runs “in a deep gorge, known as the Grand Cañon.” Known as. He doesn’t claim the name, and that wording reads like a name already in use, not one he was handing out.

Even so, the credit stuck to him. In 1933, the park’s own Grand Canyon Nature Notes said of Powell that “it was he who gave it the name Grand Canyon, probably shortly after this trip.” Here’s the thing: Blodget had printed it before Powell ever got near the river, and by 1869 a travel writer could use it without stopping to explain it.

Cañon becomes Canyon

The Geographic Names Information System, the U.S. Geological Survey’s master list, gives Grand Canyon as the official name and backs it with a decision of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names dated February 4, 1925. It also keeps the older names: Big Canyon, Great Canyon, Grand Canyon of the Colorado, Puerto de Bucareli, and versions spelled “Canon,” which is how the list writes the Spanish cañon without its tilde. Bowles had already used the English spelling back in 1869, so by the time the Board ruled, the y had been around for more than half a century.

Arizona has a name story of its own, and it’s stranger than this one: Arizona is named for a place that isn’t in Arizona. The canyon, meanwhile, is named for a word anybody could have said first, and somebody did. We just don’t know who.

Historical Sources & References

• Francisco Garcés, On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer, ed. Elliott Coues, vol. 2 (1900). Garcés’s diary entries for June 25 and 26, 1776, and Coues’s note on pp. 347–348: the “Puerto de Bucareli,” named “for the great viceroy,” is “the Grand cañon of the Colorado itself”; “the impassability is for man, not for the river.”
• Lorin Blodget, Climatology of the United States (1857). “forming the Grand Cañon, in regard to which little is positively known” (p. 90); footnote, “The Grand Cañon of the Colorado as known to trappers and hunters, though not yet visited by scientific engineers” (p. 97).
• Joseph C. Ives, Report upon the Colorado River of the West (1861). The 1857–58 Army expedition. Chapter VII, “Mojave Valley to Big Cañon” (p. 93); “The famous ‘Big cañon’ was before us,” April 3 (p. 99); walls “over a mile high” and the “profitless locality” line (p. 110).
• William J. Palmer, Report of Surveys Across the Continent, in 1867–’68 (1869). Report dated December 1, 1868, printed in 1869: “the field of investigation was terminated by the Grand Cañon of the Colorado” (p. 29); C. C. Parry’s account of James White’s 1867 trip, headed “Grand Cañon of the Colorado” (p. 232).
• Samuel Bowles, Our New West (1869). Preface signed March 1869. “The Grand Canyon of the Colorado” (p. 27); “the great mocking mystery of our geography is the Grand Canyon of the Colorado,” the blank on government maps (p. 504); Powell, “an enthusiastic geologist of Illinois,” and his plan to enter the canyon (pp. 506–507).
• J. W. Powell, Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries (1875). The start at Green River City, May 24, 1869 (p. 8); chapter VIII, “The Grand Cañon of the Colorado,” and the August 13 entry (p. 80); “a deep gorge, known as the Grand Cañon” (p. 193).
• Barbara H. McKee, “Naming of the Grand Canyon,” Grand Canyon Nature Notes (National Park Service, November 1933). The park bulletin’s credit to Powell: “it was he who gave it the name Grand Canyon, probably shortly after this trip”; Ives and Newberry’s “Big Canon” and “Great Canon.”
• Earle E. Spamer, Naming the Grand Canyon (2024). Modern study of the names: “The origin of the name ‘Grand Canyon’ is unknown”; Blodget’s footnote as “by far the earliest known publication of the name.”
• GNIS feature 23907, Grand Canyon (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record: official name by Board decision of February 4, 1925, and the variant names Big Canon, Big Canyon, Great Canyon, Grand Canon, Grand Canon of the Colorado, Grand Canyon of the Colorado and Puerto de Bucareli.