History
The Ancestral Puebloan People lived in the region from around 2000 to 700 years ago.
A party from Santa Fe led by Fathers Dominguez and Escalante, unsuccessfully seeking an overland route to California, made a five-month out-and-back trip through much of the Plateau in 1776-1777.
U.S. Army Major and geologist John Wesley Powell explored the area in 1869 and 1872 despite having lost one arm in the American Civil War. Using fragile boats and small groups of men the Powell Geographic Expedition charted this largely unknown region of the United States for the federal government.
Construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s and the Glen Canyon Dam in the 1960s changed the character of the Colorado River. Dramatically reduced sediment load changed its color from reddish brown (Colorado is Spanish for "colored" referring to its red color) to mostly clear. The apparent green color is from algae on the riverbed's rocks, not from any significant amount of suspended material. The lack of sediment has also starved sand bars and beaches but an experimental 12 day long controlled flood from Glen Canyon Dam in 1996 showed substantial restoration. Similar floods are planned for every 5 to 10 years.
Read more about this topic: Colorado Plateau
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of our era is the nauseating and repulsive history of the crucifixion of the procreative body for the glorification of the spirit.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Indeed, the Englishman’s history of New England commences only when it ceases to be New France.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)