Titan Of Chasms: The Grand Canyon Of Arizona

In 1906, the Grand Canyon remained one of America's last great wildernesses, a place that had only recently opened to mass tourism but still retained its terrifying, primordial magnificence. This collection gathers three voices that knew the Canyon intimately: explorer John Wesley Powell, who first navigated its rivers and mapped its depths; travel writer Charles A. Higgins, whose lyrical prose captured the Canyon as few could; and Southwest historian Charles F. Lummis, who traced its ancient human stories. Together, they offer a window into how turn-of-the-century Americans encountered the sublime, a word they used without irony. These are not guidebooks but love letters to a landscape so vast it remade everyone who stood at its edge. The writing pulses with the particular awe of people seeing something that had never been fully seen before. For readers who want to understand how Americans once thought about wild places, before nature became a resource and the Canyon became a national park, these essays offer something rare: the genuine shock of encountering the numinous.