Ebenezer Bryce and the Railroad That Sold the Hoodoos
Near Bryce Canyon, Utah
The man the park is named for spent five years here and left. Ebenezer Bryce was a Scottish-born carpenter who had converted to the Latter-day Saint faith and followed the settlement corridor south. He homesteaded a ranch at the base of the canyon amphitheater in eighteen seventy-four, dug an irrigation ditch from the Paria River to water his fields, and by most accounts found the canyon more inconvenient than beautiful. His reported description of the place was: "a hell of a place to lose a cow." By eighteen eighty he had moved to Arizona.
The formal tourism development of what is now Bryce Canyon National Park began in the nineteen twenties and was driven not by appreciation of the landscape but by a railroad company's need to sell train tickets. The Utah Parks Company, a subsidiary of the Union Pacific Railroad, recognized that the red-rock canyon country of southern Utah could serve the same function the Grand Canyon served for the Santa Fe Railway: scenery as a commodity to sell Pullman car reservations.
Union Pacific built the lodges, established the bus tours that connected Bryce to Zion and the Grand Canyon, and produced the Art Deco promotional posters that made these landscapes recognizable to a national audience. The parks infrastructure you are using today, the scenic drives, the lodge at the rim, the ordered sequence of viewpoints, was designed by a corporation to maximize the number of passengers it could move through a landscape in a single day.
Ebenezer Bryce is buried in Arizona. The canyon he dismissed is one of the most visited landscapes in the American Southwest.
