WILLIAM H. HOLMES, PREMIER ARTIST OF GRAND CANYON

Too immense, too spectacular, too overwhelming is the Grand Canyon ever to be adequately described. Yet since men first saw the Canyon they have tried as perhaps they must to capture in word or picture something of its mighty essence. From these countless endeavors ARIZONA HIGHWAYS now presents some especially significant portrayals of the Canyon: drawings made in 1880 by William H. Holmes. These drawings are among the finest representations of the Canyon ever put on paper; their wide vistas and amazing detail seem almost to evoke reality. But equally interesting are these drawings for their history. They are among the earliest pictures ever made of the Grand Canyon, and are reminders of a time when very few had experienced the Canyon's surpassing beauty. William H. Holmes was certainly one of the most remarkable of those few, and thus an appreciation of his pictures lies at least partly in knowing something of the artist himself, and of how he came to the Canyon. And in learning this we can retell another story of man's wonder at the grandest of canyons.

William Henry Holmes was born in 1846 in rural Ohio, and there he grew up to become a school teacher. Somehow he learned to draw and paint, though probably he had little anticipation of ever being noted as an artist. But then one day

Premier Artist of Grand Canyon

BY JEROLD G. WIDDISON on a long-awaited trip to Washington, D.C., he happened to be touring the museum exhibits of the Smithsonian Institution. He was sketching a mounted tropical bird when a member of the museum staff stopped to look over his shoulder. The museum needed just such an artist as this young man and in less than an hour Holmes was started on what was to be his life's work. Thereafter he was associated with the Smithsonian and other government agencies almost throughout his life. In 1872, the year after his "discovery," he was invited to accompany the annual summer expedition of Professor F. V. Hayden's "U. S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories." This exploration was Holmes' first experience beyond the western frontier, but during the course of the trip he drew what are probably the earliest pictures of the Grand Teton range, and also many sketches of the Yellowstone country. The wonders of these areas sparked his imagination to know more of how nature had fashioned them, and he avidly took up geology. By 1874 Hayden had promoted him to assisting geologist, and in 1875 he was in charge of a division of the expedition, this time exploring in the Mesa Verde region of Colorado Territory. Here he discovered many prehistoric Indian ruins and drew fascinating sketches of them and of the cliffs and canyons in which they were perched. Now his interests were fired again to include archaeology. At the time, of course, the study of prehistoric man in the New World was but a new subject, and Holmes had the privilege of entering it on the dusty ground floor of these unknown ruins. From the work that he began here he is judged among the founders of American archaeology and anthropology. Throughout the '70's Holmes drew scores of views of the natural wonders of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, most of them published in the official Hayden reports. He became a master of landscape illustration and was by far the best artist in the government service. He also quickly became one of the most capable geologists of the time. It was perhaps only natural, then, that there should come an opportunity to portray the greatest of wonders, the Grand Canyon. And only natural that the opportunity should come, as it did in 1880, from the man foremost in the human history of the Canyon, Major John Wesley Powell.

"PANORAMIC VIEWS FROM THE SUMMIT OF MOUNT TRUMBULL"

Every year since his great voyage down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869, Major Powell had been exploring in the plateau country with his own official "U. S. Geographical and Geological Survey." He and his men had tramped all over Utah and Northern Arizona and had long puzzled over the forces that created the magnificently sculptured landscapes. They had also found many of the answers. Here in the canyons and plateaus they were discovering and formulating new and basic principles of modern geology and also of ethnology, Indian linguistics, and resource inventory. And now in 1880 Powell was bent on working out in detail the geologic story of the Grand Canyon.

The Major regretfully knew, however, that the mounting press of business in Washington would at last prevent him from getting to the West that summer. So rather than put off further his study of the Canyon, he offered it to his chief associate, Captain Clarence E. Dutton; and together they planned a careful and comprehensive exploration. But only William H. Holmes did they consider for the tasks of artist and cogeologist. Fortunately Holmes' willing services could be obtained, for he and Dutton were both now members of the U. S. Geological Survey, which Congress had just formed to consolidate the "surveys" of Hayden, Powell, and others. Yet it is to the inspiration and years of preparation of Major Powell that the Grand Canyon expedition of 1880 must be credited.

Dutton and Holmes were by far the best men for such an expedition as this was to be. Dutton was a spectacular geologist and a poetic writer, and Holmes a geologist-artist who possessed a genius for depicting the face of the earth. Together they portrayed both the structure and the grandeur of the Canyon.

Since most of Powell's expeditions had been in the area north of the Canyon, it was natural that Dutton and Holmes should concern themselves mainly with the North Rim. To reach it they traveled south from Salt Lake City hiring men and obtaining horses and pack animals as they went. From their final departure point at Kanab, Dutton sent out the party's topographers: two to map the upper end of the Grand Canyon and the Marble Canyon, and two to cross over at Lee's Ferry and map a part of the South Rim.

Dutton and Holmes made their own first destination the middle section of the Canyon that lonely and still unknown area now in Grand Canyon National Monument. From the last outpost of civilization at Pipe Spring they headed southwest across the hot and barren Kanab and Uinkaret plateaus, slowly making their way from one to another of the scattered little "water pockets" in the rocky surface. At length they reached the base of Mt. Trumbull, and water, and here they camped for almost a month. Every day there was something new and spectacular to explore: flexed and broken plateaus, dikes in canyon walls, cinder cones, lava cascades. But of all wonders anywhere, one of the most amazing lay before them when they passed down through the Canyon's upper walls along Toroweap Wash to stand at the frightful and magnificent brink of the inner gorge. Holmes' panorama here shows dramatically and truthfully the endless expanse of bare rock, with the Colorado River roaring silently three thousand feet below.

Later, forty miles northeastward, they climbed up to the high forest of the Kaibab Plateau and the Grand Canyon seen by the majority of today's North Rim visitors. What a different world this was. Camped deep in the forest by a spring known to Indians as Parusiwompats, Dutton wrote: A more delightful camping place in summer or early autumn cannot be found. The grand old pines, the large graceful spruces, [the] palegreen aspens are abundant, but not too dense; the grass is knee-deep and swarming with gay flowers. The ravine rambles away as an open glade in the forest, and soon winds out of sight. Beneath a clump of spruces the spring sends forth a slender thread of clear pure water, almost icy cold, and a few yards from its fountain the waters disappear. If any one would know how great a luxury pure cold water is, let him drink of Parusiwompats, and afterwards pitch his tent by the water pockets of the Kanab and Uinkaret deserts. Finding their way through the forest, they came to the Rim, and the first of many unforgettable views.

Wherever we reach the Grand Cañon in the Kaibab it bursts upon the vision in a moment The forest reaches to the sharp edge of the cliff and the pine trees shed their cones into the fathomless depths below Sitting upon the edge we contemplate the most sublime and awe-inspiring spectacle in the world.

"THE GRAND CANON AT THE FOOT OF THE TOROWEAP" remains as one of man's finest graphic illustrations. Here Holmes' panorama shows dramatically and truthfully the endless expanse of bare rock, with the Colorado River three thousand feet below. From the Atlas

"PANORAMA FROM POINT SUBLIME"

Reproduced from three separate panels, each complete in itself, but meticulously drawn to fit together resulting in one vast, detailed extra wide panoramic view.

From the Atlas accompanying Clarence E. Dutton's TERTIARY HISTORY OF THE GRAND CANON DISTRICT, U. S. Geological Survey Monographs, Volume 2, 1882.

Holmes and Dutton dwelt long at the magnificent promon-tory they named Point Sublime. Here is perhaps the finest singleview of the Canyon, and one in which they could interpretboth the whole of the chasm and its endless details. Holmesoccupied himself with drawing a set of three panoramas, eachcomplete in itself, but all fitting together in one vast presen-tation of the extraordinary view. Day after day he sat for hourson some rock or log while his pencils and pens fretted and flew.To these drawings, and to their maps, Dutton keyed the rockstrata, and thus interpreted for the first time the great layeringof color and cliff that here tells the history of the earth. Then to his notebook he described the mighty rock temples risingand falling away before them on the nearer side of the Canyon,the speck of river visible far below, the distant walls and buttesof the South Rim.

To the conception of its vast proportions must be added some notionof its intricate plan, the nobility of its architecture, its colossal buttes,its wealth of ornamentation, the splendor of its colors. All of theseattributes combine with infinite complexity to produce a whole whichat first bewilders and at length overpowers.

Amid it all was the daily play of light and shade, of windand weather, of sunrise and sunset, and of night rising up fromthe depths of the Canyon.

In truth, the tone and temper of the landscape are constantly varying It is never the same, even from day to day, or even from hour to hour. In the early morning its mood and subjective influences are usually calmer and more full of repose than at other times, but as the sun rises higher the whole scene is so changed that we cannot recall our first impressions. Every passing cloud, every change in the position of the sun, recasts the whole The direction of the full sunlight, the massing of the shadows, the manner in which the side lights are thrown in from the clouds determine these modulations, and the sensi-tiveness of the picture to the slightest variations in these conditions is very wonderful. Then off to the west of them lay a view where nothing is distinctively visible, but where the imagination perceives more than the eye. There is a dim vision of cliff upon cliff andthrongs of richly-carved buttes a land of marvels indeed, but alsoa land of terrors and desolation.

Into that land they ventured, to Galahad Point, out to thetip of the Powell Plateau, then down into the Tapeats Amphitheatre. Here they descended all the way to the Colorado,slowly clambering down the slopes and through the cliffs, overa gap in the mighty Redwall, past the gushing Thunder Springs,into Sunrise Valley, and then on all fours out along a narrowpassage of Deer Creek, with sheer cliffs above and rushingwater below.

All summer Dutton and Holmes roamed the North Rim.They visited all the viewpoints of today's visitors, and theygave names to many of the natural features Cape Royal,Cape Final, Vishnu's Temple, and others. Both men spentlong hours and days in work, thought, and amazement. On theone hand was scientific curiosity, expressed in mapping, measuring, climbing up and down the rocks, in trying to determine of what the Canyon was made and how it came to be. Always the mind came into "direct contact with the enormity of the facts by a single glance of the eye," and often the geologic story was told "so plainly that a child could read and understand it."

But at least the season was growing into the cool days of October, and it was time to leave the Canyon again in solitude. The work was quickly finished as well as could be, the notes and maps and drawings were carefully packed away, and the men of the expedition gathered and turned toward civilization.

Dutton's report of the expedition appeared in 1882 as The Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District, with an atlas of maps and illustrations. This work remains today both a landmark of geologic study and one of the most beautiful reports of exploration ever published. Illustrating it are more than twenty of Holmes' drawings, plus a dozen larger panoramas in the atlas.

From these pictures Holmes must be considered the "pre-mier" artist of the Canyon if not quite first in time, then certainly first in ability. Yet Holmes was indeed only the third artist to see the Canyon. The first had been one Baron F. W. von Egloffstein, who accompanied Lt. Joseph C. Ives up the lower Colorado in 1857. But the baron's two or three draw-ings of the lower end of the Canyon are restricted views of an extremely narrow vertical gorge, as though one were peering into a trench through a keyhole. The rocky walls of his pictures are unlike those of almost any canyon, and particularly unlike the great terraces and cliffs of the Grand Canyon.

The second artist was the celebrated Thomas Moran, who did a little sketching in the North Rim area while briefly accompanying Powell in 1873. Moran's drawings and paintings always departed somewhat from reality, although he said they thus covered the true impression of nature upon himself. Several woodcuts by Moran appear in Dutton's History, but these he drew mainly from field sketches by Holmes.

Holmes' own purpose, however, was plainly that of scientific illustration, which presupposed realistic treatment of the subject. Thus his panoramas are sharp and clear to the horizon, and they show in intricate detail the true arrangement and structure of the rocky landscape.

Even so, Holmes made his illustrations not only truth but art. His artistry is of a factual sort, much like that of today's expert Canyon photographers. One of his methods was the one necessarily most used with the camera, that of composing the picture by patiently moving around until the scene appears in best arrangement. Holmes might, for example, include a portion of the Canyon rim in the foreground to better indicate perspective, but he would not have this interrupt the impression of peering directly into the gulf. He also had other methods that the camera does not. He could vary the amount of detail in his pictures, sometimes fading out objects near the edges. Or he could heighten the contrast of light and dark, or omit shadows here and include them there, all to achieve the effect of reality.

Now, unfortunately, the type of drawing at which Holmes so excelled has largely passed from fashion, even as geologic illustration. Few are the geologists or artists today who have any facility at this painstaking labor, and fewer still are those who have long days to spend on the rim of a canyon preparing a single drawing, as Holmes did.

As for Holmes himself, even he left this art somewhat behind as his interests in archaeology and anthropology came more to the fore. For a time he served as both Curator of Anthropology at Chicago's Field Museum and Professor of Anthropic Geology at the University of Chicago. Then in 1897 he returned to Washington and the Smithsonian as curator of anthropology at the National Museum; and in 1902 he succeeded Major Powell as chief of the Bureau of American Ethnology. In 1910 he became curator and finally director of what is now the National Collection of Fine Arts. This position he held until he retired, which was less than a year before his death in 1933. In his eighty-six years Holmes had achieved a reputation as geologist, anthropologist, archaeologist, and artist. He had combined talents that few other men possessed singly to give lasting value to many pioneer contributions to knowledge. But never again had he drawn quite such wonderful pictures of quite such wonderful scenes as those sketched long ago in 1880 on the Canyon's North Rim.☐☐☐