The combined effort of two military bands playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" generated sound waves that "reverberated from cliff to cliff and from gorge to gorge, from one side of the great canyon to the other in inspiring sublimity that deeply affected the entire assemblage," D.S. Spencer reported.
The general passenger agent for Oregon Short Line Railroad, who shared his impressions with the Deseret News, was one of hundreds who assembled at Zion National Park for its dedication on Sept. 15, 1920. President Woodrow Wilson had signed legislation Nov. 19, 1919, making Zion the first national park in the Beehive State. For 10 years previously, it had been Mukuntuweap National Monument.An evening of revelry in the canyon preceded official morning ceremonies. Folks danced to the "acceptable" music of competing local bands, told stories around a huge bonfire and then bedded down to await the formalities of the next day. "The state furnished cots and mattresses in sufficiency, but through some oversight, there were no blankets," Spencer recounted. Enough coverings were scraped up for the women, but men bundled in their overcoats to fend off the nighttime chill.
W.T. Mather, national parks superintendent, was a special guest, arriving with a contingent from Los Angeles who traveled to Utah "by machine." The purpose of national parks, he said, was to provide recreation centers for Americans.
Salt Lake Mayor C. Clarence Neslen noted with pride Utah's efforts to show the country it had "as fine a group of scenic attractions as could be found anywhere in the United States."
Noted Western explorer John Wesley Powell had argued to retain Mukuntuweap as the official park name, but he lost out to those who supported the much more manageable "Zion." Powell and two companions had traveled through the Parunuweap gorge, the east arm of the bifurcated canyon, in 1872. Mukuntuweap was the name they gave to the north gorge. Both narrow canyons had been painstakingly carved out of the desert by the tireless Virgin River.
Mormon pioneers were sent into Utah's Dixie in the early 1850s, among them Isaac Behunin, who had endured the many persecutions of the church before it came West. Settling into the area north of the canyon to farm and teach his religion to local Indians, he eventually ventured into the canyon in search of arable land. Awed by the other-worldly splendor of the canyon, he called it Zion because it represented to him the long-awaited place of peace and rest for the Saints. He built two homes in the canyon for his polygamous families and farmed.
When church leader Brigham Young visited Behunin's Zion, however, he proclaimed that it was NOT Zion. Some local residents took his pronouncement literally and for a time called the area Not Zion.
Before Behunin settled down to farm the narrow canyon, it had been visited by other pioneering Mormons. The first to enter the canyon likely was Nephi Johnson, who was sent to scout the area in the early 1850s. He was so little impressed that he didn't report his discovery of the fantastic canyon.
A few years later, Joseph Black, one of the first residents of Springdale, turned a more appreciative eye to the canyon. His enthusiastic reports of the wonders of the canyon gave it another temporary name, "Joseph's Glory," by people who were sure he was exaggerating.
Development of automobile and rail travel brought more visitors to the canyon and its fame spread. In 1911, Wesley King of The Salt Lake Commercial Club, with his wife, hired a team and buggy at Marysvale and explored the canyon. He proclaimed it without comparison throughout the world. In 1913, Gov. William Spry also went to the canyon and after a horseback trek into The Narrows decided it should be a national park. He and others urged Congress to set it aside as a national treasure to protect its unique scenery.
Some who visited were inspired to name particular features of the park according to the impression on their imaginations.
"Boys, I have looked for this mountain all my life, but I never expected to find it in this world. This mountain is the Great White Throne," Methodist Minister Frederick Vining Fisher of Ogden declared. His title for the park's most distinctive formation stuck. His guide, Claudius Hirschi, suggested the name for the three prominent peaks still known as the Three Patriarchs.
Among those who visited the park soon after its dedication was a group of adventurous University of Utah coeds who were determined to establish the "right of women to wear pants and boots." The group included Dora Montague, Nell Creer, Ann Widtsoe, Melba Dunyon, Mildred Gerrard and Catherine Levering. Their leader was Mrs. A.V. Peterson, a "rope-totin', back-packin' " professor ahead of history's curve.
Photographers snapped the women challenging the cliffs and waterfalls of the canyon. Their work appeared in newspapers around the world. An amazed George C. Warding got "the shock of his life" when a picture of his fiancee, Miss Montague, appeared in a newspaper in London, England, where he was serving an LDS mission.
Montague was suspended on a rope over a Zion chasm, calmly sketching Indian ruins on the opposite canyon wall. "I really never had such a thrill before . . . with nothing under me but a big cavity in the mountain's wisdom tooth," she reported. One of the group killed a rattlesnake and cut off its head as proof.
In the end, a writer analyzed the women's escapade as an event to help blaze trails into the park, but mainly to confirm "the 1920s styles in outing togs for the thousands of American women who will spend the summer in the great outdoors."
In June 1923, President Warren G. Harding discarded his coat, collar and tie and tied a large blue bandanna around his neck to venture into The Narrows. He gave a hastily assembled local band fodder for their scrapbooks when he declared that "I've never heard better drumming in my life."
In the 1930s, the canyon became a natural amphitheater for Easter pageants of the type that were enjoying a revival across the country. Thousands gathered at the foot of the Great White Throne for productions sponsored by local LDS stakes.
David Flanagan, however, looked beyond the spectacular scenery to envision a practical industry. If he could get timber from the top of the mesa to the bottom of the canyon, he would have a going business. He first had the idea in the spring of 1888 when he was 15, while exploring the red ledges east of Springdale.
For 10 years he tried to generate interest in his idea, but it was the general consensus that a cable that long couldn't work. Undaunted, in 1901 he and his brother Will built the cable apparatus themselves. Eventually it brought hundreds of thousands of board feet of lumber from forests above the canyon to its floor, 2,700 feet below. To outfit the two towers on the lip of the canyon, they carried huge amounts of equipment, including bales of wire weighing 100 pounds each, up the cliff. The cable stretched 3,300 feet to make the drop and a load of lumber (or grain or vegetables or dairy products or other goods) could make the trip in about two minutes.
The Flanagans believed they had fulfilled a prediction by Brigham Young that "lumber would come flying from those high ledges like hawks flying."
A few hardy souls tried the trip up or down the cables that usually carried lumber. A dog named Sharkey traveled by cable to the top in 1904, and a terrified load of pigs made the reverse trip. In its 24 years of operation, three people were killed on or near the cable, two by lightning and one who was sightseeing with a Boy Scout group. The project was abandoned when the park was created.
As thousands and then hundreds of thousands of tourists viewed the amazing canyon features, the inability of mere words to describe the handiwork of the Virgin River became apparent. To many, as it had been to the early I-oo-gune-intz Indians, the canyon seemed to be, in an artistic sense, the home of the gods.
Even those sent to map and analyze the canyon found themselves groping for words. Clarence E. Dutton of the U.S. Geological Survey apparently forgot he was a scientist when he reported in 1880-81 "chocolate, maroon, purple, lavender, magenta, with broad bands of toned white, are laid in horizontal belts, strongly contrasting with each other, and the ever varying slope of the surface cuts across them capriciously so that the sharply defined belts wind about like the contours of a map. . . . The sumptuous bewildering mazy effect is all there, but when we attempt to analyze it in detail, it eludes us."