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After thousands of years of Native American presence in the American Southwest, the first Europeans arrived in 1540 at the Grand Canyon's South Rim. Following another 300 years of missionaries, trappers, explorers, government surveyors and soldiers, Major John Wesley Powell and his party of nine made the first successful boat trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869. By the late 1800s, the spectacular beauty of the Canyon began to draw both visitors and businessmen alike. In 1901 the first Santa Fe passenger train arrived at the South Rim. Grand Canyon became a national monument in 1908 and on February 26, 1919, it was designated as the seventeenth national park. |
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