Sunset Point

Legend People

The Paiute saw the hoodoos as people Coyote turned to stone

Surveys of the Paunsaugunt Plateau show that people have lived here for at least 10,000 years. The Paiute developed a mythology around the hoodoos. They believed the hoodoos were the Legend People, whom the trickster Coyote turned to stone for their bad deeds.

The Scot

A Scottish ship's carpenter settled below the amphitheater

Ebenezer Bryce was born in Dunblane, Scotland. He became a ship's carpenter, joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and left for Utah at seventeen. The church sent him and his wife Mary to the Paria Valley, and the family settled right below the main collection of hoodoos.

The name

He built a road for firewood, and the canyon took his name

Bryce grazed his cattle where the park is now. He built a road up to the plateau to bring down firewood and timber, and a canal to irrigate his crops and water his animals. Other settlers soon called the canyon at the end of his road Bryce's Canyon, and the name stuck.

The park

A national monument in 1923, a national park in 1928

Conservation advocates were alarmed by the damage from overgrazing, logging and unregulated visitation. President Warren G. Harding established Bryce Canyon National Monument on June 8, 1923. Bryce Canyon National Park followed on February 25, 1928, once the last of the land had been acquired.

35,835Acres in the park

The Paiute leave

Drought, overgrazing and flooding drove the Paiutes out

A combination of drought, overgrazing and flooding eventually drove the remaining Paiutes from the area. It also pushed the settlers to try to build a water diversion channel from the Sevier River drainage. That effort failed, and most settlers, including the Bryce family, left. Bryce moved his family to Arizona in 1880.