Julius F. Stone and the Birth of Colorado River Adventure Tourism, 1900–39

Julius F. Stone (1855-1947), a Columbus, Ohio banker and financier, began his love affair with the spectacular Canyon Country of southeastern Utah curiously– he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a failed gold dredging scheme.  Despite this rough introduction to the harsh realities of “boom and bust” in this remote desert environment, Stone went on to be one of the earliest tourists in the region, exploring it for no other reason than sightseeing and adventure, and taking the first pleasure trip by boat down the Colorado River.  For this reason, Stone exemplifies our larger cultural movement from viewing peripheral and “other” environments in merely extractive, utilitarian terms, to viewing them more as aesthetically, even spiritually valuable landscapes.
There are secondary themes that this paper will touch upon: broad historical topics of environment, tourism, masculinity, and the United States’ movement into a more connected, mechanized, “modern” age.  The specific place that Stone explored was just as important as his own perspective to these ideas.  In a time when many well-known national parks such as Yosemite and Yellowstone were undergoing increasing development for more mass visitation– road construction, hotels, increased wildlife management– the Canyon Country in the 1910s was still very much an unknown and even forbidding area to its infrequent visitors.  In this sense, Stone saw himself as less a “tourist,” and more an “explorer,” in the masculine, broadly-educated, upper-class sense of such as contemporaries Theodore Roosevelt or Zane Grey