The story was dismissed. No one asked the harder question — whether the system that would have recorded a discovery like this was ever built to tell the truth about it. Every institution that controlled this canyon had something to protect. Every gap in the record has a name attached to it.
I started this looking for a quick answer. I expected to find either solid evidence that the 1909 Arizona Gazette articles were a known hoax, or a clear paper trail showing what really happened. Neither of those things exist. What I found instead was something more interesting — a system that, by design or by accident, made it structurally impossible to verify anything that happened in that canyon during that window of time. This is a documentation of that system.
A Note on How to Read This Page
This page documents what I've found during an ongoing archival investigation. I am not arguing the 1909 articles are true. I am not arguing they're false. The story itself is my test case — a data point I'm using to examine how information was controlled in and around the Grand Canyon between 1906 and 1922, and whether the system that would have documented a real discovery was ever in a position to do so. Everything here is sourced. Where I'm speculating, I say so. Where I'm documenting a gap, I explain why the gap matters. Read it critically. That's the point.
In March and April of 1909, the Arizona Gazette published two articles describing an underground cave complex discovered deep in the Grand Canyon — Egyptian-style artifacts, carved passages, a chamber large enough to hold thousands of people. The explorer was named G.E. Kincaid. The expedition was said to be Smithsonian-sponsored. The Smithsonian has denied any record of it. The story has spent 115 years being passed around conspiracy forums and dismissed by anyone serious. I want to explain why that dismissal is premature — because no one has actually looked at whether the verification system was capable of finding it if it did.
Here's the problem with how this story gets treated. Someone says "prove the cave exists" and when you can't, the case is closed. But that only works if the system that would have documented a real discovery was actually functioning — neutrally, independently, with no financial stakes. What I found is that it wasn't. Not even close.
Think about what would need to be true for a significant discovery in the Grand Canyon in 1909 to leave a clean public record. The land would need to be openly accessible. The institution sponsoring the expedition would need to be transparent and subject to public accountability. The press would need to be willing to follow up. Local authorities would need to have no financial stake in what was found. None of those conditions existed in the Grand Canyon in 1909 — and I can document every single one of them.
The standard response to the Kincaid story is: "The Smithsonian has no record of it, therefore it didn't happen." But the Smithsonian is a private trust — not a federal agency — and is not fully subject to FOIA the way federal departments are. Their denial searched one specific department. The problem with that is explained in detail below. That denial is technically accurate and tells us almost nothing about whether something happened.
Here's what I actually found when I started pulling on this. The absences that people use to dismiss the story — no official record, no follow-up investigation, no Antiquities Act proceeding, no retraction — those same absences are what you'd expect to find even if something real had happened. If the people with the authority to document it had reasons to stay quiet, or simply weren't required to say anything, then absence proves nothing in either direction. That's the question this story has never had asked of it. Not "did the cave exist" — but "given who controlled this canyon and how, could we ever have known either way." When I started mapping that out, the answer kept coming back no. Here's the documentation.
The first thing I went looking for was evidence the story was a known fabrication. I didn't find it. In 1909, newspapers retracted demonstrable falsehoods quickly — libel liability was real and editors were cautious about it. The Arizona Gazette never retracted either article. Not in 1909, not ever. In 115 years, not one correction or retraction has been published. Neither article carried a byline — unusual for a story this significant, and a detail that has never been explained.
The standard dismissal leans on one data point: a rival Flagstaff paper called it a "Mulhatton" — slang for a tall tale — eleven days after publication. That is the entire documented contemporary skepticism. One competitor taking a shot at another competitor, which was routine in 1909 regional journalism. No named source. No investigation. No Smithsonian spokesperson. A Flagstaff paper calling a Phoenix paper a liar. That's the whole thing.
April 16, 1909 — Coconino Sun (Flagstaff): Calls the Gazette story a "Mulhatton" — rival paper dismissal, eleven days after second article, no named investigator, no follow-up.
May 1, 1909 — Deseret Evening News (Salt Lake City): Reprints the story in full, opening with "The Arizona Gazette is the authority for the following." A major out-of-state paper with no connection to the Gazette treating it as a credible source worth sharing with its own readership. No retraction from the Deseret Evening News either.
These are the only two documented contemporary press responses. One mocked it. One reprinted it as legitimate news. The geography matters here. The Coconino Sun was a Flagstaff paper — same region, same readership market, direct competitor to Phoenix papers. A rival taking a shot at a competitor is the most predictable thing in 1909 journalism, and it tells you almost nothing about whether the story was true. The Deseret Evening News is a different thing entirely. Salt Lake City. Different state, different market, no competitive relationship with the Gazette, no reason to run the story at all unless an editor in Utah read it and decided it was credible enough to share with his own readers. A regional fabrication designed to fool Phoenix readers doesn't travel four hundred miles and get treated as authoritative by a paper that gains nothing from reprinting it. Neither retracted. The story's reception in 1909 is not the unanimous dismissal it has been presented as — it is a split, and the Utah half of that split has been quietly dropped from the standard account.
The articles also read nothing like yellow journalism. Yellow journalism — the Hearst and Pulitzer era that people are thinking of when they say this — was loud, emotional, and designed to sell papers through outrage or spectacle. It called people in. It created urgency. It made readers feel like they were missing something if they didn't act. These articles do the opposite. Multiple times, the text explicitly warns readers that the area is government-restricted, that anyone who attempts to visit will be turned away, and that trespassers face arrest. You do not write that into a circulation stunt. Telling your readers to stay away is not how you sell papers.
The Egyptian framing also wasn't fringe in 1909 — it was mainstream. Theodore Davis's excavations in the Valley of the Kings had been producing significant finds and generating international press throughout the 1900s. Egyptology was everywhere. A story describing Egyptian-style artifacts in an American canyon would have landed in a cultural moment when that framing was genuinely exciting to a general readership — not because people were credulous, but because Egypt was the dominant archaeological conversation of the era. The Gazette wasn't inventing a weird fantasy. It was dropping a familiar reference into a familiar framework.
Then there are the geographic details. The article names specific, verifiable landmarks inside the canyon that are not on any tourist map. It names the Laguna Dam — a real structure completed that same month — as a specific navigational hazard Kincaid had to get past. It places the departure point at Green River, Wyoming, a real Union Pacific railroad town on the actual river route. It positions the cave at 42 miles upriver from El Tovar, the Santa Fe Railway's flagship hotel — a measurement that corresponds to a specific stretch of Marble Canyon. It names Yuma as the endpoint of the journey and gives a timeline consistent with actual river travel distance and conditions.
These are not the details a desk editor in Phoenix invents. These are the details someone who had physically traveled that river would know. The inner canyon geography described in the article is accurate in ways that would require either direct experience or access to survey records that were not publicly available in 1909.
A well-researched hoax is still a hoax. But nobody has cleared that bar with evidence — the story has been dismissed for 115 years without anyone producing a document showing it was investigated and found false.
Understanding why the Smithsonian denial doesn't settle this requires understanding what the Smithsonian actually is. The structure matters here.
The Smithsonian was created from the private bequest of James Smithson, a British scientist who left his entire estate to the United States with a specific condition: the funds were to be used for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." That original intent — seek out knowledge and share it freely — is worth keeping in mind as you read the rest of this section.
The Smithsonian is a trust instrumentality — not quite federal, not quite private. It receives federal appropriations and sits under Congressional oversight, but it is governed by a Board of Regents that is only partially elected or appointed through public processes. The Board includes the Vice President of the United States, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, three U.S. Senators, three members of the House of Representatives, and nine private citizen members. Those nine private citizens are appointed by a joint resolution of Congress, but they are not publicly elected and they are not required to represent the public interest in any formal sense. In practice they are drawn from the ranks of major donors, former politicians, corporate executives, and academic elites — people chosen for their access and influence, not their accountability to the public. The institution is publicly funded, privately governed, and answers to no single transparency mechanism.
Because it is a trust and not an executive agency, it is not subject to FOIA in the way federal departments are. There is no legal mechanism to compel a comprehensive search of its records. A denial from the Smithsonian is not equivalent to a denial from a federal agency that can be challenged through the Freedom of Information process.
There's also a record-keeping problem that goes beyond the legal structure. In the early 1900s — and to some extent still — the Smithsonian did not catalog everything it received or reviewed. Items could be examined and rejected, returned to senders, transferred to other institutions, or referenced only in internal correspondence without ever being formally accessioned into a collection. The absence of something from their catalog doesn't mean nothing arrived. It means nothing was formally added. Those are genuinely different things.
The official Smithsonian denial searched the Department of Anthropology. G.E. Kincaid, as described in the article, was a hunter and river explorer — not a credentialed archaeologist. A Smithsonian-sponsored expedition of this kind would more likely be organized through natural history, zoology, or survey divisions — none of which were searched. The denial found nothing in the drawer it opened, which doesn't tell us what's in the other drawers.
What I keep running into is a structure that allows each part of an institution to say "we have no record" while relevant documentation might exist in a completely different division, in a partner organization, or in personal correspondence that was never centralized. Nobody falsified anything — and that's almost the more unsettling part. The system didn't need to hide anything. It just wasn't built to leave a clean trail, and it's never been required to.
Standard dismissals point out that nobody named "G.E. Kincaid" or "Professor S.A. Jordan" appears in Smithsonian employment records. That's true. But when you look at the Smithsonian-affiliated scientific network actively operating in Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, and the American Southwest from the late 1800s through 1909, two real people surface whose names, institutional positions, and documented histories create an overlap specific enough to document.
Trevor Kincaid was a University of Washington zoologist working as a USDA Special Agent in 1908–1909. He conducted gypsy moth research in Russia in 1908 and Japan in spring 1909. His earlier Alaska field notes — from the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition — are held at the Smithsonian Institution Archives. That expedition was a major Smithsonian-organized scientific survey of the Alaskan coast, and Kincaid was one of its field scientists. He had a documented, direct Smithsonian connection going back a decade before the 1909 article.
David Starr Jordan was Stanford University's founding president and one of the most prominent scientists in America at the time. He was offered a senior Smithsonian position in 1906. He conducted a documented Grand Canyon ichthyological expedition in 1898 — he had physically been in that canyon eleven years before the article was published. Jordan was also on that same 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition alongside Kincaid. And Jordan appears as a named major correspondent in Kincaid's University of Washington papers, with an accession specifically dated 1909 — the year of the article.
What makes this worth documenting isn't that the names sound similar. It's that these are two real scientists with documented Smithsonian ties, a documented working relationship going back to 1899, one with documented prior Grand Canyon fieldwork, both active in the right institutional network at the exact right time, with a specific correspondence record between them in the year the article was published. That is a specific enough convergence to follow.
There's also a third overlap. A documented J.E. Kincaid from Lewiston, Idaho — Trevor Kincaid's hometown — is recorded in the same period. Same small town, same decade. It's in the record.
Federal travel records that would document Trevor Kincaid's exact movements during October–November 1908 have been requested. If those records place him clearly elsewhere, this thread closes. Either result is useful.
Trevor Kincaid's documented assignments place him in Russia in 1908 and Japan in spring 1909. Between those two assignments, there is a gap in any publicly available record I've been able to locate. The Arizona Gazette article states that Kincaid departed from Green River, Wyoming in October 1908 — which falls directly inside that gap.
As a federal Special Agent, Kincaid was legally required to file travel voucher expense reimbursements documenting his exact itinerary. Those federal records are traceable through the National Archives. Requests for those records are currently pending. I don't have them yet.
When they come in, one of two things will be true. Either the records place him clearly in transit or on assignment somewhere else in October 1908 — in which case this particular name overlap closes as a research thread. Or they show something else. Either result is useful information.
This is the part that keeps pulling me back. Even setting aside the names entirely — even treating the Kincaid story as pure fiction — what I've documented is that every point of control around the Grand Canyon in 1909 was held by an entity with a financial or political interest in managing what information came out of it.
The Santa Fe Railway controlled the only rail access to the South Rim and the entire water supply. They had spent millions developing the canyon as a tourist destination. A cave full of Egyptian artifacts would either be the greatest attraction in America or a catastrophic disruption to their carefully controlled narrative. Either way, they were not a neutral party.
The Fred Harvey Company operated every hotel, restaurant, and retail outlet at the South Rim under an exclusive contract with the Santa Fe. They controlled not just the logistics of who could stay and eat, but the cultural narrative of what the canyon meant — their publications, guided tours, and curated Indigenous art programs defined what visitors understood themselves to be seeing. The El Tovar guest register, the most complete record of who came through the canyon in any given year, was theirs to keep. The 1908 register is the one that's missing.
Ralph Cameron had filed hundreds of mining claims across the South Rim, controlling every major trail and access point. He held political office simultaneously — Territorial Delegate, then U.S. Senator. In 1922 he used his Senate seat to block Grand Canyon funding appropriations. The courts eventually ruled most of his mining claims legally invalid — the claims were found to be bogus filings, used not for genuine mining operations but to maintain physical and legal control over the land. He held the ground for decades through litigation even after the claims were ruled invalid. One man controlled the physical access to the canyon and the political levers at the same time, using claims that courts eventually found had no legitimate basis.
The Smithsonian — as described in the section above — had no legal obligation to centralize or publicize what it received. Due to its record-keeping practices in the early 1900s, even a thorough internal search wouldn't reliably surface everything that passed through. It is not subject to FOIA. No legal mechanism exists to compel a comprehensive search of its holdings even today. Its financial stake was subtler than the others — the Smithsonian's institutional credibility and federal funding relationships depended on maintaining controlled relationships with Congress and major donors. An unauthorized expedition, a politically complicated discovery, or a story that put the institution's name in a sensational newspaper article would be a problem regardless of what was found.
William Randolph Hearst owned the largest newspaper chain in America — the infrastructure that decided which stories reached a national audience and which ones didn't. Four years after the Gazette articles, he bought private land inside what would become Grand Canyon National Park from the man who sold specifically to cause problems for the railroad and the federal government. Hearst fought federal condemnation of that land in court for nearly 30 years. His estate then acquired the Hance asbestos claims — inner canyon land, north bank of the Colorado River, 4,500 feet below the rim — during the 1950s uranium boom on the Colorado Plateau. The federal government eventually recovered the Grandview rim land through condemnation proceedings. They never went back for the inner canyon parcel. The Hearst Estate still holds it today. To be precise about why this is notable: this is a family holding a 325-acre parcel of land that sits 4,500 feet below the canyon rim, accessible only by river or technical descent, generating no known revenue, for which no development is possible, inside a national park, for over 70 years. There is no obvious commercial or practical reason for a private family to hold that land. The federal government has had multiple opportunities to acquire it and hasn't. That is a fact worth sitting with.
You had a railroad, a hospitality monopoly, a politician, a private scientific trust, and a media mogul all simultaneously controlling different pieces of the same puzzle — none of whom had any incentive to encourage independent investigation, and none of whom were required to. That's not a cover-up. That's just how power worked in 1909. But it does mean that "no record was found" was the expected outcome regardless of what actually happened.
Five separate entities, five separate record systems, five separate reasons to let a story die quietly. None of them needed to coordinate. The structure did it for them — whether or not anything happened.
El Tovar Hotel opened at the South Rim in January 1905. It was the Fred Harvey Company's flagship property — a luxury hotel built by the Santa Fe Railway to anchor their Grand Canyon tourist operation. From the moment it opened, it was the center of South Rim social and logistical life. Everyone who came to the canyon came through El Tovar.
Guest registers from El Tovar survive in archival collections for 1905, 1906, and 1907. They then resume again from 1909 onward, covering 1909, 1910, 1911, and 1912. The 1908 register is not in the collection. One year — the year before the Gazette articles were published, the year the article says Kincaid began his river journey — is absent.
To be clear about what this means and doesn't mean: a missing register doesn't prove anyone removed it. Records go missing for mundane reasons — fires, floods, misplacement, poor archiving. But a guest register from the single most visited location at the South Rim, from the single year that matters to this investigation, being the sole gap in an otherwise continuous run of records — that's a data point. It belongs in the picture.
The Fred Harvey Company controlled the cultural narrative of the canyon — their publications, guided tours, and curated Hopi and Navajo art programs defined what visitors understood the canyon to be. They were not a neutral record-keeper. If something unusual happened at or near the canyon in 1908, the El Tovar register would be one of the most likely places to find a trace of it — a name, a date, an unusual party. That register is the one we can't check.
The absence of the 1908 register is noted as a gap in the record, not evidence of tampering. It joins a pattern of specific absences from the specific year and location that matter — each individually explainable, collectively worth documenting.
The article isn't vague about location. It places the cave entrance approximately 42 miles upriver from El Tovar — which puts it in a roughly six-mile stretch of Marble Canyon near Kwagunt Rapids, around river miles 56 to 62. North bank. Kaibab National Forest jurisdiction under the 1908 forest split. That's a specific enough claim to test against the record — and it's never been tested.
What makes this more than just a geographic detail: by April 1909, the Grand Canyon had already been a federally designated National Monument for over a year. Roosevelt signed the proclamation on January 11, 1908. The Antiquities Act of 1906 gave the Interior Department explicit authority — and legal obligation — to protect significant archaeological discoveries on federal land. A genuine find of the scale the Gazette described, reported in a national monument, should have triggered an immediate Interior Department response. No such proceeding was ever initiated. No Interior Department inquiry has been found.
That silence is either evidence the government knew the story was false — in which case someone at Interior made that determination and left no record of doing so — or evidence that the story was simply never formally investigated at all. Neither explanation is satisfying. The Antiquities Act existed precisely for situations like this. It was never invoked.
No cave. No artifacts. No field report or photograph of anything underground. What I do have keeps pulling in the same direction, and at some point the coincidences required to dismiss the story start to outnumber the facts required to take it seriously. I'll let you decide where that line is.
Two real scientists surface with names close enough to the article's to follow — both with documented Smithsonian ties, a documented working relationship, and correspondence between them specifically dated to the year of the article. One of them has a gap in his movements that lines up with the article's stated departure date. The story's geographic details — the Laguna Dam, the Green River departure, the 42-mile measurement from El Tovar — are all accurate and specific in ways that require either firsthand experience or access to survey records that weren't publicly available in 1909. The Antiquities Act, which should have triggered automatically on a genuine discovery of this scale, was never invoked. The hotel register for the one year that matters is missing from an otherwise continuous run. Forty NPS documents confirm the canyon wasn't systematically monitored until 1922 — thirteen years after the story. And the most powerful media figure in America has been sitting on the only private land inside the canyon for over a century with no obvious reason to hold it.
Individually, every one of those can be explained away. I know that. But they don't sit individually — they cluster around the same canyon, the same year, the same institutional network. That's what I can't stop coming back to.
There's also the structural side. Roosevelt's Executive Order 909 split forest administration along the Colorado River in mid-1908 — north bank became Kaibab, south bank became Coconino, separate records, no automatic cross-reference. The theorized cave location is on the north bank. Activity there in 1908 wouldn't appear in south-side paperwork at all. The gap isn't random. It's baked into how the system was organized.
The BAE's 30th Annual Report — the Smithsonian's own accounting of where every major staff member was in fiscal year 1908–1909 — shows no Grand Canyon expedition, no Kincaid, no Jordan. W.H. Holmes made a brief South Rim stop in May 1909, specifically to scout a Powell monument location. But the BAE was one arm. A natural history or zoological expedition would never appear in that report. It narrows things. It doesn't close them.
On the other side: nothing that confirms the story either. No field notes, no accession record, no letter mentioning an expedition, no trace of an unusual departure from Green River. The 700 photographs the article describes have never been specifically looked for — glass plate negatives from 1908 expeditions don't just disappear, they get deposited somewhere. Nobody's looked. The Gazette's editorial records, which would tell us who wrote the articles and what correspondence they generated, haven't been located. And the official Smithsonian denial searched one department — the same one that would never have handled an expedition led by a zoologist and an ichthyologist. That denial is the entire basis for 115 years of closed case.
The absence runs in both directions. That's actually what you'd expect from a system that was never built to leave a clean trail either way. What I keep turning over is that nobody has seriously asked whether it was. Until this.
This is ongoing. What's here is what I've found so far, and it's out publicly because it deserves scrutiny from people who disagree as much as people who don't. Evidence and leads — use the Tips form. Discussion — the thread is linked in the nav.
This is an archival investigation — it follows the paper trail, not the landscape. The question isn't whether a cave exists. It's whether the institutional record from 1906 to 1922 is complete enough to support any definitive conclusion about what happened in that canyon, and what I've found so far is that it isn't.
The 40 documents from Grand Canyon National Park are the only primary sources in hand. They're 1922 administrative correspondence — interagency logistics, infrastructure, land disputes — and they matter because they document exactly how federal control of the canyon operated thirteen years after the story. They show a mature, interlocking system. What they also show is how absent that system was in 1909.
What comes in shapes what comes next. Records requests are active across federal, university, and private repositories. Some institutions are legally required to respond. Others aren't. That pattern of response and non-response is part of the record too — institutions that won't or can't produce documents are as informative as ones that do.
When records arrive, they get documented here. When requests go unanswered, that gets documented too.
The standard dismissal of the Kincaid story goes like this: if something significant had been found in the Grand Canyon in 1909, there would be a record of it. There is no record. Therefore nothing was found. This is a reasonable starting point — but it assumes the record-keeping system was neutral, comprehensive, and accessible. None of those assumptions hold for this specific place and period.
The canyon in 1908 and 1909 was controlled by a small number of actors with overlapping financial and political interests: a senator who held every trail through disputed mining claims, a railroad that controlled all access and water, a hotel company that managed all lodging and cultural programming, a media empire that owned land inside the canyon and shaped what the national press reported, and a federal scientific institution that was exempt from public records law and had its own internal political pressures. This is not a list of neutral parties.
For a discovery to enter the official record in that environment, it would have needed to pass through at least one of those filters. A genuine discovery that any one of those actors had reason to keep quiet — or simply not document — would not produce a paper trail. The system wasn't designed to. The canyon wasn't monitored by federal rangers until 1919. There was no neutral observer.
What's documented here is harder to dismiss than what's been used to dismiss it.
The Spider Graph on the first tab is a visual map of everything I've documented — every institution, every person, every geographic location, every evidence gap — and the connections between them. The point isn't to show a web of conspiracy. The point is to show that every node on that map was active in the same place at the same time, and that most of them are connected to each other in ways that have nothing to do with the Kincaid story specifically.
Hover over any node to see which other nodes it connects to. Those connections light up. Click it to read what I know about it and why it's in the picture. The density of connections around the 1909 article node is what makes this interesting — it's not one suspicious overlap. It's two dozen of them, all clustering around the same canyon, the same decade, the same institutional network.
Use the filter buttons at the bottom to isolate specific categories — power actors, institutions, evidence gaps, indigenous connections, geographic locations. Each filter tells a different part of the same story.
The research is ongoing. Multiple archival collections across federal, university, and private repositories are currently being contacted and documented. This site will be updated as documents come in. Every new record either narrows the question or opens new ones. That's how this works.
Primary source documents obtained through archival research. Click any document to view full size. Documents are organized by source.
Sources for claims and statements made throughout this research. Divided into sources that have been personally examined, documents obtained, and records requests currently pending. An unexamined collection is not evidence of anything — the distinction between "examined and found nothing" and "not yet examined" is noted throughout. This page is updated as records come in.
The Arizona Gazette is not part of any current digital newspaper program. Both articles exist only on microfilm, accessible in person at the Arizona State Library in Phoenix. The founding documents of this entire story — the only contemporaneous accounts of the alleged discovery — are among the hardest primary sources on this list to independently verify. That is worth noting.
Records requests are currently in progress across multiple archival repositories. Specific areas under investigation are documented in the Research Context tab. This page will be updated as documents are received and examined.
If you have documents, records, local knowledge, or relevant information — this is how to share it. Tips go directly to the researcher. Nothing submitted here is made public without permission.
This research is ongoing and built entirely on primary sources and documented leads. If you have access to anything that might be relevant — records, photographs, documents, local knowledge, family histories, personal accounts, or anything touching on the 1906–1922 Grand Canyon period — I want to hear from you.
I'm interested in archival material of any kind: institutional records, personal correspondence, land and property documents, transportation records, photographs and glass plates, oral histories and family accounts, local newspaper archives, and Indigenous oral traditions relating to the inner canyon. First or second-hand accounts, regional lore, and passed-down stories are all welcome. Nothing is too small or too peripheral — if it touches this canyon, this period, or anyone named in this research, send it and let me decide if it's relevant.
I read everything submitted. Nothing is made public without permission.
Submit a Tip
Tips are private by default. Nothing you submit will be published, attributed, or shared without your explicit permission. If you submit anonymously, I cannot follow up — make sure your message includes everything relevant. I read everything sent through this form.
Prefer to discuss publicly?
The original research post is on Reddit. If you want to debate, question, or contribute to a public conversation about this research, that's the place to do it.
View Reddit Discussion Thread ↗This project does not assert that the events described in the 1909 Arizona Gazette articles occurred. It does not claim a cave complex exists in the Grand Canyon. It does not claim the Smithsonian concealed a discovery. It does not argue that Trevor Kincaid, David Starr Jordan, or anyone else named in this research was present at the Grand Canyon in 1908 or 1909.
If anything on this site reads as asserting the 1909 story is true, that's a failure of communication — not the intended meaning. The research question is historical and structural. The archaeological question is separate and is not what this project is investigating.
The question driving this research is not "did someone find a cave." It is: given who controlled the Grand Canyon between 1906 and 1922 — the physical access, the water, the lodging, the press, the federal science apparatus, the land — is the institutional record complete enough to support a definitive conclusion about anything that happened in that canyon during that period?
The preliminary answer, based on what has been examined so far, is no. That's not a claim that something was hidden. It's a finding about the structure of the record — that it was produced by a closed system with overlapping private interests, incomplete coverage, and no neutral observer until years after the relevant period. That finding stands on its own regardless of whether the 1909 articles describe real events.
Standard archival methodology applies throughout: primary sources over secondary, documented findings over inference, open questions clearly marked as open, and nothing asserted beyond what the examined records support. Where documents raise questions rather than answer them, those questions are recorded as threads — not conclusions.
This is independent research. No university affiliation. No institutional funding. No commercial interest. Not peer reviewed — and I'm not pretending it is. It's being published publicly because the primary source documents deserve to be accessible, and because the structural argument is worth scrutiny from people who disagree with it as much as from people who don't.
The research is ongoing. This site will be updated as records come in. Findings may change. The absence of a finding in an unexamined collection means nothing — it means unexamined.
The standard position is that the 1909 articles represent a hoax, supported by the Smithsonian's denial and the absence of corroborating records. This research doesn't reject that position — it examines the conditions under which the denial was produced and asks whether those conditions were neutral enough to treat the denial as definitive.
The denial searched one department. The people described in the article were not anthropologists — they were a zoologist and an ichthyologist. A denial that searched the wrong department is a different data point than one that searched comprehensively. Examining that distinction is not conspiracy thinking. It's basic source criticism.
The conventional dismissal has rested for 115 years on the story seeming implausible — not on anyone having seriously examined the institutional record first. This project is examining that record. The conclusion may well be that the story is a fabrication. But that conclusion should come from evidence, not from assumption.
Researchers, archivists, or anyone with access to relevant primary source material — see the Submit a Tip tab in the navigation.