Kincaid's Cave: The Grand Canyon Egyptian Cave That Never Was, Arizona

On April 5, 1909, the Arizona Gazette, a Phoenix evening paper, ran a startling story on its front page. Under the headline "Explorations in Grand Canyon," it claimed that an explorer had discovered a vast cavern complex high in the canyon walls, and that a Smithsonian-backed team was now excavating it. Inside, the paper said, were chambers, mummies, hieroglyphs and artifacts that looked Egyptian or "Oriental," evidence, it suggested, of an ancient people from across the ocean. The paper named two men. G.E. Kincaid was a river traveler who said he'd found the cave. A Professor S.A. Jordan of the Smithsonian supposedly came to excavate it. According to the article, the entrance sat about 1,500 feet down a sheer cliff, in the Marble Canyon region, roughly 42 miles from El Tovar. The Gazette had mentioned Kincaid once before, on March 12, 1909, in a story about his trip down the Colorado River. That earlier article said nothing about Egyptian artifacts or a cave. After the April 5 story, the trail goes cold. No photographs, no artifacts, no follow-up excavation report. When people later asked the Smithsonian about it, the answer was consistent. Its Department of Anthropology searched its files and found no mention of a Professor Jordan, of Kincaid, or of a lost Egyptian civilization in Arizona. There's no record that either man existed, and no Grand Canyon excavation matching the story. No verified evidence of the cave has ever been found. So why does the story survive? Partly because the Grand Canyon really does have an Egyptian connection, just not the one the Gazette described. In the 1870s and 1880s, the geologist Clarence Dutton began a tradition of naming the canyon's buttes after mythological deities from around the world, and later surveyors kept it going into the early 1900s. That's why maps of the canyon show Isis Temple, Horus Temple, Osiris Temple, the Tower of Set and Cheops Pyramid alongside Shiva, Vishnu and Brahma Temples. The Tower of Set was first named "Temple of Sett" in 1879 by the painter Thomas Moran, because a niche in its wall reminded him of temples along the Nile.