Colter spent six months visiting Ancestral Puebloan tower sites — the round towers at Hovenweep above all — photographing and measuring them, then built a clay model before a stone was laid. The result is a drum seventy feet high whose masonry is deliberately irregular: stones of unequal size, some left projecting, a pale band running partway round, openings punched without a system, so that the tower reads as something weathered and repaired rather than designed. Behind that skin is a steel and concrete frame, because it had to carry visitors up four floors and a stair. The Hopi Room on the first level was painted by Fred Kabotie, a Hopi artist from Songòopavi, with a mural of the Snake Legend; the walls above carry petroglyph-style work by Fred Geary copying panels then disappearing in New Mexico. It has been a National Historic Landmark since 1987, one of four Colter buildings listed together.
The Watchtower was a commercial building. It was designed for the Fred Harvey Company, the concessionaire that ran the hotels and shops along the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, and it was built to bring paying visitors to the eastern end of the South Rim; the railway supplied the engineering. Its form was taken directly from Ancestral Puebloan towers on the Colorado Plateau, and its interiors were painted by Hopi and other Native artists working to a Harvey Company brief. The National Park Service recognises eleven tribes as traditionally associated with the Grand Canyon: the Havasupai, Hopi, Hualapai, Navajo, Zuni and Yavapai-Apache, together with the Kaibab, Las Vegas, Moapa and San Juan Southern Paiute and the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah. The Park Service, the Grand Canyon Conservancy and those eleven tribes are converting Desert View into the agency's first Inter-tribal Cultural Heritage Site, replacing the concession with tribal interpretation and demonstration.
Wikidata Q2062022 · Commons: File:Desert View Watchtower Grand Canyon 09 2017 5545.jpg · Photo: Mariordo (Mario Roberto Durán Ortiz) · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0