First built in 1929, the first bridge on this site, initially called Grand Canyon Bridge (and renamed Navajo Bridge five years later), was constructed to replace passage across the Colorado River and Marble Canyon by ferry. In 1873, at a location 5 miles north of the bridges, a landing called Lees Ferry had been established, named after the original ferryman who helped establish and maintain the crossing.

John D. Lee had had a checkered past as a Mormon church leader when he was sent to manage the ferry crossing on the Colorado to help Mormon settlers moving south into Arizona to get across the river canyon. His commission for that post was significant not only for the service it would provide, but also to put he and his family in a remote location. The river crossing at Lees Ferry was the only place in 700 miles that pioneers could get across the Colorado River and its surrounding canyons.

A polygamist, Lee and his families came to the locale after he was made a principal scapegoat for the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, where a Southern Utah Mormon militia, with Southern Paiute allies, attacked and murdered 120 emigrants in a wagon train passing through Mountain Meadows, headed for California from Arkansas. Paranoia about federal military action against Mormonism and an invasion of Mormon territories at the time fed into the Mormon militia’s actions, but the basis for their brutality lay largely in their sense of hysteria.

Lee, after two trials, would finally be indicted by the federal government, condemned, and executed by firing squad- and the only militia participant in the massacre to be so- twenty years after his participation.

In 1995, a second stronger and wider bridge for motor traffic was completed next to the first, and the initial Navajo Bridge was made into a pedestrian bridge.