Arizona

History

Early settlement

Prehistoric peoples

Although the region's physical environment may appear inhospitable to habitation and subsistence, Arizona contains some of North America's oldest records of human occupation. Relics of material culture are evidence that humans most likely lived in Arizona more than 25,000 years ago. For most of this prehistoric period, those people lived in caves and hunted animals, many species of which no longer exist. Scholars believe that the Cochise culture, made up of people living in what is now southeastern Arizona, began more than 10,000 years ago and lasted until 500 BC or later.

During the past 2,000 years, the prehistoric societies that developed within Arizona were highly organized and advanced. Many of these Native American groups lived in durable masonry villages called pueblos (from the Spanish word meaning “town” or “village”). Arizona has become one of the most intensively excavated parts of the New World for archaeological research on this period. This group of prehistoric cultures, which are better known than their predecessors, includes the Hohokam, Ancestral Pueblo (Anasazi), Mogollon, Sinagua, Salado, Cohonina, and Patayan. The nomadic Apache and Navajo probably arrived in the region some time between AD 1100 and 1500.

The Spanish period

The documented record of the European explorers and settlers of the region began in Mexico in the 1530s with Spaniards who wrote about the legend of Eldorado and the Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola. In 1539 Fray Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan priest, entered Arizona in search of riches and hoping to find Native Americans to convert to Christianity. Fearful of the hostility he faced from the indigenous people, Fray Marcos returned to Mexico and reported misleadingly about the places he visited. The following year Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led a large well-armed expedition to Arizona in an effort to claim for Spain what is known today as the American Southwest. In contrast to Marcos's reports, Coronado wrote favorably of the area, notably to the ruler of New Spain, Viceroy Mendoza. Members of Coronado's expedition visited the Grand Canyon and the Hopi pueblos, while Coronado himself traveled as far as eastern Kansas before returning to Mexico.

In 1583 members of the Hopi tribe guided the Spanish explorer Antonio de Espejo to the site of present-day Jerome. He was disappointed to find copper and other nonprecious metal ores instead of the gold he sought. By 1675 several Franciscan missionaries had established themselves at the Hopi villages, but five years later the Hopi rose up and drove the Spaniards out as part of the regionwide Pueblo Rebellion. In the early 1700s Roman Catholic missionaries established churches in the upper Santa Cruz valley in southern Arizona. During that period other Hispanics also settled there but were confined to the valley by Apache raiders. In the 18th century priests visited various parts of northern Arizona, including the Hopi villages, but made no serious attempt at religious conversion.

After the successful revolution that brought Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821, the new government ordered the missions in Arizona to close. Arizona was ceded to the United States as part of New Mexico in 1848; it became independent of New Mexico in 1863. Following the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, when Mexico sold Arizona's southernmost region to the United States, only a few scattered and isolated Mexican American ranches remained, all of them located near the Mexican border.

Statehood and growth

Until the Mexican-American War (1846–48), only a few Americans—explorers, soldiers, trappers, sheep drivers—had visited Arizona. In 1851 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sent several expeditions into Arizona to find a suitable route on which to build a wagon road to California. To protect travelers, miners, and other settlers from Native Americans, the U.S. government began to locate army posts at key sites. In 1883, workers completed the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway across northern Arizona, thereby linking St. Louis, Mo., with California; that same year the Southern Pacific Railroad completed a line from New Orleans to Los Angeles by way of Tucson and Yuma.

The copper era

Copper, Arizona's premier industry until the 1950s, was first mined in Arizona at Ajo in 1854. The Planet mines opened on the banks of the Colorado River about the same time. By 1876 the Clifton-Morenci district in eastern Arizona had two large-scale mining operations. Copper mines in Globe and Jerome, both in central Arizona, also developed rapidly, as did the silver mines at Tombstone. However, the richest copper find of all occurred in 1877 in Bisbee, in southeastern Arizona near the Mexican border. By 1880 national and international advances in electrical engineering and the availability of investment capital had created a vigorous demand for copper, and Arizona began to satisfy a rapidly growing market; the state still mines and processes about two-thirds of the copper produced in the United States.

Development of commercial agriculture

During the 1870s a few homesteaders, including a number of Mormon immigrants from Utah, attempted to develop farming economies along Arizona's few streams and rivers. Droughts, floods, and the need for heavy capital investment made it clear that for commercial farming to succeed in the state it would have to be practiced on a large scale, be highly organized, and use the best technology available. To do this, central Arizona agricultural interests developed plans for large water-storage and flood-control systems that included expensive dams and extensive canal systems. The Salt River Project, completed in 1911, delivered water to farmers in the Phoenix area (now the state's agricultural heartland). Water shortages continued to plague the state, however, and in 1963, after a long and bitter fight with California, Arizona obtained a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that affirmed Arizona's right to some 2.8 million acre-feet (3.5 billion square metres) of water annually from the Colorado River, as well as the entire flow of the Gila River. In 1968, after a lengthy and heated debate, the U.S. Congress authorized the Central Arizona Project, a massive system of pumps and canals to conduct water from the Colorado River to the Phoenix and Tucson areas; the project was completed in 1993.

Range cattle constituted a major source of income for Arizona from the 1860s until World War II, when large feedlots became prominent. Those lots, in turn, have begun to disappear; today the cattle raised in Arizona constitute only a small percentage of the country's edible beef.

Population influx

After Arizona achieved statehood in 1912, it soon began to tout itself as the place of the “five Cs”: copper, cattle, cotton, citrus, and climate. Health seekers from the rest of the country discovered that the clear, clean, dry air of Arizona brought relief from various respiratory ailments, thus laying the foundation for a growing stream of in-migrants and visitors who continued to infuse money into the state. During the 1920s “motor courts” (motels), dude ranches, and resorts sprang up to accommodate increasing numbers of tourists, winter residents, and retirees. Arizona, with its favourable climate and its distance from the country's coasts, became the site of several World War II flight schools and other U.S. government military bases. Following the war, a surge of migration from other states—particularly from the Midwest—changed Phoenix into one of the fastest-growing urban areas in the United States. Also of great significance was the development and widespread use of refrigeration and air conditioning, which perhaps more than anything else made Arizona attractive and habitable.

Many people think of the state as a romantic getaway fraught with images of Native Americans, cowboys, and a Mexican “mañana” atmosphere. Arizona, however, has never been free from the curses of an urban industrial society. Were it not for such technological developments as railroads, copper smelters, nuclear reactors, automobiles, refrigeration, computers, and hydroelectric turbines, few people would be living in the state today.

Although many newcomers anticipate a land of personal fulfillment, the state has its share of disillusioning characteristics—for example, notably high rates of bankruptcy, crime, and divorce. It faces the challenge of balancing a modern society built in an arid land with the preservation of as much as possible of its beautiful natural landscape. Arizona's major problem is the limit of the state's ability to support a growing population in a way that does not bring deterioration to those characteristics that made Arizona attractive in the first place.

James W. Byrkit

Gregory Lewis McNamee

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