AZArizona History

Arizona had to give up the right to fire its own judges in order to get into the Union. Congress in 1906 offered statehood only if Arizona merged with New Mexico into a single state, and Arizona voters killed the idea 16,265 to 3,141. When a separate Arizona constitution reached Washington in 1911, President Taft vetoed the enabling resolution because the document let voters recall judges by petition. Arizona deleted the clause, was admitted on February 14, 1912 as the forty-eighth state and the last of the contiguous ones, then put judicial recall back into the constitution at the November election that same year.

The canals came first

Between roughly 450 and 1450 the Hohokam dug hundreds of miles of irrigation canals off the Salt and Gila rivers, some more than ten feet deep, all of it moved by hand with digging sticks and baskets. It was the largest irrigation network built in North America before European contact. The settlements were abandoned in the fifteenth century. When Jack Swilling crossed the Salt River Valley in 1867 he found the old channels and simply cleaned them out to water a new farming colony, and his companion Darrell Duppa suggested calling the place Phoenix, for a city rising on the ashes of another.

Elsewhere the region held peoples who had never left. Ancestral Puebloans farmed the canyon floors at Canyon de Chelly, the Sinagua built the cliff rooms at Montezuma Castle, and the Hopi village of Old Oraibi on Third Mesa has been lived in since about 1100. The Akimel O'odham and Tohono O'odham held the southern desert, the Yavapai, Havasupai and Hualapai the western canyons, and the Dine and several Apache groups the northeast and the mountains.

Pimeria Alta and the presidio line

Fray Marcos de Niza passed through in 1539 and Francisco Vazquez de Coronado followed in 1540, hunting cities of gold and finding Hopi and Zuni towns instead. Real Spanish presence waited for the Jesuit Eusebio Francisco Kino, who began working the country he called Pimeria Alta in 1687 and founded the mission of San Xavier del Bac in 1692. The white church standing there was built between 1783 and 1797. After the O'odham rose against the missions in 1751 the Spanish garrisoned Tubac, and in 1775 Hugo O'Conor laid out the presidio of San Agustin del Tucson, the date Tucson still counts from. Mexico inherited the whole frontier at independence in 1821 and could spare it almost no attention.

Two treaties and a Confederate Arizona

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War on February 2, 1848 and handed the United States everything north of the Gila River, which left Tucson and Yuma in Mexico. The gap closed on December 30, 1853, when James Gadsden signed a purchase of about 29,670 square miles for $10 million, bought chiefly because railroad surveyors wanted a low southern route to California. Southern Arizona became American almost as a by-product of a railroad grade.

Settlers in the far south, ignored by the territorial government in Santa Fe, declared their own Territory of Arizona in 1861, and the Confederacy organized it in 1862 with a capital at Mesilla, splitting the land east to west. Confederate cavalry and a Union column from California skirmished at Picacho Pass on April 15, 1862, the westernmost engagement of the Civil War. Lincoln answered with the act of February 24, 1863 creating the federal Territory of Arizona, drawn north to south so the split ran the other way. The capital moved from Prescott to Tucson in 1867, back to Prescott in 1877, and to Phoenix in 1889.

Copper, resistance and a deportation by boxcar

The army removed most of the Navajo to Bosque Redondo in New Mexico in 1864 on the forced march remembered as the Long Walk, and an 1868 treaty let the survivors return to a reservation that is now the largest in the country. Apache resistance ran longer. Cochise's Chiricahua fought through the 1860s, Aravaipa Apache camped under army protection were massacred at Camp Grant in 1871, and the wars ended when Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon on September 4, 1886.

Industrial mining replaced the frontier. Bisbee, Jerome, Clifton, Morenci and later Ajo made Arizona the leading copper producer in the country, which is what the copper star on the state flag refers to. On July 12, 1917 a Phelps Dodge sheriff and a deputized posse rounded up 1,186 striking miners in Bisbee, loaded them into cattle cars and abandoned them in the New Mexico desert. Water money arrived alongside copper money: Theodore Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River, dedicated by Roosevelt himself in 1911, was among the first big federal reclamation projects and made large-scale farming possible below it.

Fighting over the Colorado River

Arizona spent most of the twentieth century arguing about who owns the Colorado. It refused to ratify the 1922 Colorado River Compact until 1944. In 1934, when California began building Parker Dam, Governor Benjamin Moeur declared martial law on the river and sent the National Guard downstream aboard two chartered ferryboats, an episode the newspapers named the Arizona Navy, and construction stopped until Congress explicitly authorized the dam. The Supreme Court settled the allocation in Arizona v. California in 1963, Congress authorized the Central Arizona Project in 1968, and the canal reached Phoenix in 1985 and Tucson in 1992.

That water, plus refrigerated air conditioning and the electronics plants that followed Motorola to Phoenix in 1949, turned a territory of just over 204,000 people in 1910 into a state of more than seven million. Grand Canyon National Park was established in 1919. And in 1942 the Marine Corps recruited twenty-nine Navajo speakers to build a battlefield code out of their own language, one Japanese cryptanalysts never broke.

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