Arizona

Arizona
Perhaps more than any other state, Arizona is a land of myth. Myth: The state is basically a desert, a huge blast furnace, a desolate waste of sand. Fact: Arizona boasts a wonderfully varied landscape and climate. True, in the southern part of the state you’ll find broad deserts that are blazing hot in summer. But, all around the... Read on

Arizona
Perhaps more than any other state, Arizona is a land of myth. Myth: The state is basically a desert, a huge blast furnace, a desolate waste of sand. Fact: Arizona boasts a wonderfully varied landscape and climate. True, in the southern part of the state you’ll find broad deserts that are blazing hot in summer. But, all around the state, mountain ranges soar skyward, crowned by 12,633-foot-tall Humphrey’s Peak. In the north and east, vast forests grow. Arizona’s spectacular red-rock country includes one of the world’s natural wonders, the magnificent Grand Canyon — which was carved by a river. The myth that Arizona is “all desert” probably arose because the first outsiders traveled across the southern swath, a place of cactus and sand, scorching heat, and sometimes death. From their early reports, people got a clear but mistaken idea of Arizona, reinforced later by some of the state’s place names. More than 50 chunks of Arizona geography include the blistering word “hell,” from Hellgate Mountain to Hell Hole Valley — a tally that no other state can match. But remember that in Arizona you’ll also find Paradise Valley. Not to mention mountain streams and lakes, cool canyons, and many other surprises. Myth: Few animals and plants can survive in this “endless desert.” Only the poisonous rattlesnake slithers over the dunes. Only the thorny saguaro cactus is silhouetted against the sunset sky. Fact: While it is true that 11 types of rattlesnakes live here, to say nothing of stinging scorpions, venemous black-widow spiders, and poisonous lizards called Gila monsters, Arizona also has gentler creatures. The state’s varied elevations create homes for birds and animals that range from roadrunners to Steller’s jays, from jackrabbits to elk. Plants include not only prickly pear cactuses in the Lower Sonoran Zone, but also blue spruces and alpine plants in the highest mountains. Let’s look at Arizona — the real Arizona — a bit more closely.


REGIONS OF ARIZONA

Reduced to its essentials, Arizona divides into two main provinces: the elevated Colorado Plateau in the north and northeast, occupying nearly half the state, and the Basin and Range Country occupying the remainder. The Colorado Plateau rises from 4,500 to 10,000 feet and is cut by numerous canyons. The famous Grand Canyon was carved by the Colorado River, which crosses the plateau on its 700-mile journey through the state. Above the plateau rise volcanic cinder cones (such as Sunset Crater) and the lofty San Francisco Peaks, the state’s tallest mountain range. You’ll also find deserts in the Colorado Plateau Province. To the northeast lies the Great Basin Desert, vast and powerful. Canyons cleave the landscape. Black Mesa rises. Haunting Monument Valley offers a timeless display of red-rock spires and buttes (a familiar landscape seen in western movies). At the province’s northwestern edge, the parched Mojave Desert is identified by its shrubby creosote bushes and by Joshua trees that grow 30 feet high. As a dividing line at the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, the Mogollon Rim forms a wall of cliffs that plummet some 2,000 feet straight down. The Basin and Range Province, as the name implies, is a succession of depressions and mountain ranges. These were created by fracturing and tilting of the earth’s rocky crust. In Arizona, mountains higher than about 9,000 feet are often termed “sky islands” or “biological islands”; their cool climate creates a home for Douglas fir forests where squirrels chatter and black bears roam. On Mount Lemmon, in the Santa Catalina Mountains, you can take a remarkable journey up one of these sky islands. Having begun your drive in the Lower Sonoran Zone among saguaro and cholla cactuses, you climb through junipers and pinyons, enter pine forests, and finally reach the heights where white firs and quaking aspens grow. This journey of only 40 miles is said to be like driving from Mexico to Canada in an hour. To the Native Americans of Arizona, mountains are often sacred places, the homes of spirits. One such holy place is Baboquivari Peak, southwest of Tucson. Among Anglos the ragged Superstition Mountains gave rise to another sort of mystery: the legend of the Lost Dutchman Mine. It’s said that a fabulous gold strike was made here by two German prospectors, one of whom left puzzling directions to their mine before he died in 1891. In the hundred years since then, countless gold hunters have combed the Superstitions in search of the lost mine. The portion of the province that lies in southern Arizona consists of two distinct deserts. An edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, to the southeast, rises to about 1,500 feet, an altitude where the air cools a little and grass can grow on the hills. In this region are two outlandish sights: a mountain range that is simply an immense pile of boulders (Texas Canyon), and a former lake bed called the Willcox Playa that stretches for 50 square miles, as flat as a griddle, where you literally can’t see a thing growing. This place does fit the popular myth of Arizona as an “arid zone,” where nothing lives. In contrast, the Sonoran Desert receives more rain than any other desert on the North American continent. Forests of mesquite grow, and about 300 different bird species thrive. Because it is so scenic, the Sonoran Desert has also attracted 3.1 million human residents, while the state’s other regions combined have only half a million people.


PREHISTORIC INDIANS

Some 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, the first residents of Arizona arrived. Bands of hunters armed with stone-tipped spears, these Paleo-Indians came in pursuit of large animals, such as bison and mammoths, and wild plant foods. Without art or building skills, however, they left almost no trace of themselves. As the climate grew warmer and drier, sometime around 9000 B.C. most of the big animals vanished. A new culture appeared, hunting smaller animals and gathering nuts, seeds, and berries. They made a great technological jump forward between 2000 and 500 B.C. — agriculture. The Indians planted and harvested corn, squash, and beans, providing themselves a diet of high protein and balanced nutrition. Beginning in perhaps 200 B.C., groups of these ancient people began to build villages. They lived in “pithouses,” each a shallow pit beneath a wooden frame that was filled in with mud plaster to make walls. By trading, these people gathered not only goods but also ideas from outside their home territories. Religion appeared, directed toward rainfall and the harvest. Art flourished. The most prominent of these early farming cultures were the Hohokam (southern deserts), the Mogollon (mountain valleys in the eastern uplands), the Anasazi (high deserts on the Colorado Plateau), and the Sinagua (Verde Valley, southern Colorado Plateau). Between A.D. 500 and 1100 Arizona’s early cultures made further leaps forward. In architecture, they built homes above the ground in pueblo style. In trade, they collected everything from parrot feathers to copper bells. In culture, they learned to grow and weave cotton, created complex towns, conducted elaborate spiritual ceremonies, made pottery decorated with sophisticated images of birds and lizards, and even dug irrigation ditches in the Salt and Gila River valleys. By A.D. 1350 the Hohokam were erecting high-rise buildings, and today you can visit the ruins of four-story Casa Grande (Big House), which scientists figure may have been an observatory for marking the solstices, and possibly a residence for a top level of Hohokam society, perhaps priests or elite leaders. At the same time, the Anasazi (“Ancient Ones”) made great advances in northeastern Arizona. Their cities, built in the protective alcoves of towering sandstone cliffs, fit into their stone settings like jewels into a crown. These pueblos consisted of apartments, large and communal. Most had ceremonial rooms called kivas, where religious rituals and social gatherings took place. Despite their success, however, the Anasazi vanished around A.D. 1300, followed by the Hohokam and other major cultures of early Arizona. No one has been able to fathom why this happened, although drought may have led them to abandon their villages. Today, powerful aura seems to exist around the old homes of the Anasazi, something almost ghostly. Perhaps this explains why the Najavo never moved into the abandoned Anasazi cities. Arizona is one of the few places where you can have a direct experence of America’s most distant past. Its ruins surround you. Spectacular Anasazi ruins stand in Canyon de Chelly National Monument. The Sinagua (who may have blended Anasazi and Hohokam cultures) left ruins at Casa Grande, Montezuma Castle, Wupatki, Walnut Canyon, and Tuzigoot National Monuments.


THE SPANISH ARRIVE

A myth lured the early Spaniards to Arizona. The Seven Cities of Cibola were said to be built of gold. When the explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado arrived in Arizona around 1540, however, he found only houses built of sun-baked mud, not shining gold, and they were occupied by hostile Indians. This shattered the fable of the “golden cities,” and a century passed without further interest from the Spanish government. Spanish religion arrived, however, as Franciscan padres established missions among the Hopi. In the early 1700s the Jesuit Padre Eusebio Kino founded missions in southern Arizona among the Pimas and Papagos. When mistreatment led the peaceful Pimas to revolt in 1751, the Spanish built a military garrison (or presidio), at Tubac to control the area. The Spanish period ended in 1821, when Mexico declared its independence from Spain. Anglo fur trappers and traders began to pass through, and two decades later these “mountain men” guided parties of U.S. Army explorers and surveyors. The ownership of Arizona was decided in the Mexican War of 1848, when most of Arizona was ceded to the United States. With the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, the state’s southern section was also added. During the California Gold Rush, many Forty-Niners had crossed the southern stretch of Arizona via the Gila Trail, but few settled down — that is, until a gold strike occurred in 1857 on the Gila River. Fortune seekers flooded in, and to feed them, settlers came to raise crops and cattle. By 1863 a U.S. territory called Arizona was declared. (The name may derive from a 1736 silver strike in a gulch the Indians called Arizonac). The new government’s most pressing business was to subjugate the hostile Apaches and Navajos. Indian wars raged from 1871 to 1886, when the Chiracahua Apache leader, Geronimo, finally surrendered. The U.S. government removed him and his people to a Florida prison camp. During this time, cattle ranchers grazed their herds, Mormons established farms, and miners at Tombstone dug up silver ore worth $19 million in ten years. Copper was also discovered, with the proceeds helping to build Victorian towns like Jerome, Globe, and Bisbee. In the 1870s and 1880s railroads arrived in Arizona. The modern era was dawning.

TODAY’S ARIZONA

After Arizona attained statehood in 1912, as the 48th state, copper mining provided a solid economic base, while dams in the middle of the state made farming and city growth possible. During World War II, Army air bases and defense industries came to Arizona, and after the armistice many soldiers and workers returned to the state to live. Between 1950 and 1970 the population more than doubled. Because of Arizona’s warm winter weather (and the advent of air-conditioning for summer comfort), retirees also flocked to the state. Today Arizona is a remarkable conglomeration — part boomtown economy (especially in tourism and manufacturing), part living museum of the American West (with real cowboys and more Indians than any other state), and part scenic wonderland, from the floor of the Grand Canyon to the summit of the highest peak.

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