Today in History: February 24
Arizona
Canyon de Chelly, [Arizona], circa 1910-1920.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920
Arizona, formerly part of the Territory of New Mexico, was organized as a separate territory on February 24, 1863. The U.S. acquired the region under the terms of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. Arizona became the 48th state in 1912.
By the 1880s, the Arizona Territory was bustling with fortune seekers hoping to strike it rich mining gold, copper, and silver. The town of Prescott was founded in 1863 by New Englanders searching for gold. Nearly 7,000 people came to southeastern Arizona in the wake of Ed Schieffelin's 1877 discovery of silver at Tombstone, near Tucson.
When traveler Emma H. Adams visited Tucson in 1884, which she described as "a queer old town," she was struck by the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the desert outpost:
Americans, Mexicans, Germans, Russians, Italians, Austrians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Greeks, the Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, the African, Irishman, and Sandwich Islander are all here, being drawn to the spot by the irresistible mining influence.To and Fro in Southern California
By Emma H. Adams, 1976 [c1887], pp.55-56.
California As I Saw It: First-Person Narratives, 1849-1900
Adams spent ten days in Tucson before traveling on, via the Central Pacific Railway, to Los Angeles. She describes her journey from New Mexico through the desert to Tucson, including a visit to the Mission San Xavier del Bac, in chapters eight and nine of her travel journal written in 1883 and 1884 and first published in Cleveland newspapers.
San Xavier Mission, near Tucson, Arizona, 1913.
Taking the Long View, 1851-1991
The Mission San Xavier del Bac, built in 1797, is one of the most famous monuments of the early Spanish presence in Arizona. Jesuit missionary Eusebio Kino laid the foundations for a church on the site in 1700, but a finished mission was not constructed until the 1730s or 1740s. Spanish missionaries first ventured into Arizona in 1539. With the exception of occasional forays among the Native Americans living in the northern part of the state, however, the Spanish presence in Arizona was limited to scattered missions, ranches, and forts in the Santa Cruz Valley south of Tucson. By the time the United States acquired Arizona, many remnants of Spanish influence in the state were gone. Most persons of Hispanic descent living in Arizona today immigrated to the state from Mexico after 1900.
Pheonix is the capital of Arizona's 114,000 square miles. Its 1960 population of 1,300,000 almost tripled by 1990. Native Americans maintain a strong presence in Arizona: fifteen distinct tribes (including Navajo, Hopi, Papago, Apache, and Pima) live on seventeen reservations in the state.
Hopi Woman Making Pottery, 1910.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920
- How hot was it? Hear a story of Arizona's hottest days in "Them Petrified Buzzards," a tall tale told by Uncle Steve Robertson and recorded by interviewer Earl Bowman on December 15, 1938. It's just one of many stories found in American Life Histories, 1936-1940.
- Listen to guitarist Jack Bryant play his composition "Arizona" as recorded on August 17, 1940 at the Firebaugh FSA Camp. The recording and a transcript of the lyrics are found in Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941
- When President Theodore Roosevelt visited Arizona in 1913, the Hopi Indians honored him one with a demonstration of one of their tribal dances, recorded on film under the title Hopi Indians Dance for TR at [Walpi, Ariz.], 1913 in Theodore Roosevelt: His Life and Times on Film.
- View more photographs of Arizona's striking landscape. Search American Memory on Arizona, Grand Canyon or petrified forest. A similar search on the term mission will produce a variety of images, documents, and music reminiscent of Spanish priests' and friars' missionary efforts in the Southwest.
- These collections are especially rich in photographs of the state and its people:
- View nineteenth-century railroad maps and U.S. Geological Survey maps of Arizona available in Map Collections (1500-Present). Many of these maps can be viewed with the MrSID technology which permits the viewer to "zoom in" or magnify points of interest. "Bird's-eye" views of cities such as Phoenix are also part of this collection.
- Learn more about gold discoveries and gold rushes in other states. Search on gold in the Today in History Archive.
- Read Anglo-Americans' recollections of encounters with Native Americans in the Southwest. Search on Navajo and Hopi in American Life Histories, 1936-1940.
