Arizona History

The first American Indians arrived in Arizona between 16,000 BC and 10,000 BCE, while the history of Arizona as recorded by Europeans began when Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan, explored the area in 1539.  Coronado's expedition entered the area in 1540–1542 during its search for Cíbola.  Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino developed a chain of missions and taught the Indians Christianity in Pimería Alta (now southern Arizona and northern Sonora) in the 1690s and early 1700s.  Spain founded fortified towns (presidios) at Tubac in 1752 and Tucson in 1775.

In 1853, the land below the Gila River was acquired from Mexico in the Gadsden Purchase. Arizona was administered as part of the Territory of New Mexico until it was organized into a separate territory on February 24, 1863.

Arizona was admitted into the Union—officially becoming a U.S. state—on February 14, 1912.

Phoenix was the site of a German and Italian prisoner of war camp during World War II. The site was purchased after the war by the Maytag family and is currently the Phoenix Zoo.  Also located in the state were the War Relocation Authority's second- and third-largest Japanese American internment camps, Poston and Gila River.

Pre-History: The Paleo-Indians and Archaic peoples

According to the best archaeological and geological evidence available, Paleolithic, mammoth-hunting families moved into northwestern North America sometime between 16,000 BCE and 10,000 BCE.  In central Alaska, they found their passage blocked by a huge sheet of ice until a temporary recession in the last ice age that opened up an ice-free corridor through northwestern Canada, allowing bands to fan out throughout the rest of the continent.  The earliest undisputed evidence of humans in the southwestern United States is a set of fluted spear points from the Paleolithic.  Some scientists have proposed that small bands of women, men and children wandered across the deserts of southwestern Arizona and northwestern Mexico 10,000 to 20,000 years earlier than the mammoth hunters.

In the opinion of geoscientist Paul Martin, these bands, armed with Clovis points (named for the site near Clovis, New Mexico where the first point was found), encountered mammoths, camels, ground sloths, and horses.  As these species had never faced sophisticated big-game hunters before, the result was the "Pleistocene overkill", the rapid and systematic slaughter of nearly all the species of large ice-age mammals in North America by 8000 BCE.  In a sense, the hunters who pursued the Nero mammoths may have represented the first of Arizona's many cycles of boom and bust, in which a single resource is relentlessly exploited until that resource has been depleted or destroyed.

Archaeologists call the 7,000 years between the disappearance of big-game hunters and the emergence of pottery-making societies, in the 2nd century CE, the Archaic period. Most Archaic groups survived by becoming generalists rather than specialists, foraging in seasonal movements across the mountains, deserts and plateaus. They did not abandon hunting, but they depended to a much greater degree upon wild plant foods and small game. Their tools became more varied, with grinding and chopping implements becoming more common, a sign that seeds, fruits and greens constituted a greater proportion of their diet.

Climate changes drove the transition from big-game hunting. When the first big-game hunters entered Arizona, the forests were as much as 3,000 feet lower than they are today. In the Sonoran Desert, piñon, juniper and oak woodlands extended as far as 1,800 feet down slopes, the elevation of lower slopes of Camelback Mountain in Phoenix. Desert grasslands studded with Joshua trees, beargrass and yucca carpeted valleys below. The great ponderosa pine forests of the Colorado Plateau did not exist. Instead, the Mogollon Rim supported vast stands of mixed conifers such as Douglas fir, blue spruce and Rocky Mountain juniper—the trees characteristic of higher altitudes today. The giant saguaro, the plant that symbolizes Arizona in many people's minds, had largely taken refuge in present-day Mexico.

Temperatures rose, and the seasonal distribution of precipitation began to change, causing major changes in the vegetation as well. The Clovis people were stalking mammoths and other ice-age species in southeastern Arizona at a time when many streams were drying up, forcing animals to concentrate around streams and seeps. The growing aridity of the region therefore coincided with the arrival of hunters who specialized in the pursuit of large mammals. It is possible that climate and humans acted together to bring an end to these species.

Arizona grew even more arid after the last ice age came to an end. Summers grew wetter, but warmer, so rainfall evaporated quicker. Winters became considerably drier, making less moisture available to plants. In southern Arizona, woodlands gave way to desert grasslands, and desert grasslands gave way to desert scrub. Important Sonoran Desert species like saguaro and brittlebush began to recolonize the region from the south, while ponderosa forests and piñon-juniper-oak woodlands climbed back onto the Colorado Plateau. By 2000 BC, the modern plant communities of Arizona had been established and a modern climate prevailed.

The early Archaic peoples of Arizona survived these changes by adapting to the cycles of plants rather than trying to change them. In the woodlands, they gathered acorns in July and August, and piñon nuts and juniper berries in November. In the desert, they picked the leaves of annual plants like chenopodium (goosefoot) and amaranth (pigweed). They also roasted agave in rock-lined pits each spring, and collected cactus fruit and harvested mesquite pods in the summer. Because of their dependence on scattered and seasonal resources, Archaic groups did not occupy permanent settlements. Instead, they wandered from camp to camp in search of water and wild foods.

For most of the Archaic period, people were not able to transform their natural environment in any fundamental way. Many archaeologists assumed that the Archaic cultures of Arizona were dead ends. They believed groups outside the region, particularly Mesoamerica, introduced major innovations like agriculture into the Southwest. 

According to this model, maize first put down Southwestern roots in the highlands of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona, the pre-Hispanic cultural area known as the Mogollon. Archaic populations there began growing a small and primitive variety of maize at places like Bat Cave as early as 3500 BCE. From there, maize spread slowly to more arid and lowland areas, such as the Sonoran Desert.

During the 1980s, these early maize dates were challenged by a refinement in radiocarbon dating using the accelerator mass spectrometer (AMS) technique. Accelerator dates reveal that the first corn from Bat Cave and other highland sites appeared around 1000 BCE, 2,500 years later than previously thought. A number of sites excavated in southern Arizona demonstrate that Archaic farmers were cultivating maize in the Tucson Basin at around the same time as well. 

At the Milagro site along Tanque Verde Creek, for example, a Late Archaic population built pit houses, dug bell-shaped storage pits, and planted maize around 850 BCE. Archaic groups, then, were already beginning to make the transition from food gatherers to food producers around 3,000 years ago. They also possessed many of the cultural features that accompany semisedentary agricultural life: storage facilities, more permanent dwellings, larger settlements, and even cemeteries.

Despite the early advent of farming, late Archaic groups still exercised little control over their natural environment. Furthermore, wild food resources remained important components of their diet even after the invention of pottery and the development of irrigation. 

The introduction of agriculture never resulted in the complete abandonment of hunting and foraging, even in the largest of Archaic societies. During the 1st millennium CE, at least three major cultures flourished in the Southwest: the Anasazi, the Hohokam, and the Mogollon. These three cultures are well known for their architecture and pottery.

European colonization

Although the first European visitors to Arizona may have come in 1528, the most influential expeditions in early Spanish Arizona were those of Marcos de Niza and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. 

The accounts of the early Spanish explorers of large mythical cities like Cíbola and large mineral deposits of copper and silver would attract settlers and miners to the region in later years. These explorations led to the Columbian Exchange in Arizona, and widespread epidemics of smallpox among the Native Americans. 

Native-American history of early European Arizonan exploration is hard to find, but the O'Odham calendar stick is a traditional way of recording notable events, including droughts, invasions, floods that could be used as a source.

Early Franciscans and Jesuits in Arizona also set up numerous missions around the area to convert the Native Americans, such as San Xavier del Bac. The missionary Eusebio Kino around the Pimería Alta, exchanging gifts and catechizing the natives, who were then used as scouts for keeping track of events on the frontier. 

In 1680, the Pueblo Revolt drove Spaniards temporarily from northern New Mexico, but the area was re-conquered in 1694.

Although the Spanish did not yet have towns for themselves, in the late 17th century colonists began steadily entering the region, attracted by the recent discovery of deposits of silver around the Arizonac mining camp. 

Most of the colonists left after Juan Bautista de Anza announced it had merely been buried treasure; however, several stayed and became subsistence farmers. During the mid-18th century, the pioneers of Arizona tried to expand their territory northward, but were prevented from doing so by the Tohono O'Odham and Apache American Indians, who had begun raiding their villages for livestock.

In 1765, the Bourbon Reforms began, with Charles III of Spain doing a major rearranging of the presidios on the northern frontier. The Jesuits were expelled from the area, and the Franciscans took their place at their missions. In the 1780s and 1790s, the Spanish began a plan of setting up Apache peace camps and providing the Apache with rations so that they would not attack, allowing the Spanish to expand northward.

For the most part, Spanish Arizona had a subsistence economy, with occasional small gold and silver mining operations.

In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain after a decade of war. The revolution had destroyed the colonial silver mining industry and had bankrupted the national treasury . Along the northern frontier, funds that had supported missions, presidios and Apache peace camps nearly disappeared. 

As a result, Apaches once again began raiding, running off horse herds, and killing anyone caught outside presidial walls. As missions began to wither, Mexico began auctioning off more land, causing the Pimería Alta and the Apachería to shrink as territory expanded.

American mountain men began to enter the region, looking to trap beavers for their pelts. In 1846, the ideology of Manifest Destiny and the occupation of disputed territory led the United States to initiate Mexican-American War, resulting in the Mexican Cession that gave America the region of Arizona (among other lands). 

In 1849, the California Gold Rush led as many as 50,000 miners through the region, leading to major booms in Arizona's population. In 1853, President James Buchanan sent James Gadsden to Mexico City to negotiate with Santa Anna, and the United States bought the remaining area of Arizona and New Mexico in the Gadsden Purchase.

On March 16, 1861 the southern half of New Mexico Territory declared itself independent of the United States. Arizona Territory (CSA) was regarded as a valuable route for possible access to the Pacific Ocean, with the specific intention of joining southern California to the Confederacy. 

In 1860, Southern California had cleared all legal hurdles for secession from the rest of California and was waiting reorganization as a new US territory, which never materialized. At that time sparsely populated southern California was a hotbed of Southern-sympathizers. The Battle of Picacho Pass was the westernmost battle of the Civil War fought in the CSA, and the only major one to be fought in Arizona. (The westernmost battle of the Civil War was fought at San José, California.) 

During the war, U.S. presidios were moved to New Mexico, leaving Arizona vulnerable to American Indian attack. Hostilities between the American Indians and American settlers began, despite their alliance during the time of the Mexican-American War, leading to most Indian tribes being moved to reservations.

Steamboats, mining, cattle and trains became vital parts of the Arizona economy, leading to boomtowns being formed as prospectors found gold, and the boomtowns becoming ghost towns as the miners left. Mexicans, who still were the majority in Arizona during the time shortly following the Mexican-American War, constituted most of the mining labor force.

The Desert Land Act of 1877, which gave settlers 640 acres of land, caused people to flood into the region.

In the 1900s, Arizona almost entered the Union as part of New Mexico in a Republican plan to keep control of the U.S. Senate. The whites in Arizona were against joint statehood because most New Mexicans were Hispanic. In 1912, Arizona finally entered the Union as the 48th state of the United States. In the same year, women gained suffrage in the state.

In 1917, the United States entered into World War I, thus beginning a boom in the economy of Arizona. After suffering through the Great Depression, the implementation of the New Deal and another economic boom after World War II brought Arizona back into a state of stability.

During this timeframe, industries such as cotton, copper, farming, and miniz began to flourish in the state.  The military began using Phoenix and Tucson for military bases and academies, with the army becoming the community's largest source of revenue. For a time, the Charter Government Committee swept the elections.  Barry Goldwater and Sandra Day O'Connor would later have successful judicial and political careers.

During the war, people also began to move to Arizona from other regions of the country because of its inland position and protection from aerial attacks.  In 1946, Arizona began to enforce right-to-work laws, which allowed workers to decide whether or not to join or financially support a union. The dual-wage system, in which Mexicans made $1.15 less per shift, was abandoned. In 1948, the high tech industry began in Arizona, with Motorola building one of the first plants in Phoenix. 1948 also saw American Indians gaining the right to vote, after having been disqualified for twenty years for being "wards of the state".