Arizona: A History, Revised Edition

Preface

preface ix PREFACE I grew up in Phoenix, a child of the boom in a subdivision carved out of citrus groves just south of the Arizona Canal. Soon after my family moved there in 1955, we began making pilgrimages up the Beeline Highway to a neighbor’s log cabin under the Mogollon Rim. I remember sitting beside my mother on a chaise longue in the back of a pickup as we drove up Oxbow Hill to Payson. The Tonto Basin seemed to stretch around us forever in a series of yellow hills that led to mysterious places like Punkin Center and the Sierra Anchas. But the country that captured my imagination most was the Mazatzal mountain range, whose blue outline dominated the western horizon. The Mazatzals were dark and deep, and to my young eyes, they embodied all the mystery and grandeur of the West. No one took me into them then. That came later. For thirteen years they fermented into that most powerful of drugs—wilderness— only in my mind. Then, when I was sixteen, I made my first forays into their rattlesnakeinfested heart. I started by switchbacking up the Barnhardt Trail west of Rye, past south-facing slopes bristling with agave and north-facing crevices where once, in January, I found a waterfall completely captured by ice. That trail led me around Mazatzal Peak and brought me to a little clearing where Chilson Cabin used to stand—a plank shed guarding a trickle of water dripping from a pipe. I remember camping there one moonlit night and watching a doe step out of the junipers to feed. Fifty miles to the southwest, Phoenix glittered, but I wanted the doe’s world then. The doe and Chilson Cabin belonged to an Arizona I hungered to become a part of before it disappeared. Ever since then the Mazatzals have been my touchstone in a state I call home. I return to them year after year—from Lion Mountain, Horseshoe Dam, and Sheep’s Bridge, from Polles Mesa down the Gorge and the East Verde River to its confluence with the Verde. I have carved part of my own personal history into the soft wood of the door to Club Cabin, a line shack below Table Mountain where ranchers, hunters, and backpackers have weath- x preface ered snowstorms and sunstroke for nearly a century. The Mazatzals are therefore a good place for me to begin a history of Arizona because they are real, while Arizona, after all, is only a set of arbitrary lines on a map. Arizona as a geographical concept did not exist until the nineteenth century. It was not a political reality until 1863. Even then, almost all the important forces that have shaped Arizona have washed across much larger areas as well. There is no way to confine pre-Columbian Indian societies or Spanish imperial expansion or Anglo American manifest destiny to Arizona’s boundaries. When you write about the history of Arizona, you have to write about other places too. There is also the inescapable arrogance of the term itself. If you hike into the Mazatzals, you pass jagged outcrops of rock that are nearly two billion years old. Those rocks were Arizona long before Arizona had a name, and they will be Arizona long after the name has disappeared. All of us—Paleolithic mammoth hunters, Hohokam farmers, Mexican ranchers, Anglo American dam builders and city dwellers—are light dust on those rocks. The land should make us humble, but it rarely does. Yet we still need to tell our stories. This one begins with the killing of an animal that stood twelve feet tall at the shoulder and ends with the construction of a canal 335 miles long. Both were acts of either hubris or vision, depending on your point of view. In between, there was more hubris, more vision, more folly, bravery, greed, and sacrifice. The history of Arizona is not a linear progression from wilderness to civilization. Instead it is a series of advances and retreats, accommodations and blunders, booms and busts. Many peoples have lived here over the past twelve thousand years or more, but the overwhelming impression their history conveys is the transitory nature of human occupation in this arid land. That is why history is so important. The lessons of the past may not prevent mistakes in the future, but at least they can help us inhabit a particular landscape and learn a little about its mysteries, beauties, and cruelties...