Jack Dunn was leading a scouting party of Tenth U.S. Cavalry in the Mule Mountains in 1877 about ten miles north of the Mexcian border in search of renegade Apaches. Somthing besides Indian camps caught the eye of Dunn, a civilian. It was mineral streaking on the rocks and a mining claim was quickly filed. The camp became the mining town of Bisbee, named for Judge DeWitt Bisbee who was one of the investors in what became known as the Copper Queen Mine.
Other mining camps that became towns as well were also established in the Mule Mountains but nothing matched the success of the Copper Queen Mine. In fact, few mines on earth could match its output: three million ounces of gold, eight billion pounds of coppers and plenty of silver, lead and zinc as well. Bisbee was known everywhere as the “Queen of the Copper Camps.”
It did not take long for Bisbee to wear off the rough edges of a frontier boom town. At one point there were over half-a-hundred saloons packed into Brewery Gulch but Bisbee was also an oasis of high culture. The state’s first golf course was here and the first community library and an opera house. The wild west days ended forever in 1917 when the Phelps Dodge Corporation orchestrated the Bisbee Deportation by ushering 1,300 striking mine workers out of town in front of a deputized posse of 2,000 strikebreakers.
In 1929, the county seat moved to Bisbee from Tombstone, legitimizing all claims as a proper Western city. When Phelps Dodge closed down its mining operations in 1975 the town pivoted into a tourist destination and arts colony. More than a million visitors have taken the underground Queen Mine Tour. Above ground, Bisbee has been said to possess the highest concentration of notable architecture per square inch in the state of Arizona. Many of the buildings were constructed in the gulches and canyons that define “Old Bisbee” and our hilly walking tour will begin at the one-time headquarters of the powerful Phelps Dodge concern...
More than 2,000 years ago the Hokoham peoples created the blueprint for modern Phoenix, digging over 100 miles of irrigation canals in the Salt River Valley. The ancient ditches were long abandoned when a pioneer prospector named Jack Swilling saw the valley for the first time in 1867 and his dreams turned from mining to farming. He raised $10,000 in seed money from the mining camp at Wickenburg for the Swilling Irrigating Canal Company and got to work. The first crops were appearing in the irrigated fields within a year.
Pumpkins did especially well and the emerging community was first referred to an Pumpkinville. Phillip Darrell Duppa, an English native and self-proclaimed Lord, was a friend of Swilling’s and an early canal digger with a more classical sensibility and, noting the community’s debt to the Hokoham’s canal system, he offered the name “Phoenix” for the mythical bird reborn from the ashes of destruction. The name stuck and the town was incorporated in 1881. In 1889 the Territorial Legislature left Prescott for Phoenix, then a village of about 2,000. Ten acres of land were provided one mile west of the town center and the Arizona government has been there ever since.
In 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the National Reclamation Act, allowing dams to block western streams and Phoenicians, still reeling from a Salt River torrent in 1891 that swept into the town center a mile away, eagerly embraced the projects. By 1912 when Arizona became the 48th state and last of the contiguous states to be admitted to the Union the Salt River had disappeared from Phoenix and the streets were paved for the first time. The town of 11,000 inhabitants was connected to the main transcontinental railroad lines and functioning as the region’s primary distribution center.
Today almost nothing remains of Territorial Phoenix before statehood. A city of 100,000 people in 1950 that would grow to over 1.3 million before century’s end couldn’t spend much time looking at the past. But there remain glimpses of 1920s Phoenix tucked into the modern streetscape and we will ferret them out, as well as important newer buildings, on our walking tour that will begin with a work from Arizona’s most celebrated architectural team...
A company of Spanish conquistadors, led by a mercenary Irishman named Hugh O’Conor, built a small fort on a shelf of land overlooking the east side of the Santa Cruz River in 1775. For the first 100 years of its existence life in Tucson had a decidedly martial flavor under Spanish rule, under Mexican rule and under American rule. Even after the settlement moved outside the fortress walls there was fighting between Confederate troops and Union supporters during the Civil War and the threat of attacks from the Apaches was a real menace for decades. It wasn’t until the 1880s and the arrival of the railroad that the military presence in Tucson receded into memory.
By 1900 Tucson’s population had edged above 7,000 and it was the largest town in the Arizona Territory - a distribution center for livestock and crops and newly discovered minerals. When Arizona entered the Union in 1912 Tucson was the first city of the 48th state, although it would shortly be eclipsed by Phoenix.
The county seat of Pima County began gathering a national reputation as a health and winter resort, favored especially by “lungers,” as visitors with respiratory ailments to the dry heat of the Sonoran Desert were known locally. While the population of Tucson grew steadily by 1950 you could still clamber atop the roof of a three-story building and have an unobstructed view of the entire city.
Spurred by suburban sprawl and federal funds for rebuilding American downtowns, Tucson became an enthusiastic player in urban renewal in the1960s. Even after preservationists woke up and recommended the saving of 75 buildings in 1969, 68 were torn down. Our walking tour of downtown Tucson will seek out those expressions of Southwest architecture that still remain and we will begin where the town began over 230 years ago, which has been rebuilt to look like it looked back then...
Today, when watching people splash in the placid waters of the Colorado River, it takes a leap of imagination to picture the frothy, dangerous waters that flowed through Arizona for millions of years. There was almost no place where it was safe to cross the Colorado and travelers had to come south from the confluence with the Gila River to where modern day Yuma stands to find a place where the granite outcroppings caused a natural narrowing and calming of the river. The United States acquired this region via the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, just in time for the California Gold Rush. It is estimated more than 60,000 gold hunters used L.G.F. Jaeger’s rope ferry across the Colorado River in Yuma to reach the California gold fields between 1850 and 1851, paying $2 a head.
The stream of traffic did not escape the attention of the United States Army which established Fort Yuma in 1852 on a hill overlooking the crossing. A town called Colorado City grew up here but it was washed away by the Colorado River and rebuilt as Arizona City. In 1866 a street grid was laid out with a 100-foot wide Main Street able to handle the most ambitious wagon trains. In 1871 Arizona City was officially incorporated and two years later became Yuma.
In 1876 the Yuma Territorial Prison was established on the banks of the Colorado River with prisoners hacking the first seven cells from the granite walls of granite. Prisoners would keep at work building the notorious prison until it closed in 1909 by which time a total of 3,069 prisoners, including 29 women, had been detained. In 1910 fire destroyed Yuma High School and for the next five years classes were held in the cellblocks and sports teams adopted the nickname, the Yuma Criminals.
In 1916 floodwaters on the Gila River swept into Yuma causing the worst of many floods that ravaged the town. It was also the last major flood, thanks to dams created by the Bureau of Reclamation. After that adobe buildings were banned in downtown Yuma and new construction adopted the newly trendy Spanish Colonial Revival style; in 1925 Main Street was paved for the first time. The streetscape we will encounter in downtown Yuma dates to that era but first we will begin our walking tour of the sunniest place in America along the Colorado River near the crossing that made the town famous...