Why people came to live in Arizona


Every time my friends from California visit me, I see Phoenix, and Arizona, through their eyes. And while there are a lot of things that they like, such the abundance of parking spaces, I do notice that there is always that question hanging in the air - “why would anyone want to live in such a harsh climate?”

Now don't get me wrong, I love Phoenix. And the climate hasn't been a problem for me. My career has been spent in air-conditioned buildings, I have always had an air-conditioned car, etc. It may get to 115 degrees out there, but I'm in cool comfort all of the time.

Yesterday, as I was staring out into the desert at the Casa Grande Ruins, I was asking myself again “what were people doing here?” Yes, the river flowed right nearby, there appeared to be plenty of accommodations for living, and even places where games were played (I love that part!), but really, it was in the Sonoran Desert, which has been an extremely harsh place since the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. And the answer, of course, is the same as the reason people populated the entire planet after wandering out of Africa, they needed space. And yeah, some people were in what are known as “marginal areas”, that is, pretty much the last place that anyone would choose to be, but it's a place. You can put labels on the groups of people who lived in what is now called Arizona, but they're just people.

The next big group of people who arrived in the area that includes Arizona were the Spanish. You know, conquistadors, people looking for gold. And if you remember your history lessons, you remember that even though Christopher Columbus was Italian, he sailed with the financing of Spain. He was looking for the spices of the Orient, didn't find any, and went home. Of course, people who went to the trouble of going to such a disappointing place came back with stories of treasure, especially gold. The conquistadors didn't find the cities of gold (because they never existed), they just pretty much made a mess of things and killed a lot of people.

The next wave of people from Europe were also from Spain, but their interest wasn't gold, it was salvation. People like Father Kino were interested in teaching their religion to the people that the conquistadors had discovered, or what was left of them. Spain established churches, or missions, from what is now modern-day Mexico up through California. Take a look at a map and run your finger up from Mexico, through Tucson, along the Gila River, through Yuma, across the California desert, and then from Los Angeles to Monterey. The Pacific Coast Highway is El Camino Royale, the (Spanish) King's Road.

Nowadays there are so many hard edges, like freeways, and state and county boundaries, that it's just about impossible to imagine Mexico, Arizona, and California as just one continuous place. But it is. And people have lived there for centuries, and for their own reasons.

Image at the top of this post: Pueblo Grande looking southeast towards where Tempe is nowadays.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more