The man who named Phoenix, Arizona - Darrell Duppa


Since Jack Swilling is considered the founder of Phoenix, Arizona, because his company dug the first modern canal (in the 1860s - modern as compared to the Hohokams), it's only appropriate to give some credit to someone else who was in that party, Darrell Duppa.

Like Jack, Darrell is a little bit hard to "clean up" and make into a "founding father" type. I like to imagine hanging around with these guys, who probably would have seemed a little "touched", if not downright crazy.

Now waitaminute, I'm not trying to put these guys down. What they accomplished was the founding of an incredible city, Phoenix, Arizona. But if you stand in the Salt River Valley in the 1860s and look around, you really have to wonder about these guys? What were they thinking? I know what they were drinking.

Time-travel with me. It's the late 1860s and an ex-Confederate named Jack Swilling has the idea of digging a canal out in some forsaken desert because he and his friends figured that it would be a good idea. They had seen the gigantic abandoned canals (built by the Hohokam people), and they figured that they could follow along the same path. It's a matter of record that these guys drank a lot of whiskey, and I can believe it.

In my lifetime I've known a lot of people who quaff a few beers and suddenly think that some hair-brained scheme is going to work. And digging a canal through the desolate desert along the Salt River in the 1860s had to be about as hair-brained as can be imagined. That it worked, and nowadays there's indeed a great city there, is just hard for me to comprehend. So, no, I wouldn't haven't invested in it. Not only was it waaaaayyyyy out in the middle of nowhere, there were Apaches, who weren't very happy about trespassers on land that they protected.

From what I've read about Darrell Duppa, that photo up there was about as cleaned-up as he ever was. Mostly living in Arizona he just let his hair grow long (like his friend Jack) and lived a very, uh, rustic life.

But Darrel had read the classics. It was his idea to name the new city "Phoenix", which is a legendary bird that rises from the ashes. He also named Tempe, by the way, which is the valley next to Mount Olympus. He must have had quite an imagination! Phoenix and Tempe were nothing but dirt and mesquite when he named them. But he saw an amazing future. And amazingly, he was right.
Become a PhD (Phoenix History Detective) today on Patreon!

Click here to become a Patron!
History Adventuring posts are shared there daily including "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona. Discounts for seniors, students, teachers, and veterans.

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

Learning to drive in the 1970s

Image
Although most of my history adventuring is done in my imagination, traveling into the distant past or future, I was actually there in the 1970s. In fact, that's when I learned how to drive a car. Time-travel with me. I learned to drive on my parents 1973 Ford Torino Station Wagon, which was a monstrous, clumsy boat of a car that had a hood that a friend of mine in high school described as "getting there fifteen minutes before you did". In fact, the nose of the car was so ridiculously long that my dad actually made a bump-out at the end of the garage for it to fit so you could close the garage door. Parking that car in the tiny garage that my parents had was like threading a needle! By the way, we're in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the neighborhood where I grew up, which was built in the late 1920s. But don't imagine that it was some kind of historic neighborhood, it was just old, and very worn. The streets were terribly narrow, and even more so after it snowed (which...
Read more