The meaning behind the name of Phoenix, Arizona


If you've ever wondered about the meaning behind the name of my favorite city, Phoenix, yes, it's based on the legendary Phoenix bird, which rises from its ashes to be reborn. And it's a cool name, and a cool image, which is often confused with a Thunderbird, but they're different, and once you see Phoenix through the eyes of the pioneers who saw it when it was first laid out, in 1870, the meaning becomes even clearer.


Time-travel with me back to the Salt River Valley just after the Civil War, before the city of Phoenix existed. The valley is empty, no one lives there. If you're under the impression that the pioneers forced anyone out, it's simply not true. It was a "no man's land" between the Apaches to the north, and the Pima people to the south. Yes, it was visited by both tribes, but they didn't live there, no one did, and no one had for a very long time. But there had been people living there, as evidenced by what they left behind.

A tiny portion of the Hohokam ruins have been preserved at 44th Street and Washington, but they lived all over the valley. You're looking southeast towards Tempe.

The people who lived in the Salt River Valley were called the "Hohokam", which simply meant "those who have gone". Just how long they had been gone no one knows, probably for hundreds of years, but they left behind evidence of a gigantic civilization.

The pioneers saw empty canals, which were much bigger than the modern ones you can see around Phoenix nowadays. They also saw adobe structures, a lot of them, that were slowly melting back into the earth. That a great civilization had been there, and vanished, there was no doubt. All that was left, if you have a poetic mind, were the ashes, and the pioneers of the new city saw that it could be another great city, rising from them. It must have taken a lot of imagination, but they made it happen.


If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please consider subscribing to History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

Click here to become a Patron!

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