Excerpt from Arizona, Vol. 1: Prehistoric Aboriginal, Pioneer Modern, the Nation's Youngest Commonwealth Within a Land of Ancient Culture

The task of writing this History of Arizona was undertaken with a degree of confidence much stronger than later felt when there came fuller appreciation of the magnitude of the task. For, though Arizona may be called the Baby State and though within her borders last may have been found the nation's frontier, her history is one of rare antiquity. When the first English entered Chesapeake Bay the Spaniards already had been in Pimeria nearly seventy years and the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers on Plymouth Rock was full eighty years after the passage of Coronado, who here found Indians who for centuries had lived in well-ordered cities. The material has not been easy to gather, though much has been written upon the Southwest. Yet Bancroft's volume on Arizona and New Mexico, issued in 1889, was the only work that approximated complete treatment of the subject. The author felt that he had accumulated much data in the course of over thirty-six years of residence in Arizona, years mainly devoted to newspaper and general writing, yet must confess that the field of Arizona history, when delved into as an occupation, has produced much that was strange and much that has changed his ideas on matters theretofore by him considered settled. The Territory has had many chroniclers of legends and events and many scientists have studied her ethnology and her natural features. There has been less trouble in finding material than in classifying it, balancing it in relative importance and finding the place into which each item best would fit. In this connection, in the consideration of a number of important features, it has been thought well to make classification by subjects, rather than to observe close chronological sequences.

In the progress of the work continually has been impressed upon the writer a feeling that Arizona is a land apart and unique. She has her own features of dual climates, of peculiar native flora and fauna, of contrasting wooded and snow-capped mountains, rising out of waterless, sage-colored, far-stretching plains, of "deserts" that become oases when torrential streams are checked - all broadly at variance with Natures manifestations in any other State of our Union. Indeed, it has been said that only in far-off Palestine are these conditions in any wise duplicated.


There is a charm in all, that includes also the history of this Sun-Kissed Land, even though the epoch considered be one of dreadful tragedy. The stage setting always has been dramatic. In the wondrous, many-hued framing of the deep mountain canons are cliff dwellings and on the plains are mysterious cities of an unrecorded past. Across the glowing landscape have paced mail-clad conquistadores and brown-robed, sandaled friars.

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