Look back over Arizona’s landscape of time
Compiled by Kathy Engle
Green Valley News 
Now the day is over
The Millennium is drawing nigh
Shadows of before years
Steal across the sky.
-------Joyce Esterbrook
Green Valley
 Arizona has a unique history, one full of   memorable, inspiring and ignoble events. Here, in honor of the millennium, is a capsule look back  over the landscape of  time.

•1770s  First  Spanish presidio established along the banks of the Santa Cruz River at Tubac. With the soldiers come the first women settlers.

•1775 Col. Hugo O’Conor, Irish mercenary serving in the Spanish Army, established a presidio (fort) that was to become the modern city of Tucson. Capt Juan Bautista de Anza II leads 240 colonists from Tubac to found what is now the city of San Francisco.

•1780s Aggressive military campaigns against the Apaches,  and appeasement policy, result in a peace agreement  that lasts nearly half a century. Spanish ranchers and miners move into Southern Arizona. Missions are built at San Jose de Tumacacori and San Xavier del Bac.

•1821 Mexicans wins independence. Tomas and Ignacio Ortiz, owners of the Arivaca Ranch purchase the San Ignacio de la Canoa land grant for   approximately $250.

•1824 First Americans, including mountain man and scout Kit Carson arrive in Arizona to trap for beaver along the rivers.

•1835 Apaches go back on the warpath. With the exception of small settlements at Tucson and Tubac,  Arizona is just about deserted.

•1848 War breaks out between U.S. and Mexico.

•1850-53 Arizona becomes part of New Mexico Territory.

•1854 U.S. Congress ratifies the Gadsden Purchase, including the lands south of the Gila River to the present border with Mexico,  completing the boundaries of today’s continental United States.

•1859 Arizona’s first newspaper, The Weekly Arizonan,  first printed at Tubac.

•1860s Gold discovered in Arizona’s central  mountains.

•1863 Arizona Territory founded.

•1869 John Wesley Powell and fellow adventurers ride down the Colorado River in boats, becoming what some say are the first explorers in the Grand Canyon. This remains a disputed claim.

•1877 Ed Schieffelin discovers silver near Tombstone which quickly  mushrooms into  a boom town larger than San Francisco.

•1881 Shootout at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone really takes place near the corner of Fremont and 3rd Stret between the Earp brothers and the Clantons and McLary’s, the most famous gunfight in the history of the West.

•1886 Chiricahua Apache Chief Geronimo and his band surrender, ending one of the longest wars in U.S. history.

•1881 Southern Pacific Railroad crosses Arizona

•1889 Phoenix becomes Arizona’s permanent capital.

•1899  War with Spain. Many Arizonans join with Rough Riders to follow Teddy Roosevelt in the charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba. Tucson’s first horseless carriage   arrives after Dr. Hiram Fenner has it shipped by train. 

•1900 Arizona claims about 120,00 residents. Pearl Hart, the famed “Girl Bandit”, is sentenced to five years in prison for her part in a stagecoach robbery in 1899.

•1901 Theodore Roosevelt becomes president. Santa Fe Railroad completes 64-mile rail line from Williams to the Grand Canyon. Fare: $3.95.Arizona Rangers formed to combat cattle rustlers

•1902 Famed Western writer Zane Gray, trained as a dentist, visits Arizona. The area between the Arizona Strip and the North Rim of the Grand d Canyon which is to become the setting for his most famous novel, “Riders of the Purple Sage” and several others.

•1905 Fred Harvey Company opens what is described as the world’s “grandest” hotel, El Tovar, perched on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

•1906 Arizona Rangers called out to quell a riot of striking  miners in Morenci in what is remembered as the largest strike in American history prior to World War I. Flagstaff rocked with a series of earthquakes. A few months later, a  massive  quake destroys the city of San Francisco. Mule-drawn street car makes its final run in Tucson, replaced by an electric car.

•1907 Territorial Legislature passes law banning women from entering saloons.

•1908 City of Tucson passes ordinance prohibiting spitting on the sidewalks. Tucson ends era of all-night saloons when City Council decides they must all close by midnight. Baron and Josephine Goldwater become proud parents of a son they name Barry. 1908 President Teddy Roosevelt declares the Grand Canyon a national monument.

•1909 Chiricahua Apache leader Geronimo dies at 80. Artist Frederic Remington dies of acute appendicitis at age 48. Began his career in the 1880s when he came to Arizona to cover the Geronimo campaigns for Harper’s Weekly. Silent movie star Tom Mix wins National Rodeo Championship at Prescott’s Frontier Days Rodeo. Mix went on to star in more than 300 silent movies, most filmed near Prescott.

•1910 Arizona’s first flight takes place on Feb. 12, when Charles Hamilton, billing himself as the “Man Bird” flies his bamboo and silk airplane in a race against a Studebaker car at the state fairgrounds.

•1912 Arizona gains statehood Feb. 14. Famed orator William Jennings Bryant marks the occasion with a two-hour speech, sans microphone or megaphone,  at the state  capital for a crowd of 5.000.  Lewis Tewanima, the  Hopi distance runner from Second Mesa, wins the Silver Medal in the 10,000-meter run during the  Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden.

•1915 Five years before passing of Prohibition (18th Amendment in 1920)  Arizona goes dry on Jan. 1.

•1916 Pancho Villa crosses the border, attacks the town of Columbus, N.M.. taking a military post and catching U.S. forces by surprise, President Wilson sends a Punitive Expedition after Villa led by Gen John J. “Black Jack” Pershing. In the state gubernatorial election Republican Tom Campell and Democrat George W. P. Hunt finished in a virtual tie. “For 11 months the state has two governors and things were still a mess,” writes State Historian Marshall Trimble.  Arizona’s first cotton king, Paul Lichfield, with the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, buys 24,000 acres in Chandler and plants long staple cotton, replaced shortly afterwards by Egyptian cotton.

•1917 U.S. declares war on Germany. More than 1,000 striking miners deported by rail and dumped in  New Mexico  during the Bisbee Deportation, the most notorious event in Arizona’s labor history.

•1919  Tucson pioneers in aviation, building the nation’s first municipally owned airport.

•1920s More than 300 acres of concrete roads, 16 feet wide are built in Maricopa County to help farmers get their goods to market.

•1922 Arizona’s first licensed radio station, KFAD, later changed to KTAR, goes on the air.

•1927 Charles Lindbergh dedicates Arizona’s new Davis-Monthan Airfield in Tucson, landing in his famous monoplane, “The Spirit of St. Louis.”

•1926 Babe Ruth travels through Phoenix. Spots some kids playing baseball, steps off train, picks up a bat and starts hitting baseballs into a field about 400 feet away.

•1928  Heard Museum is founded in Phoenix  by Maie Bartlett  and Dwight B. Heard, president and publisher of the Arizona Republican.

•1929 Revolution breaks out again in Mexico. A bombing raid on Naco, Ariz., led by American pilot Patrick Murphy who offered his services   to the Mexican rebels. marked the only time the U.S. have been under air attack from a foreign power. Stock market crashes Oct. 24. Detroit Tigers conduct spring training in Tucson.

•1930 Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory makes major news with the discovery of the planet Pluto.

•1931 The Arizona Highway Patrol, forerunner of the Department of Public Safety and the first state-wide police force, is created by the Legislature.

•1932 Tucson police pull off a major coup by arresting the notorious John Dillinger and his gang without firing a shot.

•1933 Isabella Selmes Greenway, widow of former Rough Rider and former copper magnate John C. Greenway, is elected the first woman in Arizona to serve in Congress.

•1936 The two oldest Kennedy brothers, Joseph and future president John F., come to Arizona to work as cowboys at the J-6 Ranch near Benson.

•1940 Cowboy silent movie idol Tom Mix dies after he  crashes his Ford auto in a shallow arroyo near Florence. 

•1941 Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. U.S.S. Arizona battleship takes the worst hit with 1,177 crew members killed.

•1942 War Department authorizes the relocation of Japanese Americans from military installations in California to some in Arizona.

•1943 Arizona’s first state historian Sharlot Mabridth Hall, dies in her hometown of Prescott.

•1949 Jacque Mercer, Miss Arizona, becomes first Arizona woman to be crowned Miss America. Emay Sekaquaptwea, a Hopi from Oraibi, becomes the first full-blooded Native American to receive an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

•1949 Rex Allen, “The Arizona Cowboy” from Willcox makes his movie debut. In schools across the state children are trained to get under their desks to avoid begin injured by an atomic bomb after Russia explodes Joe One.

•1950 Ana Frohmiller, 12 times elected state auditor, becomes the first women to serve as a major party (Democratic) candidate for governor. She lost to Republican Howard Pyle.

•1951 The world champion New York Yankees come to Phoenix to train at the old Phoenix Municipal Stadium.

•1953 Phelps Dodge closes down the mines at the “Billion Dollar Copper Camp” of Jerome.

•1955-58 Astronomers look at more than 150 mountain peaks in the Southwest before choosing Kitt Peak, near Tucson, as the site of a new astronomical observatory.

•1959 Marty Robbins of Glendale records his signature song “El Paso.” Arizona State College at Tempe becomes Arizona State University.

•1961 Rep. Stewart L. Udall is named Secretary of the Interior in the administration of John F. Kennedy. He was replaced in Congress by his younger brother “Mo”

•1963 Arizona wins Supreme Court decision in dispute with California over Arizona’s share of Colorado River Water.

•1964 Barry Goldwater accepts  Republican Party nomination for president of the United States at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. He loses to Lyndon Johnson in November.

•1965 Interstate 10 between Phoenix and Tucson completed. World famous group of painters who dub themselves Cowboy Artists of America is created in Sedona at the Oak Creek Tavern. Astronaut Frank Borman of Tucson, and Jim Lovell spend two weks in ordit in Gemini 7. They execute the first manned space rendezvous  in orbit, linking up with Gemini 6.

•1966 U.S. Supreme Court issues  ruling regarding Miranda v. Arizona  requiring officers to read suspects their rights and warn them that anything they say can be held against them in a court of law.

•1966 Gov. Sam Goddard names Arizona folksinger Dolan Ellis as the state’s official balladeer.

•1968 Astronaut Frank Borman pilots Apollo 8 into the first moon orbit.

•1970 Pioneer Hotel in Tucson burns to the ground, killing 29 people. A 15-year old boy with a juvenile record is arested and convicted for the crime and sentenced to life in prison. 

•1974 Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, a longtime Arizonan, is forced to resign as U.S. Attorney General and face charges along with others in the Nixon administration regarding the Watergate scandal.

•1976 Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles in killed in a car bombing in June. The prosecution failed to prove that organized crime was involved. The exact details remain a mystery. 

•1978 Tyson gang escapes from prison in Florence and goes on a 12-day ramage and killing spree.

•1979 the Archaelogical Resources Protection Act, a new federal law, steps up efforts to deal with those who loot archaelogical sites. Law carries a possible fine of $10,000 and a year in prison for the first offense and up to a $100,000 fine and five years in prisons for subsequent offenses.

•1981 President Ronald Reagan nominates Sandra Day O’Connor of Arizona to the U.S. Supreme Court, the first woman appointed.

•1984 After 60 years in the making, the Central Arizona Project begins delivering water to the Salt River Valley in Phoenix, a few years later CAP reaches its final destination in Tucson.

•1988 Former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt makes an unsuccessful run for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. NFL St. Louis Cardinals, now known as the Arizona Cardinals, move to the state. Arizona Gov. Evan Mecham, a Republican,  is impeached and removed from office. He is replaced by Rose Mofford, Democrat,  long-time secretary of state.

•1992 Bruce Babbitt named as Secretary of the Interior in the Clinton Administration.

•1996 Tucson gymnst Kerri Strug leads her team to a gold medal at the Summer Olympic Games, despite a serious injury to her ankle.

•1997 Lute Olson and the University of Arizona Wildcats win the state’s first NCCA national basketball championship after beating Kentucky 84-79.  
Republican Gov. Fife Symington is convicted on seven felony counts and forced from office. Secretary of State Jane Dee Hull is sworn in by Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

1998 Barry Goldwater, “Mr. Arizona” dies at his home in Paradise Valley.

•1999 “Fab Five”  Jane Dee Hull, governor; Betsey Bayless, secretary of state; Janet Napolitana attorney general;  Carol Springer, treasurer; and Lisa Graham Kegan, superintendent of public instruction, sworn into the top posts in Arizona government. A sixth woman, Brenda Burns, is elected president of the Arizona Senate. Rex Allen dies in an accident at his home in Tucson. 

•2000 Arizona Sen. John McCain, Republican, Arizona, continues his campaign for the Republican nomination for president of the United States.

 
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