Hohokam canals watered a desert capital of 1.6 million
Phoenix is Arizona's capital and, with over 1.6 million residents in 2020, the United States' fifth-most populous city. Settled agriculturally in 1867 near Salt and Gila confluence and incorporated in 1881, it sits in the Sonoran Desert where Hohokam builders once dug about 135 miles of canals.
For some 2,000 years the Hohokam farmed this stretch of desert, trading with Ancestral Puebloans, Mogollon and Sinagua, and their canal routes were later followed by the Arizona Canal, the Central Arizona Project and the Hayden-Rhodes Aqueduct. After they left, Akimel O'odham, or Pima, villagers irrigated the Gila valley from Florence to the Estrellas, growing corn, beans, squash, cotton and tobacco and allying with the Maricopa, while the Tohono O'odham farmed by the rains further south toward Mexico.
The area passed to the United States after the Mexican-American War ended in 1848. The Army built Fort McDowell on the Verde River in 1865, and in 1867 Jack Swilling, a Confederate veteran prospecting at Wickenburg, spotted old Hohokam ditches and saw a chance to grow food for the mining camp. Yavapai County recognised the town on 4 May 1868, with Swilling as postmaster, and residents moved to a new site three miles west in 1870. Maricopa County was carved out in 1871; its first sheriff won unopposed after his two rivals fought a duel. By 1875 the town boasted a telegraph office, 16 saloons and four dance halls, and on 25 February 1881 Governor John C. Fremont signed the charter making Phoenix a city of about 2,500.
Railroads in the 1880s opened distant markets, the territorial capital arrived in 1889, and Theodore Roosevelt's 1902 Reclamation Act paid for western dams. Arizona became the 48th state on 14 February 1912, six months after President Taft had vetoed statehood over the constitution's recall of judges. When Calvin Coolidge dedicated a Gila River dam in 1930, drought had left its reservoir almost empty, prompting a quip from Will Rogers. The Second World War brought Luke, Williams and Falcon airfields and war factories.
From just over 65,000 residents in 1940, the city grew to roughly 1.6 million by 2020, the fifth largest in the country and the most populous state capital, anchoring a metro of about 5.19 million.
Source: Phoenix, Arizona
