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Illustration by Arnie Bermudez
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Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday October 17, 2003
Things you always never wanted to know about Arizona
As early as 300 B.C., Phoenix's dry desert soil began yielding crops for the Hohokam people, who spent centuries developing a complex system of irrigation canals, only to mysteriously abandon them around 1450 A.D.
In the 19th century, Jerome, a thriving copper-mining town, was destroyed by fire three times between 1887 and 1888; after the third fire, locals rebuilt with brick. The entire town looks like it's about to slide off the mountainside. Indeed, many buildings have done just that; the famous "sliding jail" can be seen 225 feet below its original location.
The first serious European exploration of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon was in 1869, when John Wesley Powell, a one-armed veteran of the Civil War, led an expedition though the territory that was still a blank spot on the map.
Arizona's state reptile is the Arizona ridge-nosed rattlesnake.
In the 1950s, Glen Canyon was the heart of the largest "roadless" area in the continental United States. And in 1956, conservationists fought hard against the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam, but lost. When the dam was finished in 1963, the Colorado River and its tributaries began backing up 186 miles. By 1980 Lake Powell had flooded the canyon to a depth of 560 feet and had created almost 2,000 miles of shoreline, becoming the second-largest artificial reservoir in the country.
The town of Winslow's primary claim to fame is the Eagles' hit "Take it Easy" (which was written by Jackson Browne), in which a hitchhiker standing on a corner gets checked out by a girl ("my Lord!") in a flatbed Ford. The putative corner is at Kingsley and Second streets.
Arizona is home of Geronimo, the first U.S. rodeo (1888) and Sandra Day O'Connor, the first female Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court (1981).
The language of the Navajo, an American Indian tribe in northeastern Arizona, is so complex that the U.S. military used it as a secret code during WWII. It was never broken.
When the city of London auctioned off its 1831 bridge in the late 1960s, developer Robert McCulloch bought it for $2,460,000, disassembled it into 10,276 granite slabs, transported the 10,000 tons of stone and reassembled it at Lake Havasu City.
Ninety-three percent of daylight hours in Yuma are rain-free.
The official state neckwear of Arizona is the bola tie.
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