Arizona

The last of the contiguous states to be admitted, and a place shaped entirely by water it does not have. The southern strip was bought from Mexico in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 for a railway route that was never built there. Apache resistance under Cochise and later Geronimo continued until 1886, longer than almost anywhere else, and the Navajo were marched on the Long Walk to eastern New Mexico in 1864 before being allowed to return to a reservation on part of their own land - now the largest in the country. Mining built the territory: copper above all, which made the state and produced the strikes and deportations of 1917 at Bisbee, where over a thousand miners were loaded into cattle cars and abandoned in the desert. Statehood came in February 1912, delayed partly over a constitutional provision allowing judges to be recalled. The Colorado River compact of 1922 and the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams made Phoenix and Tucson possible, and that allocation, negotiated in an unusually wet decade, is now the region's central crisis. The Grand Canyon is in the state's north. Arizona has more Native American land than any other state. It does not observe daylight saving time. Phoenix is the capital and the fifth largest city in the country. The state has twenty-two federally recognised tribes. Its saguaro cactus grows nowhere else in the country. Phoenix regularly exceeds forty-five degrees in summer. Meteor Crater near Winslow is among the best-preserved on earth. The state flag carries a copper star for the industry that built it.

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