The Big One: Maricopa County, Arizona, U.S.A.

Cut Maricopa County out of a map of Arizona. Lay it alongside a map of the Texas panhandle (turning Texas upside down while you're about it). You'll notice a resemblance between them, which, it seems to me, is rather appropriate. There's something conspicuously Texas-ish about Maricopa County. Among all the 14 counties it's the Big One (save for physical size, in which it ranks 7th). It has half of all the population, half or more of all the business, half or more or just about everything else. Itinerant Texans contributed mightily to the settling and building of Maricopa County. The modern-day flow of inmigration is still heavy with them: Cock an ear in a shopping center mall, a theater or a stadium and note how many Texas twangs you hear. Maybe Maricopa County isn't as flamboyant as Texas. Still, there are so many silver saddles to be seen in the Phoenix rodeo parade every March that a body'd have trouble counting them all. Our zillionaires may not be as plentiful nor as gaudy as those of Texas, but they're just as rich, even if some of them had to make it somewhere else and fetch it out here to retire on. And for splashy Texas-type mansions, the McCune house in Paradise Valley, a hop, skip and three palo verde trees away from the Goldwater place, should do until something splashier comes along. It's said to contain 26 bathrooms, give or take a few, and to have cost nearly $6 million. And one more thing before we leave the matter of similarities to Texas: Like Texas, Maricopa County defies stereotyping. Just about the time you think you have it pegged, it gets away from you. The casual outlander, for instance, glancing hastily at a map, might suppose that any county nudging a million in population, embracing a city as big as Phoenix and more than a dozen other communities, must be pretty civilized. Well, it is those portions that have been civilized. But you don't have to venture far west of Phoenix to encounter one of the emptiest and most formidable desert areas in America. It sweeps from the Harquahala Mountains in the northwest to Childs Valley in the southwest a distance of some 100 miles. This is an area so devoid of anything save rocks and rattlesnakes that Air Force supersonic jets use it for target practice and maps carry the warning legend: “DANGER: Do not leave right-of-way on main traveled roads. Use roads open to public only. Observe all warning signs.” To our outlander friend glancing casually at his map, the county might seem also to be pretty much of a piece so far as elevations go. Well, surprise again. There's a spread of nearly 7,000 feet from lowest to highest. The low is below 700 feet at Sentinel, on the Phoenix-to-San Diego highway west of Gila Bend. The high is Four Peaks, thrusting 7,645 feet above sea level in the Mazatzal Mountains in the far northeastern part of the county.

The first county in Arizona to be carved from the original four (Pima, Yuma, Mohave, and Yavapai) was Maricopa County on February 12, 1871. The new county was named for an important Yuman tribe known to have been living with and below the Pima Indians at least as early as 1775, according to Fr. Francisco Garcés. Maricopa was the name applied to them by the Pimas (Maricopas called themselves Pipatsje, “people”). Apparently the Maricopas moved gradually from the Gulf of California to the location noted by Fr. Garcés. Col. Kit Carson found them at the mouth of the Gila in 1826. A reservation for the Maricopa Indians was established on February 28, 1859, on the Gila River, the area being enlarged by various executive orders thereafter. No treaty was ever made with the Maricopa or Pima Indians, they having always been friendly toward the white men.

The weather, as Maricopans well know, is just about as near perfect eight months out of every 12 as weather has a right to be. A shade warmer and a shade less moist than Pima County (Tucson). Average of 228 cloudless days each year, compared to 100 for Miami and 181 for Los Angeles. Enjoys sunshine during 85 per cent of all daylight hours. St. Louis, by comparison, gets 61 per cent, Cleveland 50. "Weather?" said a Wyoming coed in a letter home. "It's fine, I guess just one delightful day after another." For some newcomers, though, this has a drawback. The seasons come and go too unobtrusively. As one eloquent visitor later reported: "No flaming leaves announce the autumn, no robins herald the spring. Like an artist working with consummate skill to keep his technique hidden, nature does the job so effortlessly that, improbable though it may seem to outsiders, natives sometimes take it for granted. 'What weather?' a man says, caught off guard. That's how close it comes to perfection." The other side of the coin is that the summers are gawdawful hot. Had it not been for air conditioning, the population of Maricopa County would be just about where it was at the end of World War II a trifle over a quarter million. The communities of the county would be evacuated come June by everybody with enough scratch for plane fare to San Diego or gasoline to Flagstaff. Small businesses would close (as they did when I arrived in Phoenix soon after the war), leaving signs on their front doors: "Gone fishing. Why don't you?" Maybe, come to think of it, we've lost something rather valuable in losing thanks to air conditioning that summer hiatus. Still, the pace does lessen come June, July and August. Office workers slip out a half-hour early to head for the pool, and the boss rarely notices, because he slipped out an hour early. I frankly prefer summer, now that I'm air-conditioned in home, car and office. We confront each other, the summer sun and I, only between front door and car, between car and office and in the neighborhood swimming pool. And in summer the pressure lightens. People have more time to be pleasant. Neckties all but disappear. And the stackups at red lights are shorter. (In January, at the peak of the season, the 5 o'clock traffic westward bound to Maryvale backs up all the way to my office from the Indian School Road intersection with the Black Canyon Freeway three longish blocks away.) I remember reading someplace that Arizona used to draw newcomers mainly because of the five C's climate, copper, cotton, citrus and cattle and the three A's arthritis, asthma and allergies. Now the biggest factor in its continued growth is simply AC air conditioning. Practically everything is air conditioned homes, stores, city busses, taxicabs, police squad cars, whole huge shopping centers (including the malls), even jails. "Air conditioning," I was told by the business editor of one of the Phoenix newspapers, "is probably the greatest thing that has happened here." At that moment is was 110 outside and 75 inside, and I found nothing in his statement to argue with.

What started it all, and gave birth to the nearly 6 million diverse acres we now call Maricopa County, was, of course, water. More specifically, the water of the Salt River. It formed up from a filigree of creeks with colorful names (Cedar, Carrizo, Cibecue), draining the snows of the White Mountains west of what are now Lakeside, Pinetop and Show Low. Then it flowed briskly southwestward, past tawny, low-slung mountains, through canyons and across the desert, to a confluence with the Verde northeast of present-day Mesa, thence into the valley of the Salt. We are the children of that river. If it hadn't been there, we wouldn't be here.

The first to arrive, attracted by the river perhaps as long as 2,000 years ago, were the Hohokam people. (Hohokam is a Pima Indian word meaning "those who have vanished.") Nobody knows whence they came. They may have migrated up from Mexico or out of the East.

They diverted the waters of the Salt into a complex of irrigation canals, so well laid out that, incredibly enough, today's sophisticated system of irrigation in the valley is partly patterned after it. There were more than 175 miles of such canals. One was 16 miles long. Some were as large as 30 feet deep and 7 feet wide. The effectiveness of their irrigation projects suggested to one authority that the Hohokams must have been "a large, industrious, cooperative population, perhaps with a centralization of authority."

They cultivated cotton, wove it into textiles, fashioned crude pottery and practiced cremation, which makes it tough as blazes for anthropologists to learn much about them. However, we have managed to excavate some of their squarish pithouses (as at Pueblo Grande, in east Phoenix) and thus learned what little there was to learn about them.

What we've never found out is where they ultimately went and why. They simply disappeared, along about the time that Joan of Arc was raising the siege of Orleans and Gutenberg was printing his first Bible. We conjecture that their farms may have become waterlogged from a rising water table, or the land may have been worn out from centuries of use.

Came next a Franciscan priest, Fray Marcos de Niza, on a scouting expedition for the Viceroy of New Spain. He is thought to have marched northward along the San Pedro River to its confluence with the Gila, then westward into what is now Maricopa County. In the mountains south of Phoenix there is a rock into which has been gouged his name and the date of April 12, 1539. It's on the route he is supposed to have taken, and there's a reference to it in his diary.

After that, a year later, came Coronado, in search of the seven fabled cities of Cibola, their streets purportedly paved with gold. His coming opened the era of white-Indian conflict in the Southwest which led ultimately to the sequestering of thousands of Indians on reservations deed for which we are finally beginning to suffer small twinges of conscience.

Most of present-day Maricopa County was included in the original Territory of New Mexico. Then, in 1863, the Territory of Arizona was created, and a year later, as the Civil War was ending, the first white settler arrived in the Salt River Valley.

Some 50 miles to the northwest, meanwhile, a prospector named Henry Wickenburg found a hill of gold 80 feet high and 300 feet long and called it the Vulture Mine. It yielded $171/2 million worth of gold before the lode was lost, and it triggered a gold rush and led to the founding of the town of Wickenburg. In time Wickenburg became the principal supply center for some 60 gold mines. Now and again the rattle of gunfire could be heard within the confines of the town as outlaws lunged after shipments of gold outbound via Wells Fargo.

There's an interesting footnote to the Wickenburg story. It involves a name that was to become nationally known just a century later. The name was Goldwater. What happened was this: Mike and Joe Goldwater, grandfather and great-uncle respectively of the man who was to be runner-up for the presidency, built and operated a stamp mill for Henry Wickenburg. In due course he sold the mine and took his leave. The new owners ran the Vulture for awhile. Then they, too, left, owing the Goldwaters $90,000.

They resolved to get what was coming to them. Pending the arrival of the latest set of owners, they worked the mine for themselves and pocketed the proceeds as payment on the debt which was due them. Even after the owners arrived, the Goldwaters mined on, pre-empting each day's proceeds and somehow holding the owners off at arm's length. This kept on for 30 days, with a daily take of $3,000. When the 30 days were up, and Mike and Joe had their $90,000, they surrendered the mine to its owners and went their way.

There were four counties in the old Arizona Territory. What is now Maricopa was then part of Yavapai and Pima. But the growth of Phoenix and the communities around it suggested to the settlers that it was time to have a county of their own. In 1871 this was done. The new county was named for a small but scrappy Indian tribe which fought pitched battles with other tribes, ultimately being driven by Indians, not white men from the region of the lower Colorado River and settling in central Arizona.

Somebody has made the interesting point that, whereas hungry men start most migrations, it was rich men who started the modern migration into Maricopa County in the 1930s. A Cleveland inventor and manufacturer, John C. Lincoln, came out and built Camelback Inn. William Wrigley, the Chicago chewing gum tycoon, built the Arizona Biltmore and planted the Wrigley mansion on a hill nearby. Fowler McCormick, heir to a farm machinery fortune, laid out a ranch in Paradise Valley which started the hegira to that desert version of Beverly Hills.

Well, that's the county I live in. It's not as scenic as Coconino, which has the Grand Canyon, nor Navajo, which has the Painted Desert. Apache County has more Indians, Pima County more mines. Cochise County has Tombstone and the Boothill Cemetery. But Maricopa is the hub. It's where the happenings happen. It's Dallas and New York and Los Angeles and Chicago, yes, and Sauk Center, all rolled up in a single and supremely variegated package. It is, in three words, the Big One.