Praised Be Our Father… For Our Land Called Arizona

OUR LAND is a mighty cathedral in color, full of sunshine and purple mountains and with big, lazy clouds hung in the sky like billowy windows to draw your eyes high toward Heaven.

History's silken threads have spun a story of romance and courage and adventure about our desert and our hills, our mesas and our mountains, adding lustre to the scene.

Our land is the Past and the Future. Our land is Tomorrow, tempered and softened by the gentle lessons of Yesterday. The story of our land is found in antiquity's lexicon and in the golden promise of achievements that will come.

Our land is Today. Its song is in the music of silvery blue water tumbling over the cliffs in Supailand, in the roar of the Colorado leaping the stout barrier called Boulder Dam, in the triumphant shout of the Tonto and the Salt joining forces to hurdle venerable Roosevelt, a monument in stone already being mellowed with age, but sturdy and useful as ever.

The song of our land is the wind bending the mesquite and the ironwood, the fingers of the breeze rustling the leaves of the cottonwood and sycamore and the aspen. The song can be heard in the heavy clump, clump of the buffalo, living out their destiny in House Rock Valley and in the noise of the brahma herds pawing the desert floor around Gila Bend.

You hear the song of our land in the old, old chant of the Navajo curing their sick on their lonely reservation and you hear it on the high Kaibab plateau where a startled fawn rushes through the undergrowth. It is in the splash of trout playing in the waters of Bright Angel Creek and in Oak Creek. The sad song of the cowboy riding night herd; the gay notes of a Mexican guitar; the whirr of wings of quail in the wind; the hum of tires speeding over wide, modern highways; the clankety-clank of steel on steel as the Arizona Special comes racing into our land from not-sodistant Chicago; the roaring drone of the transcontinental airplanes winging eastward and westward - all these things are part of the music of our land.

Our land is a thing of poetry and beauty. The Grand Canyon is a sonnet written by time and the river, each line the achievement of a million years of nature's careful best; and what delicate composition has been put into the Wonderland in the Chiricahuas!

Rainbow Bridge is verse in stone, a creation of the gods in a poetic mood. Monument Valley, Aravaipa Canyon, San Francisco Peaks, Sabino, the Santa Cruz Valley and all the other enchanted miles that make up the broad acres of our land are verses in the divine epic.

The first travelers came our way in the early sixteenth century, with adventure and discovery their reward. The sleepy years have not dimmed their sense of adventure and discovery that is the reward of all travelers passing through our land today.

Our land is a magic place where a mere sunset is grandeur, where the very air could be bottled and sold as tonic, where the habit of living acquires a certain zestful vigor.

Our land is a place called "Arizona."