There's one more reason to indulge in Girl Scout Cookies this year: In 2012, the Girl Scouts of the USA celebrates its 100th birthday. Juliette Gordon Low formed the Girl Guides in 1912, modeling the organization on England's Girl Guides and Boy Scouts. Low changed the name to Girl Scouts in 1914, after she was informed that scouts were sent out first and guides second — she believed her girls would be "second to none."
Del Webb, like so many of the people who move into his communities, was not an Arizona native.
An avid baseball player, Webb — who grew up in California and would later own the New York Yankees — had a promising career until he fell ill with typhoid fever. He moved to the Phoenix metropolitan area in 1928 for the dry climate, and began working as a carpenter.
You might say Flagstaff was built on exaggerations. In 1876, a man named Samuel Woodworth Cozzens wrote a book titled The Marvelous Country. "You'd call it a travel book today," says Leslie Roe, director of the Pioneer Museum and Riordan Mansion in Flagstaff. Unfortunately, the book was more fiction than fact. "It made a lot of claims and he told it in the first person, as though he experienced it," he says. It later came to light that Cozzens had never visited Northern Arizona. Despite that, the author ventured to cities like Boston, where he promoted his book.
School might be out for good at the Strawberry Schoolhouse, which opened in 1886, but it still gets its fair share of visitors during the summer months, when the classroom opens it doors to the public. "People come to see the schoolhouse and say, 'I went to a school just like this,' " says Margaret Parker, president of the Pine-Strawberry Historical Society. "It's amazing."
In the early 20th century, women in Arizona were treated like second-class citizens at the voting booth. Frances Willard Munds wasn't comfortable with that, and she made it her mission to do something about it.
The former schoolteacher's fight for women's suffrage began in Prescott, where she joined the Arizona Women's Christian Temperance Union. In addition, she became a member of the Arizona Equal Suffrage Association in 1903, later serving as its president. Munds even petitioned the Territorial legislature numerous times and spoke at the Arizona Constitutional Convention.
If a picture's worth a thousand words, this photograph of Olive Oatman speaks volumes. Her story is remarkable.
In 1850, she and her family left their home in Illinois and headed west to California. In February 1851, they approached the Gila River in Arizona, where they were ambushed by a band of Yavapai Indians. Only three of the nine family members survived the attack — brother Lorenzo was beaten and left for dead, although he managed to seek help, and sisters Olive and Mary Ann were abducted and forced into slavery.
If it weren't for the National Rifle Matches, a shooting competition, Arizona's state flag might never have come to fruition. For years, Arizona's National Guard was the nation's only team without a flag. But enough was enough. Colonel Charles Harris, the team's captain, didn't want to compete without representation anymore, so he drew up a temporary banner for the 1910 match, according to the Arizona State Library. May Hicks Curtis Hill, the wife of one of the guardsmen, sewed the original version.
By her own account, Eulalia “Sister” Bourne was “by no means a typical teacher.” And likewise, Baboquivari School was no ordinary school.
Located at the foot of the Baboquivari Mountains in Southern Arizona, the remote school was conducted in the 1930s in “whatever temporary quarters [were] convenient for the two landholders in the six-township district.”
A stagecoach rumbles into town, and clouds of dust billow around it. The driver tugs the reins and pulls the horses to a stop — just long enough to drop off and pick up bags of mail, load and unload passengers, eat a meal, replenish water and change horses.
It reads like a scene from a John Wayne Western, but in 1858, the stagecoaches of the Butterfield Overland Mail were real, and they provided the best means to move letters, packages and passengers westward from the Mississippi River.
