Arizona Centennial

A cowboy in Arizona today is more likely to drive a pickup truck than ride a horse.  But his dusty boots and sweat-stained hat brim can still be found statewide.

Ranches were here before statehood.  One early Spanish land grant brought the Amados family to Southern Arizona in 1711.  Henry Amado still has his great-grandfather’s branding iron. While it isn’t polite to ask a rancher the size of his herd, Amado has to call in a lot of neighbors during roundup not far from the town of Amado, named after his family.

The Wild West loved its outlaws. Two of Arizona’s most famous lived during the 20th century.

Public Enemy Number One -- John Dillinger -- was a bank robber and killer, but he seemed a glamorous figure during the Depression.

Dillinger and his henchmen fled to Tucson in 1934 after killing two guards during an Ohio jailbreak.  The downtown hotel they checked into caught fire that night.

Snow hung on pine branches as Flagstaff’s Marine Color Guard honored Arizona’s centennial this morning at the Pioneer Museum.

Locals visited the museum throughout the day where a new Centennial exhibit is on display.

The exhibit is a preview of a larger exhibit planned for the spring.

It will showcase each decade of Flagstaff’s history.

Sixty eight-year-old color guard member Johnny Anaya was born and raised in Flagstaff.

He says his favorite memories are of the Flagstaff All-Indian Powwow, which occurred every Fourth of July between 1929 and 1980.

Joe Meehan and Les Roe rang the Emerson School bell at Flagstaff Pioneer Museum 100 times to mark Arizona's 100th birthday Tuesday.

The museum is hosting a day-long birthday party with a new Centennial exhibit by NAU history students.

Meehan, curator of Arizona Historical Society’s Pioneer Museum, says in 1912, Flagstaff was a booming frontier town with a population around 2,000.

“The lumber yard was up and running. It was growing, the university was here, the observatory was here,” he says.

The Grand Canyon has always been Arizona’s wonder of the world.

We don’t know who first saw it…

We do know people lived within its walls 10 thousand years ago…

And left salt caves and split twig figures.

One explorer, Joseph Christmas Ives, in 1858…didn’t see the Canyon’s beauty. He said: "Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality.”

But a one-armed Civil War hero, Major John Wesley Powell, saw it differently from the kitchen chair he lashed to the top of a rowboat…

Grand Canyon enthusiasts celebrated Arizona’s centennial recently with a History Symposium at the South Rim.  And some of the most interesting research came from amateur historians in love with the Canyon.

Dennis Foster teaches applied macro-economics at Northern Arizona University.  That’s his day job.  He spends his free time studying Grand Canyon and its history. For the past 15 years Foster has been investigating the 1882 – 83 Charles Walcott expedition.