Arizona Territory

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The Yavapais interned at San Carlos also began to trickle back into their traditional ranges, but the government did not create reservations for them until 1904 at Fort McDowell, 1910 near Camp Verde, and 1935 near Prescott. Hualapais were taken to La Paz on the Colorado River reservation in 1874, but they escaped a year later to find their country overrun by ranchers. The stockmen had run their cattle over the grasslands, destroying several of the wild plant species on which the Hualapais relied. In order to contain them, the government established a small reservation along the south rim of the Grand Canyon in 1883.

The Pimas had been allies of the Europeans ever since Kino rode through their country in the 17th century, and during the California Gold Rush they fed thousands of American and Mexicans with the produce of their floodplain fields. They had become the first agricultural entrepreneurs of Arizona in the 1840s, and because of the establishment of a stagecoach route through their territory in 1857 and the Civil War in 1861, they were selling three million pounds (1,400,000 kg) of wheat a year by 1870. If their water rights had been respected, it might have been the Pimas that built Phoenix.

During the late 1860s, Anglo and Mexican farmers settled the upriver from the Pima villages around Florence and dug irrigation ditches that siphoned off the waters of the Gila. In 1873, Chief Antonio Azul led a delegation of Pimas to Washington, D.C. to protest the situation. The Pimas responded by suggesting that the Pimas emigrate to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. The O'odham refuse, but 1,200 did move north to the Salt River where irrigation water was more plentiful. Then, in 1887, the construction of a large canal near Florence diverted the Gila once and for all. By 1895, conditions were so poor that the government began issuing rations to the O'odham.

The territory of Arizona was admitted to the Union as the 48th state on February 14, 1912.

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References

Sheridan, Thomas E. (1995). Arizona: A History. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0-8165-1515-8
Cheek, Lawrence W. (1995). Arizona. Oakland, CA: Compass American Guides. ISBN 1-878867-72-5