"The Arizona Rangers" is the first documented history of the Rangers ever published, and fills a sizeable void in the annals of Arizona Territory. Bill O'Neal's enthusiasm for his subject and his respect for those remarkable men who wore the five-pointed star are apparent in every word of his thoroughly researched, well written manuscript. He has accurately portrayed the story of the Arizona Rangers against an authentic background of turn-of-the-century...

Lord Darrell Duppa, along with his friend Jack Swilling, suggested the name "Phoenix" for the city he had cofounded because it described a city born from the ruins of a former civilization. Settled on the ancestral lands of the Hohokam Indians, Phoenix was thriving by the early 1920s when craftsmanship and attention to detail were the orders of the day. Buildings were designed to welcome residents and travelers alike. Today the Fox Theater,...

The Hohokam built an extensive network of canals with sticks and stone hoes, but mysteriously disappeared in 1450. Later, the Pima and Maricopa Indians occupied their farmlands near the Gila River, and Maricopa took on the name of the latter. In 1858, Maricopa became an isolated little town in the middle of the desert. It served as the major stage station for the Butterfield Overland Stage Station and became a beacon of light for trappers, traders,...

Charles Trumbull Hayden built the first canal on the south side of the Salt River in 1870. Soon after, he built a store, a flour mill, and a cable ferry across the river, and he started a town. Since then, Tempe has changed from a small farming community to a lively urban center. Moreover, Tempe's residential growth has made it the seventh-largest town in Arizona.

An accessible history of how each of the fifty United States obtained their unique shapes offers insight into such topics as the super-sized geography of Texas, Oklahoma's panhandle, and Maryland's unusual layout.

Most visitors travel to Sedona to view the towering red rock sandstone formations dotted with juniper pines and to hike and explore Oak Creek Canyon, along with other beautiful canyons that were once showcased by the Westerns filmed in Sedona. After the ancient peoples who farmed departed the area, the Homestead Act of the 1870s advertised free land and lured cattle ranchers and farmers, but by the 1960s, tourism reigned, and Sedona became a destination...

This volume describes the little-known world of John Baptist Salpointe, successor to Archbishop Lamy and the second Archbishop of Santa Fe, who worked among Indian tribes in both Arizona and New Mexico during the tumultuous final years of the frontier between 1860-1898. All of his impressions and accumulated knowledge of Indian/White relations over this thirty-plus-year period are vividly described in his varied vignettes enhanced by the editors through...

Between Two Countries: A History of Coronado National Memorial 1939-1990 is the inspiring story of a generation that sought to acknowledge the common history the United States shares with Mexico. The story began at a time when fact and legend intertwined to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first European expedition to traverse northwestern Mexico and the southwest of the U.S. In the end, two governments with different historical viewpoints...

"Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangsters from Harlem, she stood atop Maine's Mount Katahdin....

John Butterfield's mail service connected the East and West Coasts in one of the great entrepreneurial and pioneering stories of the American West. Until 1858, California's gold fields were reached only by horseback, wagon or ship around Cape Horn. Congress decided a 2,800-mile, twenty-five-day stagecoach line would roll from St. Louis to San Francisco. Former Utica, New York mayor Butterfield hired one thousand men and bought 1,200 horses, 600 mules,...