The Rise of Phoenix

The capital of Arizona owes its birth to the handiwork of the ancient Hohokam.

THIS LAND

In 1868, when the name "Phoenix" was chosen for what would become the capital city of Arizona, the reference to a creature reborn from its own ashes was not entirely a romantic notion. The Anglo- and Mexican Americans who began to settle the Phoenix basin in the mid-nineteenth century found the ruins of towns built by the Hohokam ("the people who have gone," as they were dubbed by later indigenous people). The Hohokam lived in this northern part of the Sonoran Desert from the last few centuries B.C. until A.D. 1450; toward the end of that period, as many as 80,000 people may have populated the basin. To feed their population, the Hohokam grew corn and other crops, which they irrigated with water from the Salt River by means of about 500 miles of canals. To a great extent, the modern city owes its very existence to those abandoned canals.

The city's rebirth began in 1867, when Jack Swilling, who had been employed variously as a Confederate soldier, a Union Army scout, and a miner, passed through the area and met John Y. T. Smith, one of the first settlers. Smith told him of "diggings" he thought might be mines, inland from the river, but on inspecting these channels Swilling quickly understood their real purpose:

   By the end of my third afternoon there I was convinced that I had examined
   nothing less than an extensive system of canals and ditches whose function
   had once been to bring the water of the river to the farms of a country
   with rich soil but no rainfall to speak of.

Jack Swilling began a new career as founder of the Swilling Irrigating and Canal Company, which cleaned out a few of the abandoned canals. "As long as we're following their lead," Swilling wrote, "we ought to walk in the same tracks." Soon the canals were watering a growing settlement, just as they had served Hohokam towns centuries before.

Like the core of modern Rome or Mexico City, central Phoenix has archaeological remains almost everywhere you look--and they turn up whenever a sewer line is dug, a foundation is excavated, or a road is built. More than 300 sites are known just within the city limits. One of them, La Ciudad ("the city" in Spanish), was once home to several hundred people. It included a platform mound--a rectangular construction of stone walls filled with dirt, often the result of periodic expansion and remodeling. This one was 150 feet long, 110 feet wide, and nearly 50 feet high. On and around it the Hohokam would have constructed houses of mud, stone, and cementlike caliche. La Ciudad is one of several similar large sites spread around the irrigated basin.

The large platform mound of La Ciudad has practically vanished following 150 years of urban development. (One early-twentieth-century landowner even charged daily admission to anyone wishing to dig up artifacts from the site.) But it's hard to erase some 30,000 cubic yards of material. Armed with a modern map and a map from 1868, photographer David Ortiz and I spent a morning surveying some of the empty lots scattered through downtown Phoenix, and eventually we were able to identify a remnant of La Ciudad. It is now only about ten feet high and paved over by the parking lot of St. Luke's Medical Center at the corner of 18th and Van Buren Streets. No traces seem to remain of the canals that were once located near it.

We also poked around an undeveloped city lot, a leftover triangle enclosed by train tracks, a large concrete-lined irrigation canal, and huge highways. We saw evidence that in historic times this land was used for farming, grazing, and as a dump for stockyard manure. Piles of dirty blankets and old shirts showed that it now serves as a camping spot for the homeless. There were signs of the vanished Hohokam as well. Small, reddish brown pot shards dotted the ground, interspersed with worn-out or broken remains of stone hoes. And two ridges of earth that more or less paralleled the nearby bed of the Salt River--which in this spot is almost entirely dry--proved to be remnants of an eighty-foot-wide canal, large enough to have carried a fair portion of the river's water. It was once one of the main canals, extending more than ten miles to serve the agricultural plots of Hohokam villages.

Visitors to Phoenix who are reluctant to venture into empty lots can turn instead to the Pueblo Grande Museum and Archaeological Park, located north of the Salt River and east of the city's airport. The centerpiece is a rectangular platform mound as big as a football field and twenty to thirty feet high. Its construction was begun about A.D. 1150, with further expansion during the next 300 years. Hohokam houses were once scattered up to half a mile around the mound; the society's elite were housed on its top, where they probably had rooms designed for determining solstices and carrying out other rituals. The site may well have boasted one or more multistoried buildings akin to the Hohokam big house (casa grande, in Spanish) that may be seen at Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, fifty miles southeast of Phoenix.