As a regular feature, I thought I would share with you each time a little snippet of local history.
So – did you know that our part of Arizona very nearly wasn’t Arizona, but Mexico?? When, following the Mexican-American War, by the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, the United States acquired the rest of the west which had not been already snaffled by the Louisiana Purchase, the border between the US and Mexico ran along the Gila River, about 100 miles north of us. It was only when the US, wanting to make a railroad from east to west, found that the Rocky Mountains were inconveniently in the way, and that what they really needed was another bit of land, south of the Gila, along more hospitable terrain. So, avoiding another war, they bought it, in the form of the Gadsden Purchase, in 1853, and set about surveying and then building the railroad, and also the Butterfield Trail, which ran from St.Louis to Los Angeles and thence to San Francisco. The price, which worked out at 33c per acre, was $10 million – as you can see if you look at the areas in question, it represented quite an increase in dollars per acre over the cost of the Louisiana Purchase – but still, what a deal!! And so it is thanks to the inhospitable terrain north of us, that today we are not Mexicans, but Americans!