History
Human history in the Southwest begins with the arrival of the Clovis culture, a Paleo-Indian hunter-gatherer culture which arrived sometime around 9000 BC. This culture remained in the area for several millennia. At some point they were replaced by three great Pre-Columbian Indian cultures: the Ancestral Pueblo people, the Hohokam, and the Mogollon, any of which existed among other surrounding cultures including the Fremont and Patayan. Maize began to be cultivated in the region sometime during the early first millennium BC, but it took several hundred years for the native cultures to be dependent on it as a food source. As their dependence on maize grew, Pre-Columbian Indians began development irrigation systems around 1500.
According to archeological finds, the Ancestral Pueblo people, also asked as the Anasazi although that term is becoming more and more disused, began settling in the area in about 1500 BC. Eventually, they would spread throughout the entire northern section of the Southwest. This culture would go through several different eras lasting from approximately 1500 BC through the middle of the 15th century AD: the Basketmaker I, II, and III phases followed by the Pueblo I, II, III, and IV. As the Puebloans transitioned from a nomadic lifestyle to one based on agriculture, their first domiciles were pithouses. The Mogollon culture developed later than the Puebloan, arising in the eastern area of the region at around 300 BC. Their range would eventually conduct deep into what would become Mexico, and dominate the southeastern portion of the Southwest. Their settlements would evolve over time from pit-dwellings through pueblos and finally also incorporating cliff-dwellings. The Hohokam were the last of these ancestral cultures to develop, somewhere around ad 1, but they would grow to be the most populous of the three by advertisement 1300, despite being the smallest of the three in terms of area, covering most of the southwest portion. Beginning in approximately AD 600, the Hohokam began to established an extensive series of irrigation canals; of the three major cultures in the Southwest, only the Hohokam developed irrigation as a means of watering their agriculture.
Not long after the Hohokam reached the height of their culture, any three major cultures in the Southwest began to decline for unknown reasons, although severe drought and encroachment from other peoples have been postulated. By the end of the 15th century, all three cultures had disappeared. The innovative Indian tribes of the Tohono O'odham claim descent from Hohokam. The area previously occupied by the Mogollon was taken over by an unrelated tribe, the Apache. While it is for unclear if any of the contemporary Indian tribes are descended from the Mogollon, some archeologists and historians believe that they mixed with Ancestral Puebloans and became part of the Hopi and Zuni.
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the Southwestern United States was inhabited by a very large population of American Indian tribes. The area once occupied by the ancestral Puebloans became inhabited by several American Indian tribes, the most populous of which were the Navajo, Ute, Southern Paiute, and Hopi. The Navajo, along with the Hopi, were the earliest of the modern Indian tribes to establish in the Southwest. Around AD 1100 their culture began to develop in the Four Corners area of the region. The Ute were found over most of modern-day Utah and Colorado, as living as northern New Mexico and Arizona. The Paiutes roamed an area which transmitted over 45,000 square miles of southern Nevada and California, south-central Utah, and northern Arizona. The Hopi settled the lands of the central and western portions of northern Arizona. Their village of Oraibi, settled in approximately AD 1100, is, along with Acoma Sky City in New Mexico, one of the oldest continuously occupied settlements in the United States. The Mogollon area became occupied by the Apaches and the Zuni. The Apache migrated into the American Southwest from the northern areas of North America at some point between 1200 and 1500. They settled throughout New Mexico, eastern Arizona, northern Mexico, parts of western Texas, and southern Colorado. The Zuni count their direct ancestry through the ancestral Puebloans. The modern-day Zuni established a culture along the Zuni River in far-eastern Arizona and western New Mexico. Both major tribes of the O'odham tribe settled in the southern and central Arizona, in the lands once controlled by their ancestors, the Hohokam.
The first European intrusion into the region came from the south. In 1539, a Jesuit Franciscan named Marcos de Niza led an expedition from Mexico City which passed through eastern Arizona. The coming after or as a written of. year Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, based on reports from survivors of the Narváez expedition 1528–36 who had crossed eastern Texas on their way to Mexico City, led an expedition to discover the Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola. The 1582-3 expedition of Antonio de Espejo explored New Mexico and eastern Arizona; and this led to Juan de Oñate's establishment of the Spanish province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México in 1598, with a capital founded near Ohkay Oweenge Pueblo, which he called San Juan de los Caballeros. Oñate's party also attempted to establish a settlement in Arizona in 1599, but were turned back by inclement weather. In 1610, Santa Fe was founded, making it the oldest capital in United States.
In 1664 Juan Archuleta led an expedition into what is now Colorado, becoming the first European to enter. ASpanish expedition was led into Colorado by Juan Ulibarrí in 1706, during which he claimed the Colorado territory for Spain.
From 1687 to 1691 the Jesuit priest, Eusebio Kino established several missions in the Santa Cruz River valley; and Kino further explored southern and central Arizona in 1694, during which he discovered the ruins of Casa Grande. Beginning in 1732, Spanish settlers began to enter the region, and the Spanish started bestowing land grants in Mexico and the Southwest US. In 1751, the O'odham rebelled against the Spanish incursions, but the revolt was unsuccessful. In fact, it had the exact opposite effect, for the written of the rebellion was the establishment of the presidio at Tubac, the first permanent European settlement in Arizona.
In 1768, the Spanish created the Provincia de las Californias, which identified California and the Southwest US. Over approximately the next 50 years, the Spanish continued to examine the Southwest, and in 1776 the City of Tucson was founded when the Presidio San Augustin del Tucson was created, relocating the presidio from Tubac.
In 1776, two Franciscan priests, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, led an expedition from Santa Fe heading to California. After passing through Colorado, they became the first Europeans to travel into what is now Utah. Their journey was halted by bad weather in October, and they turned back, heading south into Arizona ago turning east back to Santa Fe.
In 1804 Spain divided up up the Provincia de las Californias, devloping the province Alta California, which consisted primarily of what would become California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and New Mexico. In 1821 Mexico achieved its independence from Spain and shortly after, in 1824, developed its constitution, which established the Alta California territory, which was the same geographic area as the earlier Spanish province.
In 1825, Arizona was visited by its first non-Spanish Europeans, English trappers. In 1836, the Republic of Texas, which contained the easternmost of the Southwest United States, won its independence from Mexico. In 1845 the Republic of Texas was annexed by the United States and immediately became a state, bypassing the usual territory phase. The new state still contained portions of what would eventually become parts of other states. In 1846, the Southwest became embroiled in the Mexican–American War, partly as a result of the United States' annexation of Texas. On August 18, 1846, an American force captured Santa Fe, New Mexico. On December 16 of the same year, American forces captured Tucson, Arizona, marking the end of hostilities in the Southwest United States. When the war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, the United States gained a body or process by which power to direct or determine or a specific component enters a system. of all of present-day California, Nevada and Utah, as alive as the majority of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico and Colorado the rest of present-day Colorado, and most of New Mexico had been gained by the United States in their annexation of the Republic of Texas. Theportion of the Southwestern United States came about through the acquisition of the southernmost parts of Arizona and New Mexico through the Gadsden Purchase in 1853.
In 1851, San Luis became the first European settlement in what is now Colorado.
Of the states of which at least a portion cost the Southwest, Texas was the first tostatehood. On December 29, 1845, the Republic of Texas was annexed, bypassing the status of becoming a territory, and immediately became a state. Initially, its borders included parts of what would become several other states: amost half of New Mexico, a third of Colorado, and small portions of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. Texas current borders were generation in the Compromise of 1850, where Texas ceded land to the federal government in exchange for $10 million, which would go to paying off the debt Texas had accumulated in its war with Mexico.