"Dedicated to all those living elsewhere who would rather be in
Tucson"
"Tucson" is the first comprehensive history of a unique corner
of America, a city with its roots in Indian and Spanish colonial
history; its skies broken by the towers of a Sunbelt
metropolis.
In these pages C. L. Sonnichsen, dean of southwestern
historians-and a Tucsonan by adoption--chronicles with humor and
affection the growth over two centuries of one of the region's most
colorful communities.
Today's metropolitan Tucson is a city of half a million people.
Set along the Santa Cruz River in the Lower Sonoran Desert in a
great basin surrounded by soaring mountain ranges, it is different
in many ways from any other city in the United States. Like all
other Sunbelt centers, however, it is growing by great leaps and
bounds. A popular winter resort, it attracts fugitives from the
frozen North. The site of the University of Arizona, it draws many
with an intellectual bent. For artists the attractions of the "Old
Pueblo" are all but endless. The city booms with new people,
industries, shopping centers, and subdivisions.
Newcomers tend to bring along their ideas, life-styles, and
landscapes, including Bermuda grass and mulberry trees, and have
moved Tucson closer to the familiar patterns of urban America. But
tradition and geography limit their efforts, for Tucson has always
been the center of a separate world, with a history, population,
and character of its own. It was an oasis far from other Indian
cultural centers a thousand years ago.
It was a remote outpost in 1776, when the Spaniards founded a
presidio there. It was not far from the edge of the world when
Anglos began settling along the Santa Cruz not long before the
Civil War. Even with the coming of the railroad, the airplane, and
television, Tucson has remained insulated from the rest of the
country by distance and by special habits of mind. Much of Tucson's
charm derives from this insulation.
Beyond the separateness, says the author, is a fact too often
overlooked: Deserts Were Not Made for People. Technological skills
make survival possible for most of the population; only the
long-resident Papago Indians are truly at home there. In such a
difficult environment early-day white settlers had to make do with
little, undergo much, and be prepared for the worst.
Today their successors live in what is essentially an artificial
environment, using their natural resources as if they were
inexhaustible-- for water Tucson depends entirely on underground
sources-and continue to enjoy the genial, if sometimes superheated,
climate, the casual life-style and western friendliness of the
population, the Indian-Spanish-Mexican cultural and historical
ambience, and the artistic and intellectual life. The problems of
other great American cities are Tucson's also. Perhaps it is those
very problems and the uncertainty of the future that add a special
urgency to the savoring of life in this special corner of
America.
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