AURA

You know, things are more complicated and mixed up than you remember from school. Of course school tries to make things simple because . . . who needs all this when you’re a kid. Coronado telling me about the Spanish touching Florida and then ending up in Texas, and then Coronado going all the way from Mexico into Kansas, that’s just one thing. Another one is the civil war that I remembered from school was between the north and the south, basically all happening in the east. Who would have thought there was a fight way out here in Arizona that must have seemed like the middle of nowhere then. But there was. The fact is: When you look southwest from Picacho that’s on the main drag from Tucson to Phoenix, at Picacho you’re looking at Picacho Peak where they had their battle. Some people used to do a reenactment of it until recently, god knows why. But that’s how I found out some of the people who settled Arizona came from the south in the east, and they wanted to join the Confederacy. In fact, they sent a delegate to the Confederate Congress, and in 1862 the Confederacy sent troops to New Mexico and Arizona to lay down the law. But then Union forces came along and beat them at Picacho. The Confederacy acted as if nothing happened and went ahead and cooked up what they called the Confederate Territory of Arizona a year later, even though it didn’t mean anything since they couldn’t enforce it. And that was the yada yada yada that got the U. S. Congress to create what they called the Territory of Arizona, which is basically what we’ve got now, except that it got more formal by becoming a state.

The reeactments were kind of fun. There used to be more tourists watching than all the soldiers in the original battle.

● Battle of Picacho Pass

● Recent reenactment

● Picacho Peak State Park

● Map

● 10 day weather forecast