The fact that the population of New Mexico is largely Mexican, and that of Arizona is mostly American, suggests a potent reason for the strong feeling in Arizona against this proposition. Their racial instincts and their business interests alike conflict. If they are joined as a single state, there will be continual jealousy and friction, and legislation to promote the interests of one-half the state will necessarily be at the expense of the other.
To the traveller sensitive to the spell of a strange, unearthly beauty, Arizona prefigures itself as the country God remembered rather than as "the country God forgot." It is at once the oldest and the newest of the states. Its authentic and historic past antedates the coming of the Mayflower to the rocky and desolate December shores of Massachusetts, while its future flashes before one like an electric panorama outspeeding wireless telegraphy. It is the Land of Magic and Mystery. The light is a perpetual radiance, as if proceeding from some alchemy of distilled sunshine. While Colorado is the Land of Perpetual Dawn, of an heroic and poetic achievement, Arizona is the region of brooding mystery, of strange surprise.
There are the music and pictures of Arizona in her fertile valleys, her wide rolling mesas; and the very melody of the wind harps meet and mingle with the organ strains of sweeping orchestral effects of the winds in the cañons and in wild, desolate gorges where impenetrable twilight renders them a veritable No Man's Land. Mr. Aldrich's "Two Shapes" might have met in that uncanny region of the Petrified Forest. The very dance of the Brocken may nightly be seen in the midnight fissures and steep precipices of the Grand Cañon.
It is, however, essentially the land of mirage and mystery, this wonderful Arizona! As one journeys about he half fancies that he hears on the air those magic lines:
"O birds of ether without wings!
O heavenly ships without a sail!"
Every incredible thing is possible in this miracle country, where purple mountain peaks quiver in the shimmering golden light, where ruins of remote ages stand side by side with the primitive mechanism of pioneer living, where snow-capped mountain peaks are watched from valleys that have the temperature and the productions of the tropics. Arizona contains unknown and undreamed-of resources of gold, copper, and silver. The state has the richest possibilities in mineral wealth; there are thousands of square miles of range lands; there is wealth of forests, although it is a part of the miracle character of this state of color and dream life that its forests are almost as much concealed from casual view as are its minerals hidden in the depths of the earth, for they are secluded in deep cañons or they are high out of sight on the mountain summits. In fruits and flowers Arizona has the luxurious growth and lavish abundance of the tropics, producing grapes, figs, oranges, lemons, pomegranates, pineapples, and peaches,—almost everything, indeed, unless it be the apples of Hesperides.
Although Arizona has not the electric exhilaration and infinite energy of Colorado, it has a delicious quality, as if the very air were a caress. Though warm in the south, the heat has none of the enervating effect of the heat where humidity combines with it. The heat here is so dry, the air so pure, that there is little extreme discomfort even when the mercury soars to legendary altitudes. In winter all Southern Arizona is a paradise of loveliness. At this season the towns of Florence, Phœnix, Tucson, Yuma, and other points invite one to the balmy air, the luminous brilliant skies, and the nights, which are a glory of starry illumination. Northern Arizona has a perfection of summer climate, and the Grand Cañon is destined in the near future to become one of the great summer resorts of the world. With the splendid facilities for comfort offered by the arrangements, the traveller finds all his accustomed conveniences, and the cañon has literally all seasons for its own. There is one glory of July and another glory of January; there is a transcendent loveliness of June, and an equally indescribable charm of October. No month is without its special reasons for visiting at that time this most marvellous scenic wonder of the entire earth.
In remote ages Arizona was evidently an inland sea.
Montezuma Well, on the Verde River, some fifty miles from Prescott, is one of the strange spectacles of Arizona. The well is on an elevated mesa of solid limestone. It has a circular opening some six hundred feet in diameter, as perfect as if carved by a skilled workman. From the surface opening down to the water is a distance of some seventy feet, and the water itself is over one hundred feet deep. It is perfectly clear and pure. Near the well are several cave dwellings, and fragments of pottery abound in the vicinity. There are beds of lava, also revealing that the well is the crater of an extinct volcano.