Four Flags Over Tucson

On August twentieth, seventeen seventy-five, a Spanish Army lieutenant colonel named Hugo O'Conor, an Irishman working for Spain, chose this spot along the Santa Cruz River for a presidio. He was reorganizing Spain's frontier defenses against Apache resistance, and this river valley, already home to O'odham communities and already farmed for centuries, was strategically positioned.

That founding moment is where most histories begin. But it is not where the place begins. The O'odham had been here for thousands of years. The Hohokam before them had dug the canals the Spanish found still tracing the valley. The name Tucson itself is an anglicization of the O'odham word Cuk Son, meaning black base, referring to a dark volcanic hill at the south end of the valley. The Spanish did not name this place. They renamed it.

Four flags have flown over this valley in the time since. Spain governed until eighteen twenty-one, when Mexican independence transferred sovereignty. Mexico held Tucson for thirty-three years. Then the Gadsden Purchase of eighteen fifty-three, ratified in eighteen fifty-four, moved the international border sixty miles south overnight. Tucson became American territory without its residents having moved a step.

In eighteen sixty-two, Confederate troops under Captain Sherrod Hunter occupied Tucson for roughly eighty days, making it briefly the westernmost outpost of the Confederacy. California Volunteers arrived in May of that year and returned the Union flag without a battle. The Confederacy's claim on Tucson lasted less than three months.

Four flags, four sovereignties. The O'odham were here through all of them, and before all of them.