The Stripped Pine on the Fourth of July

Picture a Boston scouting party camped at a spring in the high ponderosa forest of northern Arizona, midsummer of eighteen seventy-six. The United States was celebrating its centennial, one hundred years of independence, and someone in the group had an idea. They felled a ponderosa pine, stripped it of its branches, drove it upright into the ground, and flew an American flag from its top. The spring already had a name: Antelope Spring. By the time word spread to the next travelers, the landmark everyone remembered was not the water but the pole. People said, 'the camp at the flagstaff.' The name outlasted the pole itself.

Exactly who raised that flag is disputed. One account credits the so-called Second Boston Party, a group of easternmost settlers prospecting a route west. A competing claim puts the flag-raising in eighteen fifty-five, when a railroad surveyor named Samuel Clark Hudson reportedly tied colors to a tall pine in the same vicinity. A third version credits soldiers in Edward Fitzgerald Beale's expedition in eighteen fifty-nine. The spring itself was still called Antelope Spring as late as eighteen seventy-one, which suggests the flagstaff story cohered gradually, with different parties each claiming the symbolic gesture.

The first permanent settler arrived two years after the centennial. Thomas F. McMillan built a cabin north of present-day downtown in eighteen seventy-six, the same year the flag went up. Coconino County was organized in eighteen ninety-one with Flagstaff as its seat. From a disputed flagpole at a desert spring, a city of nearly eighty thousand people grew. The ponderosa forest that surrounds it is the largest contiguous stand of that species in North America.