University of Arizona: The School the Gamblers Funded

The Arizona Territory's Thirteenth Legislature, convened in eighteen eighty-five, had a reputation. Its members were known locally as the Thieving Thirteenth, a title they had earned through the standard methods available to territorial legislators. When the legislature handed out the territory's institutions, the towns competed, and Tucson ended up with the university, or so Tucson believed.

What Tucson actually received was the university, which sounded better than it was. The other towns had lobbied for the territorial capital and the territorial insane asylum, which came with guaranteed operational funding. The university came with a land grant and twenty-five thousand dollars, which was not enough to build a functioning institution. Tucson's boosters had been outmaneuvered.

The city scraped together what it could. Two professional gamblers and a saloon keeper who owned land adjacent to the proposed campus donated the necessary acreage. Ground was broken on Old Main in eighteen eighty-seven. When classes began in eighteen ninety-one, Old Main was the only building on campus. There were thirty-two students, and the university ran preparatory classes for its first twenty-three years because the territory had no high schools.

From that beginning, in a territorial outpost that had fought the gift it received, the University of Arizona became one of the major research universities in the American West. Its astronomy and optical sciences programs are among the strongest in the world. The Arizona State Museum on campus holds one of the most comprehensive collections of Southwestern Indigenous material culture in existence.

The gamblers who donated the land got no building named for them. Their names have been largely forgotten. The university they accidentally endowed has not.