Arizona

Long before it was a state, the Salt River Valley was farmed by the Hohokam, whose hand-dug canals watered the desert for a thousand years. When 19th-century settlers built a new town on those ancient waterworks, they named it Phoenix — a city risen from what came before. The land is still home to many nations, among them the Navajo (Diné), Hopi, Tohono O'odham and Apache ; the Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in the United States.

Spanish explorers arrived in 1539, and Father Kino's missions — most beautifully the white “Dove of the Desert,” San Xavier del Bac near Tucson — followed by the 1690s. The territory passed from Spain to Mexico, then to the United States after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. Mining boomtowns rose on copper and silver, Route 66 later threaded across the north, and on Valentine's Day, 14 February 1912, Arizona became the 48th state — the last of the contiguous forty-eight.

That history is still legible on the ground: copper in the state's “Five C's,” territorial-era Tucson, Old West Tombstone, and a Grand Canyon that has drawn travellers since the railroad reached the rim in 1901.