it the best possible soil
for farming purposes. Favored by a mild winter climate the Salt River
Valley can be made to produce crops of some kind each month in the
year--fruits in the fall, vegetables in the winter season, grains in
spring and alfalfa, the principal crop, throughout the summer. A
succession of crops may oftentimes be grown during the year on one farm,
so that irrigated lands in Arizona yield several times the produce
obtainable in the Eastern states. Alfalfa may be cut six or seven times
a year with a yield of as much as ten tons to the acre. The finest
Egyptian cotton, free from the boll weevil scourge, may also be grown
successfully and is fast becoming one of the staple products of the
State. Potatoes, strawberries, pears, peaches and melons, from temperate
climates; and citrus fruits, sorghum grains and date palms from
subtropical regions, give some idea of the range of crops possible here.
Many farmers from the Eastern and Southern states and from California,
finding this out, began to take up land, dig irrigating ditches and make
homes in Arizona.

Fifteen or twenty pioneers had gone to the Salt River Valley while I
was at Wickenburg and there had taken up quarter sections on which they
raised, chiefly, barley, wheat, corn and hay. A little fruit was also
experimented in. Some of the men who were on the ground at the beginning
I remember to have been Dennis and Murphy, Tom Gray, Jack Walters,
Johnny George, George Monroe, Joe Fugit, Jack Swilling, Patterson, the
Parkers, the Sorrels, the Fenters and a few others whose names I do not
recall. A townsite had been laid out, streets surveyed, and before long
it became known that the Territory had a new city, the name of which was
Phoenix.

The story of the way in which the name "Phoenix" was given to the city
that in future days was to become the metropolis of the State, is
interesting. When the Miner excitement was over I decided to move to the
new Salt River townsite, and soon after my arrival there attended a
meeting of citizens gathered together to name the new city. Practically
every settler in the Valley was at this meeting, which was destined to
become historic.

Among those present was a Frenchman named Darrel Dupper, or Du Perre, as
his name has sometimes been written, who was a highly educated man and
had lived in Arizona for a number of years. When the question of naming
the townsite came up several suggestions were offered, among them bei