Page 14 - Curriculum Visions Dynamic Book

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Arizona
Phoenix, the capital city of Arizona
Settled 1867 Incorporated February 5, 1881 Elevation 1,086 ft (331 m) Population 1,445,632
Metro 4,489,109 (US: 12th)
Phoenix is the capital, and largest city, of the state of Arizona. It lies astride the Salt River, now largely dry due to the water being used for irrigation.
Because Phoenix is the largest city as well as the capital, it ranks as the most populous state capital
in the United States, but it is also the sixth most populous city nationwide.
The city is the 13th largest metro area by population in the United States and is one of the largest cities in the United States by land area.
The landscape of Phoenix is generally flat, making it easy for the city to grow and sprawl.
There are only a few scattered low mountain ranges. Surrounding Phoenix there are large fields of irrigated cropland and several Indian reservations.
The city averages over 330 days of sunshine and receives just 7 inches (180 mm) of rain a year, mainly as thunderstorms.
Because Phoenix lies in a desert area, the Native Americans who lived here over the thousands of years before European settlement, were forced to
be nomadic hunter-gatherers. About 3000 years
ago, some groups of people began to develop
settled lifestyles and cultivate crops such as maize and squash. One of these settled groups was the Hohokam peoples, who settled in the Salt River basin. They learned how to use irrigation to make their crops thrive, and built small canals to carry water from the river to their fields. They created 135 miles (217 km) of irrigation canals, the path of which is still marked by the line of the modern Arizona Canal and others. By 1300 AD, the Hohokam were the largest group of people in the prehistoric Southwest, and