Flagstaff Arizona Tourism

In 1540 the Spanish conquistadors explored Northern Arizona to find riches of gold. They wrote in their memoirs about meeting the Hopi, Yavapai, and Havasupai Indians, who gathered pinon nuts and hunted mule deer near the Peaks.

A big business during that time was the Arizona Lumber and Timber Company, and because of the railroad which ran through Flagstaff the company grew and so did the town. Many people gravitated toward Flagstaff because of its growth such as Americans, Hispanics, Basques, African-Americans and the Chinese.

As the United States turned 100 on the 4th of July, 1876, a group of people from the east built a flagpole out of a Ponderosa pine tree and raised the American flag in Antelope Park. Seven years later the Atlantic and Pacific railroad was constructed through Antelope Park. The town was named for the flagstaff which was still standing. Before long, local interest in nearby Indian ruins, now encompassed within Walnut Canyon National Monument gained momentum. The ruins were discovered by lumber magnate Michael Riordan. Over the next 25 years Riordan was probably best known for exploiting the ruins and removed numerous artifacts, but around 1891 local citizens began to get alarmed at the scale of looting and destruction of ruins. The Chamber of Commerce recognized the tourist value of the ruins, condemning the mutilation of the cliff dwellings in 1891. It wasn’t until 1904 when the ruins became part of the San Francisco Mountain Forest Preserve that protective precautions were taken to secure the ruins.