Prescott

Prescott is a mile high and ringed in ponderosa, which is not the Arizona most people picture, and it became the territory's first capital largely because of that difference. When Congress carved Arizona Territory out of New Mexico in 1863, the Union wanted its seat of government well away from the Confederate-leaning south, and close to the gold the Walker party had just found on the creeks nearby. The first territorial legislature met here in 1864 in a drafty one-room log house, and the town was laid out on a grid around a courthouse square — a New England county seat set down in the mountains of the Southwest, which is still very much how it feels.

The capital did not stay put. Tucson's merchants pulled it south in 1867; Prescott won it back in 1877; and Phoenix took it for good in 1889 — but the courthouse square remained the heart of town, and the 1916 Yavapai County Courthouse still presides over it, the spot where Barry Goldwater would later launch campaigns from the steps.

Facing the square is Whiskey Row, a single block that once held around forty saloons, gambling halls, and worse, serving the miners and cowboys who came down out of the hills. The Palace, opened in 1877, is the oldest bar in Arizona; the legend Prescott likes best is that when the Great Fire of July 1900 swept the row, drinkers carried the Palace's carved Brunswick bar across the street to the courthouse plaza and kept serving while the building burned behind them. Much of the row was rebuilt in brick within the year and stands today.

The name carries an irony worth noticing. The town was called Prescott for William Hickling Prescott, the historian whose best-known book was The History of the Conquest of Mexico — even as the government was forcing the Yavapai, on whose land the town sat, off to the San Carlos reservation in the same 1875 removal that opened the Verde Valley below to the miners who built Jerome. Prescott today leans into the frontier past it kept better than most: the courthouse lit up at Christmas, the World's Oldest Rodeo every summer, and the red rocks of Sedona an hour northeast over the pines.