The meaning behind the name of Phoenix, Arizona


If you've ever wondered about the meaning behind the name of my favorite city, Phoenix, yes, it's based on the legendary Phoenix bird, which rises from its ashes to be reborn. And it's a cool name, and a cool image, which is often confused with a Thunderbird, but they're different, and once you see Phoenix through the eyes of the pioneers who saw it when it was first laid out, in 1870, the meaning becomes even clearer.


Time-travel with me back to the Salt River Valley just after the Civil War, before the city of Phoenix existed. The valley is empty, no one lives there. If you're under the impression that the pioneers forced anyone out, it's simply not true. It was a "no man's land" between the Apaches to the north, and the Pima people to the south. Yes, it was visited by both tribes, but they didn't live there, no one did, and no one had for a very long time. But there had been people living there, as evidenced by what they left behind.

A tiny portion of the Hohokam ruins have been preserved at 44th Street and Washington, but they lived all over the valley. You're looking southeast towards Tempe.

The people who lived in the Salt River Valley were called the "Hohokam", which simply meant "those who have gone". Just how long they had been gone no one knows, probably for hundreds of years, but they left behind evidence of a gigantic civilization.

The pioneers saw empty canals, which were much bigger than the modern ones you can see around Phoenix nowadays. They also saw adobe structures, a lot of them, that were slowly melting back into the earth. That a great civilization had been there, and vanished, there was no doubt. All that was left, if you have a poetic mind, were the ashes, and the pioneers of the new city saw that it could be another great city, rising from them. It must have taken a lot of imagination, but they made it happen.


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