About

Hohokam (roughly 300 BCE – 1450 CE)

The land now called Tempe sits inside the Salt River Valley, occupied for over 1,500 years by the Hohokam — one of the most sophisticated pre-Columbian societies north of Mesoamerica. They engineered roughly 500 miles of irrigation canals across the valley, cultivated cotton, corn, beans, and squash on industrial scale, built platform mounds and ballcourts, traded macaws and copper bells south to Mesoamerica and shells west to the Pacific.

Around 1450 CE the Hohokam abandoned the valley. The cause is contested: extended drought, catastrophic flooding that destroyed canals, soil salinization, social collapse — likely some combination. What's not contested is that the people didn't vanish. They reorganized.

Akimel O'odham and Piipaash (1450 – present)

The descendants of the Hohokam are the Akimel O'odham (River People; called "Pima" by the Spanish) and the closely-allied Piipaash (called "Maricopa"). They lived along the Salt and Gila Rivers continuously from the Hohokam reorganization through the colonial periods to the present. The Hohokam ruins were visible in the landscape and known to the O'odham as the work of their ancestors — a civilization of acknowledged descent, not of strangers stumbling upon abandoned cities.

Spanish and Mexican eras (1539 – 1848)

Spain claimed the territory from the 16th century but its settlements stayed south — the Salt River Valley was peripheral, too far north, too contested by Apache raiding from the highlands. The O'odham retained effective control of the valley throughout both the Spanish and Mexican periods. Mexico inherited Spanish territorial claims after 1821 but had even less presence here.

US conquest and the making of Tempe (1848 – 1912)

The Mexican Cession (1848) and the Gadsden Purchase (1853) transferred the land to the United States — without consulting the O'odham or Piipaash. Anglo-American settlement of the Tempe area began in 1871 when Charles Trumbull Hayden established a flour mill and ferry crossing on the south side of the Salt River. Mexican-origin laborers built the new canals: re-excavations and extensions of the Hohokam system.

In 1879 the settlement was renamed "Tempe" after the Vale of Tempe in classical Greek mythology. That same year, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community was constituted on a reservation north of the new Anglo town of Mesa — and the Gila River Indian Community south of Phoenix. The water rights that had sustained O'odham agriculture for centuries were largely reassigned to Anglo-American settlers. The 1879 renaming and the 1879 reservation creation are the same year for a reason.

The long 20th century

The Territorial Normal School at Tempe was founded in 1885 — the institution that eventually became Arizona State University and still anchors Tempe's identity. The Reclamation Act of 1902 enabled the Salt River Project and Roosevelt Dam, federal infrastructure that transformed the valley into an agricultural empire on the Hohokam pattern, but for Anglo-American owners. Arizona statehood followed in 1912.

Tempe remained a small agricultural town through the early 20th century. Postwar suburbanization, ASU's growth, and the tech industry have turned it into a city of about 200,000, embedded in a metro area of roughly five million.

It's a neighborhood that changes constantly and somehow stays the same. The specific bars and restaurants cycle. The basic life of the place — students, long-timers, desert heat, the light in October — doesn't.