HISTORY · HISTORICAL MARKER
How I Came to be Here
History
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Sky Harbor Airport is the eighth-busiest in the United States, with 461,989 airplanes carrying 40,591,949 passengers a year to and from the Valley, with inbound flight paths crossing above Scottsdale Road at Buckeye and outbound flights passing over Scottsdale Road between Bethany and Shea. The Yaqui originated in the northern Mexican state of Sonora, and in the 1920s, after four hundred years of conflict with Spanish colonists, they came to Arizona and settled in South Scottsdale. To the west, Hole-in-the-Rock in Papago Park has had its sandstone shape carved by wind and rain for the past fifteen million years or so, and when the Hohokam people lived here, they used the hole in the rock to track the solar solstices and equinoxes. From this perspective, change can be tracked in the rock’s disappearance from view, whether from erosion or from being obscured by new building, while later arrivals to Scottsdale came by many paths, including immigration redirected from New York to Arizona, birth on a family trip from northern Arizona, coming to attend ASU and staying, following family members who had moved here, or leaving behind winter cold in Hastings, Nebraska.
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