A silver boom in Mohave County created an instant town that by 1894 had a school, a literary society, a church, a hotel and a population of more than 1,000.

This is the main thoroughfare of Paradise, Arizona, photographed sometime after the turn of the century. Note the boy running toward the hotel at right, the burro grazing in the street, another tied under the tree and the collection of barrels spilling over with things unknown.

The original St. Joseph’s Academy (called the Convent School) was established in 1868 adjacent to Tucson’s old St. Augustine Cathedral. It was a thick-walled adobe building, built in the “fashion of the country’’ with earthen floors and a roof of sagebrush and cactus interfaced on pine rafters and covered with mud.

Nogales City Hall was commissioned by the Nogales Volunteer Fire Department in 1914, opened in 1915, and served as Town Hall and later City Hall for 65 years.

Impressive as the steamboat Gila appears, Martha Summerhays, an Army wife who journeyed on the boat in 1874, described the steamer in less than glorious terms: “We had staterooms, but could not remain in them long on account of the intense heat. After a hasty meal and a few remarks upon the salt beef and the general misery of our lot, we could seek some spot which might be a trifle cooler. Conversation lagged; no topic seems to have any interest except the thermometer, which hung in the coolest place on the boat; and one day when Major Worth looked at it and pronounced it 122 degrees in the shade, a grim despair seized upon me.”

Harry Goulding was born in Durango, Colorado, in 1897. He was from a family of sheepmen, and he ran sheep in Colorado and New Mexico as a youth. He talked his way into the Army in World War I, being underage, and ended up as a mule sergeant in the 7th Engineers. After his discharge he headed back west to find a spot where he “could look a hundred miles in any direction and not see a second lieutenant.’’

In its heyday between 1881 and 1889, the Bird Cage – replete with wallpaper imported from Paris, massive grand piano, orchestra pit, box seats and well-stocked bar – was the most famous honky-tonk in America.

Celeste Marie Jones arrived in the Superstitions in the 1950s to search for gold. She had some financing – some say from a church in Los Angeles – and she got more financing in the form of food and supplies from Bob Corbin and his partner, Joe Robles, who themselves had prospected for gold in the Superstitions. The two men packed in food every Friday night one whole winter in exchange for a 10 percent share of anything Jones found.

It took five years – from 1931 to 1936 – to build the Hoover Dam, what was then the largest concrete dam in the world. It was built in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, in northwestern Arizona on the border with Nevada.

In the 1880s, Dennis Dilda had left behind a string of murders in Texas and New Mexico by the time he arrived in Prescott in the fall of 1885. But in the frontier, little was asked of a man’s background, especially one with a wife and children. Dilda soon got a job running the ranch of W.H. Williscraft about 40 miles outside of town.