The March of Arizona

The March of Arizona is the only March of the United Kingdom of America, and the form is the point. When Parliament created it in 1884 it judged that ordinary provincial government could not hold a country of this kind: a desert of 770,000 square kilometres with an international frontier along its whole southern edge, water that had to be administered or nothing else could be, treaty nations whose land and jurisdiction ran through the middle of it, and a summer that kills people. A March is a frontier command. What Parliament made was a frontier command with a constitution.

The clearest expression of that is the Lord Marcher, the Crown’s representative here, who holds an emergency authority that no other polity’s Crown representative has: the power, by proclamation, to direct water, require cooling and shelter, commandeer plant and close ground when water fails, heat kills, fire runs or the river floods. It has been used nineteen times since 1884, eleven for heat, five for water, two for fire and one for flood, and never once for a breakdown of civil order, although the Charter would permit it and the March has had episodes that would have supported it. The office’s refusal to use it for public order is the strongest of its conventions.

The March holds about 14 million people and returns twenty members to the House of Commons. It is made of two old territories and the pieces of three more: Arizona and New Mexico entire, the Las Vegas Basin that was the Arizona Territory’s Pah-Ute country, the Durango highlands and the San Luis Valley counties of Rio Grande, Conejos and Costilla, taken from Colorado for their headwaters, El Paso taken from Texas, the Imperial Valley west of Yuma together with the desert east of the ranges in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, which the March made into its own counties of Coachella and Joshua, Kane and St George in the north, and, alone among the polities of the Realm, a Crown Port on the Sea of Cortez at Rocky Point.

It is governed under its own Charter of 1884, and it is the most closely governed desert in the world: water certificated before a house may be built, cooling enforced as a utility, outdoor labour stopped at measured temperatures, and a right to shade.

It is also a polity assembled out of other people’s land and other people’s water, on which the Realm designed and first detonated an atomic weapon without telling the villages downwind.

The name and the people

Arizona is the name of the western half and the name of the whole, and the Eastern March has never entirely forgiven it. The word’s origin is disputed, most probably from an O’odham phrase for a small spring, transmitted through Spanish. It attached to a silver strike, then to a territory, then to a March that contains a second old territory with a longer written history than the first.

The demonym follows the same fault. Arizonan is the official form, used in the March’s statutes, in the Diet’s record and by its government, and in the Eastern March almost nobody uses it. There, people are Nuevomexicanos or New Mexicans, and have been since long before either territory existed. The March has never resolved it and does not try: its forms print both, its members use whichever their constituents use, and every High Steward from the Valley has been corrected at least once in Santa Fe.

History

The nations and the old geography

The country was inhabited continuously for thousands of years before any of its modern names existed, and its oldest towns are still inhabited. The Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande and the western mesas built stone and adobe towns, several of which have been lived in without interruption for a millennium, which makes them the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in the Realm. The O’odham farmed the Gila and the Salt with canal systems their ancestors dug, whose alignments the modern Valley still uses. The Diné and the Apache peoples came later into a country already old and made it theirs. The Hopi held the mesas; the Zuni, the Havasupai, the Hualapai, the Yavapai, the Ute of the highlands and the Paiute of the north held the rest.

The most consequential fact in the March’s geography is that its rivers were irrigated before Europeans arrived, and that every canal dug in the Valley since has followed lines drawn by people whose descendants were then denied the water.

Spain, Mexico and the cession

Spanish settlement came north up the Rio Grande from the end of the sixteenth century and planted Santa Fe in 1610, a capital older than almost anything in the eastern Realm. It brought missions, presidios, land grants, the Spanish language and Catholicism, and a Hispano village society that has held the Eastern March’s valleys ever since.

Mexican independence made the country Mexican. The cession of 1848 and the Treaty of Mesilla of 1853, which acquired the southern railway strip and nothing more, made it the Realm’s. The people living on it became subjects of the Crown by treaty, with their property, their language and their religion guaranteed in terms the following century did not honour.

The creation of the March, 1884

Parliament created the March of Arizona in 1884 out of the Arizona and New Mexico territories and the additions described above, the second March after the Northern March of the plains, which became the State of the Dakotas in 1889, and the March Charter was negotiated and sealed the same year, five years before the Polity Instruments Act 1889 made a written instrument compulsory for every polity of the Realm.

The reasoning was frontier reasoning. The southern boundary was an international frontier of more than a thousand kilometres through country where nobody could be stopped. The water was already in dispute and would shortly be in litigation. The treaty nations held land and jurisdiction that no ordinary provincial government could deal with and no federal department wished to administer from three thousand kilometres away. And the Realm had lately learned how expensive it is to govern a frontier by improvisation.

What Parliament did not intend, and the Charter’s drafters certainly did, was an instrument that would constrain the Realm as much as it empowered the March. The Charter’s water provisions, its compact requirements and its emergency limits have been used more often against federal departments and the March’s own ministries than against anybody else.

The wars of removal, and the schools

The March was created on ground taken by force from the people who lived on it, and the taking was recent in 1884.

The Long Walk of the Diné, the forced removal to Bosque Redondo and the years of hunger there, is treated in the Navajo Republic article and is not softened here: it happened in this country, to the people who are now the Realm’s largest treaty nation by territory, and the fort they were held at is in the March’s eastern country.

The Apache wars ran for a generation. In 1871 a party of settlers and their allies killed about a hundred and forty Apache people, mostly women and children, camped under the protection of an army post and promised safety. The jury acquitted in under half an hour. In the 1880s Apache leaders who surrendered on terms were shipped out of the March as prisoners of war with their families, including families who had never fought, and were held in other polities for twenty-seven years.

The boarding schools followed the wars and did in a schoolroom what the army had done in the field. Children were taken, some by force and some under a bargain their parents could not refuse, forbidden their languages and punished for speaking them. The largest stood in Phoenix, on ground the city now uses for other things. The March has opened its own records of these schools. The Realm has not opened all of the federal ones.

The deportation of the strikers, 1917

In 1917, at a copper town in the March’s south, a sheriff deputised two thousand men, rounded up about twelve hundred striking miners at gunpoint, loaded them into cattle wagons and shipped them across the line into the desert of the Eastern March, where they were left without food or water until federal troops took them in.

Nobody was convicted of anything. A prosecution was attempted and failed, on the defence that the town had acted in an emergency of its own declaring, which is the kind of defence the March’s Charter had been written to make unnecessary and could not make impossible.

The Lord Marcher, George W. P. Hunt, the first holder of the office and a known friend of the miners, declined to proclaim, on the view that a labour dispute was not within the authority. The Diet’s censure the following year did not disturb that reading and has hardened into the convention that the emergency authority is never used in a question of public order, which is why nineteen proclamations in a century and a half have concerned only heat, water, fire and flood. The episode is also the origin of the March’s mining law, with its provisions on company towns, private deputies and the licensing of company police.

Water, and the making of the Valley

The Valley exists because of a dam. The Salt River Project impounded the Salt in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the water it delivered turned a desert basin holding a few thousand people into the Realm’s fifth metropolitan region.

The water came from somewhere. The Akimel O’odham and the Pee Posh, who had farmed the Gila for centuries with their own canals, lost their river to upstream diversion before the Project was built and went from self-supporting farmers to famine within a generation. Their water was partly restored, by settlement, ninety years later.

The land grants

The treaty of 1848 guaranteed the property of the people it made subjects, and the guarantee was administered through a claims process requiring documentary proof, in English, before a court in a distant city, at the claimant’s expense.

Canon records that a bilingual land commission protected many grants and did not prevent major land loss, and the mechanism of the loss is worth stating plainly. Individual grants with clear papers mostly survived. Communal grants did not. The village commons, the grazing and timber land held by whole settlements together, was the hardest to document in the form the courts required, and enormous acreages of it passed into the public domain or to the lawyers and surveyors who took land as their fee. The Eastern March’s villages lost their commons and kept their houses, which is a way of losing a way of life while appearing to keep your property.

The bomb

The Realm designed its first atomic weapon at a laboratory established on a mesa at Los Alamos, in the Eastern March, and fired the first device on a range in the March’s southern desert.

The people who lived downwind were not warned and were not told afterwards. The ranching families and the Hispano villages within forty miles of the tower were not evacuated, not notified and not surveyed. They drank from open cisterns that caught what fell, ate from gardens under the same sky, and learned what had happened when the rest of the Realm did.

The cancers came in the following decades and the claims after that. Compensation reached the miners and the plant workers decades before it reached the downwind families, and for many of those families it has never arrived at all, because the schemes were drawn by category and their category was not in them. The March has petitioned the Realm on their behalf under four ministries and is petitioning still.

The camps

Within ten weeks of the Realm’s entry into the second war, Americans of Japanese heritage were removed from the Pacific coast, and two of the largest camps that held them were built in the March, on the land of two treaty nations.

Both nations’ councils objected. Both were overruled by the federal government, which held the land in trust and did not require the consent of the people whose land it was. The March could stop neither thing: the removals were federal, the land was federally administered, and the nations’ objections were addressed to a department not obliged to listen. Thousands of people who had committed no offence were held in the desert on ground taken from people who had committed none either.

Uranium

The plateau country was mined for uranium from the 1940s, largely on and beside the land of the Diné. Navajo miners worked unventilated workings without being told what the rock was, in a language many of them did not read, for companies that knew what the literature said. Their families washed the dust out of their clothes. The tailings sat where the work ended, some beside houses, some in the washes, and a great many are still there.

The Navajo Republic’s ban on new uranium mining is treated in its own article. The March has supported the ban and left the remediation to the Realm, which is a defensible division of responsibility and a convenient one.

Goldwater

Barry Goldwater spans the modern March from end to end, and the order of his offices is frequently muddled. He came up through the Phoenix City Council and the March Diet, was High Steward of Arizona from 1953 to 1958, went afterwards to the House of Commons, and was Lord Marcher from 1987 to 1995.

His contribution to the March was constitutional rather than political, and it was made by refusal. He exercised the emergency authority twice, both times for heat and both times for the minimum period, and declined it on eleven recorded occasions, including three on which a High Steward had advised it. His doctrine, quoted ever since, is that frontier authority must be constitutional rather than personal, and that an emergency power used for a ministry’s convenience is not an emergency power but a second executive.

He also acted once without advice: in 1994, when a ministry that had lost the Diet’s confidence would not advise a proclamation during a water failure in the Basin, he proclaimed anyway and said so in a report of four pages that is reprinted in the Realm’s constitutional textbooks. The Diet confirmed the proclamation within a week and the ministry resigned within a month. The requirement that a Lord Marcher report occasions on which the authority was considered and declined was enacted in 1996, the year after he left office, and was drafted from the practice he had adopted voluntarily.

The constitutional change of his political lifetime was the abolition of the Chamber of Regions in 1953 and its replacement by the concurrent majority, treated below.

The disconnection of 1956

In the summer of 1956 a Phoenix district’s water was disconnected over a billing dispute between the city and a private supplier, in temperatures above forty-five degrees, for eleven days.

The district was Black and Mexican. No comparable district in the Valley was disconnected that summer or any other, and the supplier’s own records, produced to the Diet the following winter, showed arrears of the same size in districts that were never touched.

The Diet’s answer was Chapter IX, Article 1 of the Charter, the right to water: a right in every person within the March to a supply sufficient for life, enforceable against any authority or undertaking, which may not be interrupted for non-payment. The heat provisions of the following decades were drafted on its model.

The right exists because of what was done to that district, and this article says so rather than presenting Chapter IX as an abstract achievement of desert constitutionalism.

Heat becomes constitutional

The second half of the twentieth century turned heat from a hardship into a subject of law. The March counted its heat deaths, published the count, and legislated against the number: cooling as a regulated utility, the summer disconnection ban, the work rules and the right to shade, which requires the March’s public authorities to provide it at stops, crossings, schoolyards and public buildings.

The modern March

The March of the present century is a fast-growing, hot, comparatively prosperous polity of fourteen million people, exporting solar power west in summer, making semiconductors in a desert on water certificated to the acre-foot, feeding the Realm winter vegetables out of two irrigated valleys, and negotiating the largest transfer of water rights in the Realm’s history with the nations whose water it took in the first place.

It changed both its heads in 2027. Gabrielle Giffords became Lord Marcher on 1 July; Dean Farnsworth resigned the High Stewardship on health grounds later that year, and Esperanza Villalobos was commissioned in his place. On 2 November 2028 the southern San Andreas ruptured beneath the March’s Coachella Valley, in the earthquake of magnitude 7.8 that struck Los Angeles, and the March’s government and California’s asked for federal help within ten minutes of each other.

The Charter in brief

The March’s constitutional instrument is the March Charter of 1884, which has its own article and is not restated here. What a reader of this one needs is short.

• It is older than the requirement that polities have written constitutions, having been sealed five years before the Polity Instruments Act 1889.
• It is cited by Chapter and Article, and its English and Spanish texts have been equally authentic since 1948. It has been amended a hundred and thirty-five times.
• It creates the Lord Marcher, the High Steward, the March Diet, the courts and the Council of Nations and Compacts, and describes six regions whose boundaries are in the instrument itself.
• Chapter V, Article 4, substituted in 1953 when the Chamber of Regions was abolished, requires the concurrent assent of a majority of the members from at least four of the six regions for measures allocating water between basins, amending the Charter, or affecting treaty land, treaty water or the jurisdiction of a nation.
• Chapter VI governs water, and its central move is definitional: water is not property that can be transferred away. Two attempted transfers, in 1923 and 1988, were held void, and the nations have used the Chapter’s statement requirement to void allocations eleven times since 1974.
• Chapter VIII is the emergency authority, and Chapter IX holds the rights that came out of 1956 and after.

Government

The Lord Marcher

The Lord Marcher of Arizona is the Crown’s representative, and the office is not a Governor in frontier dress. It carries the ordinary vice-regal functions, assent, commissioning, the opening and dissolution of the Diet, and one that no other polity’s Crown representative has: the emergency authority of Chapter VIII, exercised by proclamation, ordinarily on the High Steward’s advice and, once, without it.

The authority reaches extremity of heat, failure of water, fire and flood. It has never been used for civil order, and the office’s refusal to use it for that is its strongest convention, established when a Lord Marcher declined to proclaim during the deportation of the strikers in 1917 and hardened by every holder since. Since 1996 a Lord Marcher must also report the occasions on which the authority was considered and declined, which is the only such requirement in the Realm.

The Lord Marcher is also the March’s constitutional interlocutor with the treaty nations: when a compact dispute rises above ministerial negotiation it goes to the Council of Nations and Compacts, convened through this office, on the principle that treaty dignity requires a head of state rather than a department. For decades no Lord Marcher used the procedure, and the Council’s yearly sessions went on as formalities, receiving notice and giving advice, until Gabrielle Giffords convened it on a dispute in her first year.

The household is at March House in Phoenix, and the commission runs for eight years. The office was technically vacant from 1884 to 1911, when the Territorial Governor exercised it under the Charter’s transitional chapter; the first Lord Marcher was George W. P. Hunt, from 1911 to 1919, who had been High Steward before him.

Gabrielle Giffords has held the office since 1 July 2027, on a commission to 30 June 2035. She sat in the House of Commons for Tucson East from 2007 as a Liberal Federal Democrat and was shot in the head at a constituency meeting outside Tucson on 8 January 2011, in an attack that killed six people and wounded thirteen. She resigned her seat the following year, did not return to elected politics, and came to the Marchership through recovery, firearms advocacy and the compact and water work of the intervening years. Her appointment placed a person who had been the subject of a civic emergency in the office that proclaims them, a point made at the time by supporters and critics alike and one she has declined to comment on.

The Territory of Loreto’s assembly has asked that she serve as Loreto’s head of state as well, in one person and two commissions. The March is supportive and its Diet has resolved in favour: a frontier polity recognising a frontier office is, in the March’s own language, the form working as intended. Its lawyers have noted without pressing the point that Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties have managed such an arrangement for two centuries and that the smaller party does most of the managing.

The High Steward

The High Steward of Arizona is the head of government, commissioned as the member able to command the Diet, and the title is the March’s own: a steward holds the frontier for somebody else. The office leads the Ministry, controls the legislative programme, and delivers the Basin Report to the Diet each November, which is a constitutional obligation rather than a political choice.

Dean Farnsworth, Basin Conservative and member for Mesa East, held the office until 2027 and resigned on health grounds. His ministry’s standing quarrels with the capital were the ordinary ones between a growth-minded March government and a city that can no longer grow outward: the assured-supply certificates, which he asked the water administration to read generously and which it declined to; the transport levy, paid into by corridor towns and spent on a city tramway; and the annexation power, which the towns would limit and the capital would not.

The succession was the interesting part. His own bloc could not agree a successor, and the Diet commissioned Esperanza Villalobos of the Sun Liberal Alliance, member for a Tucson seat, whose majority rests on her own bloc, the nations’ members and the Las Vegas seats, and which the Valley’s Basin Conservatives regard as an accident that will not survive a bad summer.

Her ministry’s first real test is one fight rather than two. A tribal water settlement requires the concurrent assent of four regions and the Valley will not give it; and a shortfall on the Colorado forces a choice between the Imperial Valley’s senior right and the Valley’s cities. The settlement would fix the nations’ share for a century, the shortfall would make that share expensive, and the Valley’s members have worked out that they can lose both arguments at once.

The March Diet

The March Diet is the unicameral legislature: ninety members, elected for four years by mixed-member proportional representation, sitting at Phoenix for at least a hundred days a year and for at least ten days elsewhere, a requirement of a statute of 1938 which exists so that the Diet must physically go to the country it governs.

Its standing regional committees sit at Albuquerque for the Eastern March, at Las Vegas for gaming, water and service labour, at El Paso for the border and the military, and at Flagstaff for the highlands and the compact interface. Its Emergency Scrutiny Committee is permanently constituted and may recall the full Diet when the Lord Marcher proclaims.

Its distinctive procedure is the concurrent majority. On water between basins, on the Charter itself and on anything touching treaty land, water or jurisdiction, a measure needs not only a majority of members voting but the assent of a majority of the members from at least four of the six regions. The Valley holds most of the population and cannot carry a water measure alone, and the nations’ interests are protected by the arithmetic of regions rather than by anybody’s good will.

The Council of Nations and Compacts

The Council of Nations and Compacts is the standing forum of the March’s relationship with the treaty nations. It is not a second chamber and does not legislate. Measures affecting treaty rights, water, land, policing or emergency powers require notice, consultation and published reasons before the Diet may pass them, and the nations hold seats proportionate to their compact standing.

It sits at Phoenix, and has since 1974. One of its two formal sessions each year is held at Santa Fe, an arrangement made because the eastern nations, the Pueblos above all, would not travel eight hundred kilometres west for every sitting and said so. The compromise is characteristic of the March: the institution has one seat, and the seat travels.

The Navajo Republic does not sit in it. As a treaty republic outside the forty-nine polities it deals with the Crown directly, and with the March by compact, and the water coordination between the Republic and the March is among the most active negotiations in the western Realm.

The courts

The March’s superior courts sit at Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque and Santa Fe, and its bench has a specialism found nowhere else in the Realm: water. Its water judges hear basin adjudications that run for decades, and the March’s reported water law is cited in California, Deseret, Colorado and occasionally in Mexico. The March’s water authorities employ more hydrologists than its universities do, because Chapter VI requires an authority to state in writing what an allocation will do to treaty water before it may make one.

The blocs

March politics is conducted in blocs older than most of the federal parties.

Basin Conservatives hold the Valley’s suburbs, the farming counties and the mining towns: water for use, building where it can be certificated, and a settled suspicion of Santa Fe and Tucson.

The Sun Liberal Alliance holds Tucson, Flagstaff, Santa Fe, the university districts and the younger Valley seats: transit, heat law, environmental regulation and, under the present High Steward, the nations’ settlements.

The Crown Frontier Party still exists, small and obstinate, Goldwater’s old vehicle reduced to a rural handful, and it holds the balance more often than its size suggests. Its price is always the same and always local: water certainty for the basins it represents.

The federal parties organise here too, and the March’s Commons delegation does not map neatly onto its Diet.

Representation in the Realm

Twenty seats in the House of Commons, from Phoenix Central and North to the Navajo Country and the Four Corners, and two members of the House of Lords.

Geography

The six regions

The Charter names six, and their boundaries are in the instrument rather than in a statute, which is why the March argues about water inside a fixed map.

The Valley is the Salt River metropolitan region: Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe, Glendale, Ahwatukee and the rest, holding about half the March’s people on a fraction of its land.

The Southern Desert is Tucson and the old borderlands: saguaro and mesquite country, the copper towns, the mission valleys and the O’odham country. Tucson is the March’s anti-capital, older than Phoenix, more mixed, closer to Mexico and more willing to argue.

The Eastern March is the New Mexico country from Santa Fe and Taos through Albuquerque to Las Cruces: the Rio Grande’s valley, the Pueblos, the Hispano villages, the laboratories and the ranges.

The Basin is the Las Vegas country west of the Colorado, the old Pah-Ute county of the Arizona Territory, which still exists in the March under its old name, and which is why the March meets Nevada on a parallel rather than at the river.

The Highlands are the plateau and mountain country of the north and north-east, including Flagstaff, the canyon country and the Durango extension.

The Lower Colorado is Yuma, the river gate and the Imperial Valley.

The land

Three kinds of country, and the March’s politics follows them. The basin and range of the south and west, desert floors between sudden mountains. The Colorado Plateau of the north, high, cold in winter, cut by canyons including the greatest of them. And the Rio Grande rift, the trench that carries the Eastern March’s river and most of its people.

Elevation does the work latitude does elsewhere: Phoenix at three hundred metres is subtropical desert, Flagstaff at two thousand is pine forest under snow, and they are two hours apart.

Climate

Hot and dry, with two rainy seasons that mostly disappoint: winter storms off the Pacific, and the summer monsoon, which arrives in July, drowns arroyos, fills the sky and does not reliably fill reservoirs. The Valley’s summer runs from May to October with weeks above forty-five degrees, and the nights no longer cool as they did, which is the fact that kills people.

Water

Water is the March’s constitutional subject, its longest litigation and its permanent argument.

The river

The Colorado is over-allocated and shrinking. The compacts that divided it were written in the wettest decades of the modern record and promised more water than the river has ever reliably carried, and the March is the largest user of a river that no longer reaches the sea, its last water spent in fields and taps above the delta.

The March’s position is complicated by its own shape. It holds the Imperial Valley, whose right is the oldest and largest in the basin and outranks Phoenix’s, and it holds the cities that would be dry if that right were enforced in a bad year. A polity containing both ends of a priority dispute cannot litigate its way out of it.

The groundwater

The real reserve is underground and is being mined. Certificates of assured supply govern building: a developer must show a hundred years of water before a subdivision may be sold, which is the strongest such rule in the Realm and the reason the Valley’s growth is legible at all. Outside the certificated basins the rural aquifers are unregulated, and farms there pump water that fell as rain ten thousand years ago. The Charter’s Chapter VI governs how water is held, allocated and published and says nothing about how much may be taken, so the decline is undeniable, annually published, and unchecked.

The nations’ settlements

The tribal water settlements are the largest single transfer of water rights in the Realm’s history and are still being negotiated. Each fixes a nation’s share, funds the works to deliver it and extinguishes claims that would otherwise hang over every other user in the basin. Each requires the concurrent assent of four regions.

They are the March’s best modern work and its slowest. The nations’ claims are senior, the March’s cities are dependent, and every settlement is an admission of what was taken. The Valley’s resistance to the current one is not about principle; it is about the price of buying back a hundred years of somebody else’s water.

The Basin Report

The Basin Report, delivered to the Diet each November, states the year’s supply, the reservoir levels, the certificate position and the coming year’s allocation. It is the most-read public document the March produces, is carried in full by newspapers that carry nothing else in full, and is as close as the March comes to a national occasion.

Heat

The March counts heat deaths, publishes the count and legislates against the number. It is the only polity in the Realm that treats a temperature as a constitutional fact.

Cooling is a regulated utility. A landlord who cannot cool a dwelling to a stated standard may not let it, and a power company may not disconnect a dwelling in summer for non-payment, a rule drawn from the water right of 1956 and extended to electricity in the 1990s.

Work stops at measured temperatures. Outdoor labour ceases at thresholds fixed in regulations and measured at the site rather than at the airport, a rule the building industry fought for a decade and lost.

Shade is public infrastructure. The right to shade requires the March’s authorities to provide it at stops, crossings, schoolyards and public buildings, so a bus stop without shade is a breach rather than an inconvenience.

And the failure is plain. The people who die are overwhelmingly the unhoused, and the right to shade has never reached them. The March’s duty is to open cooling centres above a measured temperature; its own auditors report that the centres are too few, too far apart and closed at night, when most heat deaths occur. A housing-first programme works where it is funded and is not funded at the scale of the problem. The March has the best heat law in the Realm and the same bodies at the end of every summer.

The nations

The March contains more separately recognised treaty nations than any polity except Alaska and Cascadia, and deals with them under compact, government to government. The Navajo Republic is not among them: it sits outside the polity count as a treaty republic of the Realm. Its land lies within the March’s borders and the March administers it only by compact, so that the Republic is outside the March in law and inside it on the map.

The river peoples of the Valley, the Akimel O’odham and the Pee Posh, lost the Gila to upstream diversion, were reduced to famine, and recovered a share of their water by settlement ninety years later. Their community’s decisions on roads, water and land now bind the Valley’s growth, and the Ahwatukee freeway story turns on exactly that.

The Tohono O’odham hold country the international border runs straight through, dividing a nation between two realms. A treaty right of passage is recognised by the Realm and by Mexico, is administered badly, and is a permanent grievance. The nation refuses any barrier on its land, the Realm has accepted the refusal, and successive federal ministries have tried to reopen it.

The Apache nations of the mountains, and the Mescalero and Jicarilla country of the east, hold forest and grazing land, run their own enterprises, and carry the memory of the wars and of the prisoners of war most directly.

The Pueblos of the Rio Grande and the western mesas are the oldest continuously inhabited towns in the Realm, each a sovereign government with its own officers, ceremonial calendar and, in most cases, its own language.

The Hopi hold the mesas, and the land dispute between the Hopi and the Diné, which arises from federal boundary-drawing a century ago, is one the March has no power to settle and has been careful not to pretend otherwise.

The border

The March’s southern frontier with the Confederation of Mexico runs for more than a thousand kilometres, and the March’s settled view is that it is a seam rather than a wall.

Families live on both sides of it. Children cross to school and workers to work, and the border cities are single economies with a customs post in the middle: El Paso and its Mexican twin are, in every way except law, one place.

The removals of the 1950s are this section’s failing. In a federal campaign of mass deportation conducted through this March, people were rounded up and put over the line in numbers, and among them were citizens of the Realm, taken on appearance and language and deported without process from the polity of their birth.

The desert kills. People crossing away from the posts die of heat and thirst in the March’s southern country. The March counts them and publishes the count, in the same spirit as the heat count and with the same result: a published number, a duty to search, water stations that are argued about, and a frontier the March cannot make safe because it does not control who is crossing it or why.

Rocky Point is the other face of the same border: the Crown Port on the Sea of Cortez, which the March has held since the Border Settlement of 1899, and which gives a landlocked desert polity a beach, a customs valve for border commerce, and the only salt water any March has ever had.

Economy

Semiconductors. The Valley is the Realm’s second chip-making region, drawn by flat land, cheap power, a trained workforce and, above all, by a century of water engineering that can guarantee a supply in writing. The industry’s draw is large and its recycling aggressive, and its certificates are the most closely read documents in the March.

Copper. Morenci, Ray, Bagdad and the great open pits remain the richest copper ground in the Realm. The industry employs fewer people than it did and produces more metal, and its tailings, water use and haul roads are permanent local arguments.

Defence and the laboratories. Los Alamos, the proving grounds, the ranges and the air bases employ tens of thousands and bring research money the March could not otherwise attract. More federal land is under military use here than in any polity of the Realm, and the March may regulate none of it. It has sought audit powers of the kind Pennsylvania obtained after Kittanning and has been refused.

Retirement and health. People move here at sixty-five and the medicine follows them. Retirement settlement, hospitals and the care economy are among the largest employers in the Valley and the Southern Desert, and the median age in some counties runs a decade above the Realm’s.

Agriculture. The Imperial Valley and Yuma grow the Realm’s winter vegetables, an industry that exists entirely because of the Colorado. The Eastern March grows chile, pecans and cotton; the highlands and the eastern plains run cattle; and the dairy industry of the southern basins is larger than its neighbours like to admit.

Tourism and Las Vegas. The canyon, the parks, the resorts, Santa Fe’s art market and, above all, Las Vegas, whose gaming and convention trade is the largest single-site private industry in the March.

Gaming here is licensed tightly and taxed heavily. The March permits the industry under a regulator that can take a licence away and has done so, and the nations’ own gaming is negotiated separately under compact, which the Valley’s operators resent and the Charter requires. The real limit on the Basin’s growth is not the regulator but the water: a city in the driest corner of an over-allocated river system can only be as large as its allocation, and its allocation is fixed by an arithmetic it cannot lobby.

Energy

Solar at enormous scale. The March generates more solar power than any polity in the Realm and exports it west into California on summer afternoons at prices that fund a material share of its government.

A nuclear station west of Phoenix is the largest single generator in the United Kingdom of America and the only one of its size anywhere with no river, lake or sea to cool it. It uses treated wastewater piped out from the Valley’s cities, which is the neatest available illustration of how this polity works.

Coal is gone. The great coal stations on and beside the nations’ land have closed, and the closures took the nations’ jobs and royalties with them. The transition money arrived late and in smaller amounts than the wages it replaced, a pattern the Realm has repeated wherever an industry has ended.

And the fight is transmission. New lines to carry solar power west must cross ground that is sacred, federal, or both, and the Charter requires notice, consultation and published reasons before a route is laid. Some routes have been refused outright. Others have been driven through on published reasons, which is what the procedure permits and what Ahwatukee shows the cost of.

Transport

Phoenix Sky Harbor is the March’s principal airport and one of the busiest in the Realm, with the air network that follows from it.

The southern transcontinental railway is why half the March’s towns exist and are where they are. The line came through in the 1880s and the settlements arranged themselves along it, which is why so many of them are four streets beside a siding.

The border crossings and the freight through them are the March’s real logistics economy: produce north, manufactures south, and a customs and brokerage trade in every border city.

Demographics and society

The peoples

About 14 million people, growing faster than the Realm as a whole and almost entirely by migration. They come from California and the east for cost, space and sun, and the certificates of assured supply are the only real brake on where they can be housed.

The March is among the most Hispanic polities of the Realm: Nuevomexicano families in the east whose ancestors arrived before 1700, Mexican families on both sides of a border that moved rather than moving, and recent arrivals in every city. Its Indigenous population is among the largest of any polity. Its Anglo population is largely of arrivals from elsewhere in the Realm, which is why so much of the Valley’s politics has the texture of somewhere else.

Language

English is the language of government across the March, and the Charter’s Spanish text has been equally authentic since 1948, so the instrument that governs the polity exists in two languages of equal force.

The Eastern March’s Spanish is its own old variety, descended from settlers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, keeping forms and vocabulary that Mexican Spanish lost or never had, and its speakers are conscious of the difference. The nations’ languages, Diné, O’odham, Apache, Hopi, Zuni and the Pueblo languages, are taught under compact and broadcast in several.

Religion

Hispano Catholicism of the Eastern March runs on village churches, the penitential brotherhoods of the northern valleys, and a calendar older than the Realm.

The Mormon corridor holds the north and the Little Colorado country, with St George as its March capital, farming towns settled by direction from Deseret in the nineteenth century.

The nations’ ceremonial life is protected under the Charter and litigated over access: to peaks, springs and sites that lie on federal land, on private land, or under a proposed transmission line.

And the Valley’s megachurches, built for congregations of arrivals, are the newest religious fact in the March and the least written about by anybody.

The Church of America is established by law across the Realm and is thinly planted here, which is the ordinary condition of an established church in a Spanish-Catholic and Indigenous country it reached late. Its dioceses in the March are enormous in area, poor in communicants and asset-rich in the way the Church is everywhere: cathedral congregations of a few hundred inside buildings that cost six figures to roof.

Its weight here is historical rather than devotional, and it is not a comfortable history. The Church ran mission and boarding schools in this country, some of them day schools attached to parishes and some of them institutions that removed children from their families for years, and it has been named as responsible rather than as an adjunct of the federal programme. It enacted its Penitential Rite over that treatment in 1999, opened its archives without conditions, negotiated compensation rather than imposing it, and funded language recovery that the nations themselves direct. The March’s own view, stated by more than one High Steward, is that the Church did in 1999 what the Realm has still not done with the federal records.

Education

Four universities carry the March: the great one in the Valley (the University of the March, at Tempe), the older one at Tucson, the Eastern March’s at Albuquerque, and the highland university at Flagstaff, which does the Realm’s serious work in Indigenous studies and in forestry.

Tribal colleges, several of them, are funded by the March under compact and directed by the nations, an arrangement the nations insisted on and the March conceded without much of a fight.

Schools teach in Spanish and English through the Eastern March and in the nations’ languages under compact.

And the shadow. The March has opened its own records of the boarding schools, including admission books, punishment books and burial registers. The Realm has not opened all of the federal ones, and the March has asked four times.

Housing

The Valley builds outward because it can, and the cost is heat: new subdivisions without mature shade run several degrees hotter than the districts they surround, so the March’s growth makes its own worst problem worse. Prices have risen beyond local wages, so the polity people moved to because it was cheap is no longer cheap, and the March’s housing argument is now everybody else’s with a thermometer attached.

The second city

Albuquerque is the March’s second city, a river city of laboratories, air bases, an old plaza and a ring of Hispano villages absorbed into its growth, and the Eastern March’s economic centre in a way Santa Fe, which holds the region’s government and its art market, has never been.

It is also the clearest case of what a polity governed from Phoenix does to the rest of itself. The Valley’s institutions, its transport money, its water administration and its press treat the Eastern March as a region to be consulted rather than a half of the polity, and Albuquerque, eight hundred kilometres away and an hour behind in the Valley’s habits of mind, is dealt with as the Eastern March’s problem rather than the March’s second city. Every High Steward promises to correct this. The transport levy is the usual test, and it is usually spent in the Valley.

Culture

Chile. Red or green is the question asked in every restaurant of the Eastern March, is answered without hesitation by anybody from there, and is the nearest thing the March has to a shibboleth. The answer for people who cannot choose is both.

The art market. Santa Fe and Taos support the largest art trade in the Realm outside the great cities, built substantially on the nations’ work, and the economics of it are uncomfortable in a way the March does not resolve: the market is a livelihood for many Pueblo and Diné families and a machine for selling other people’s sacred forms to visitors.

Rodeo and the fairs. Ranching culture runs through the highlands, the plateau and the eastern plains, and the county fairs are the civic year in a hundred small places.

Spring baseball. The Realm’s clubs train in the Valley every February, filling the hotels, emptying the offices, and providing the one season when the rest of the Realm comes here for something other than the canyon.

Dark skies. The March’s lighting law protects the observatories of the mountains and the plateau, shields streetlights across whole counties, and has made the March’s night sky one of the things people travel for. It is also, quietly, the one environmental law the March passed before anybody was frightened of anything.

What the March has sent the Realm

For a polity created as a frontier command, the March has furnished the Realm with an unusual number of its officers.

Two Governors-General. Sandra Day O’Connor, and Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Hispana from Los Alamos commissioned in 2022. No other polity of comparable size has sent two.

A High Steward who became a federal figure. Goldwater’s career ran from a city council through the Diet and the High Stewardship to the Commons and back to the Marchership, and the March’s politics has never quite recovered from being the place he came from.

And constitutional lawyers. A polity whose instrument is litigated constantly, whose water law is cited in four other polities and whose compact practice is the Realm’s most developed exports advocates that federal departments hire and other polities borrow.

Durango

The March’s live constitutional grievance is not its own. The Highlands include the country around Durango, taken into the March at its creation in 1884 because the rivers that rise there flow south and west into the March’s system. The Free State of Colorado has never accepted the transfer and teaches it as a loss.

Nothing is pending. Colorado has never petitioned Parliament, which is the only body that could alter a polity boundary, and the March’s standing answer, given by successive High Stewards in almost identical words, is that it would be glad to discuss the boundary at any time and that the headwaters are not negotiable, which is an offer to discuss the only thing nobody wants to discuss.

The arithmetic is the whole of it. A March whose headwaters lay in another polity would be a March negotiating for its own supply, which is precisely the position the March’s downstream neighbours are already in with respect to the March, and Arizona has never found a comfortable answer to the observation. The grievance is permanent because it is unpressed: a claim that is pressed is a claim that can be lost. The fuller account is in the Charter’s own article.

Failings

The wars of removal. The March was made on country taken by force. The Long Walk, the Apache wars, a massacre of about a hundred and forty people camped under army protection in 1871 with an acquittal in under half an hour, and Apache families held as prisoners of war in other polities for twenty-seven years.

The boarding schools. Children taken, forbidden their languages and punished for speaking them, in institutions the March ran or permitted, the largest of them in its own capital.

The rivers taken from the river peoples. The Akimel O’odham and the Pee Posh farmed the Gila before anyone else irrigated anything here, lost the river to upstream diversion, and were reduced to famine. The restoration came ninety years later and remains partial.

The land grants. A treaty guarantee administered through a process that required English documents in a distant court, which cost the Eastern March’s villages their commons while leaving them their houses.

Uranium. Navajo miners in unventilated workings, not told what the rock was, and tailings left where the work stopped, some beside houses, many still there.

The downwinders. The Realm designed its first weapon here and fired it here, and the ranching families and Hispano villages within forty miles were neither warned nor told, and drank the water that caught the fallout. Compensation reached them last and has not reached all of them.

The camps. Two of the largest internment camps of the second war were built in this March on the land of two treaty nations, over their councils’ objections, by a government that did not require their consent.

The deported strikers. Twelve hundred men taken at gunpoint and shipped into the desert in cattle wagons in 1917, and no conviction.

The disconnection of 1956. A Black and Mexican district of Phoenix cut off from water for eleven days in a Valley summer, in a city that disconnected no comparable district anywhere else. The right to water exists because of it, which is the best that can be said and is not much.

Heat deaths now. Counted and published and rising, overwhelmingly among people with nowhere to go, in a polity whose heat law is the most advanced in the Realm and whose cooling centres are closed at night.

Symbols

The flag is the March’s own: thirteen rays of red and gold above a blue field, with a copper star at the centre. The rays are read here as the sun over the desert and the copper star as the mineral that paid for the March’s first half-century.

The motto is Lex in deserto, law in the desert, which states the March’s whole constitutional claim: that a frontier can be governed by instrument rather than by improvisation, and that the alternative was tried and is in the Failings above.

The oldest law still in force in the March is older than the March: the Travellers’ Act 1864, the territorial statute that requires every licensed house to keep a hitching rail and a filled trough and forbids anyone keeping water by a road to refuse it to a traveller. Every schoolchild in the March learns that nobody is refused water as the first law they are taught.

March House at Phoenix is the Lord Marcher’s residence, and the March Diet’s chamber is the polity’s other public building of consequence.

Assessment

The March is the most deliberately governed desert in the world and the Realm’s most successful constitutional experiment, and both halves of that sentence need the Failings section standing next to them.

What it has done well is genuinely hard. It wrote an instrument in 1884 that has held a polity of six regions, two languages, an international frontier and a great many treaty nations together for a century and a half. It built a procedure, the concurrent majority, that stops the largest region carrying a water measure alone, and it has kept that procedure through the growth of a metropolis that could have swallowed the rest. It made a right to water out of the worst thing a city did to its own people, and a heat law out of the number of bodies it was willing to count. It gave a frontier an emergency power and then produced a line of officers whose chief distinction is how rarely they used it.

What it did to get here is in the record above, and the two halves are not separable. The water that made the Valley was taken from people who were farming with it. The land the laboratories stand on was taken by a claims process designed to be failed. The March’s own nations were removed, schooled out of their languages, mined without warning, and then made parties to the most advanced compact system in the Realm, which is progress and is also restitution proceeding at the speed of the party that owes it.

The open question is whether the form still means anything. A March was a frontier command for a frontier that closed a century ago; the southern boundary is a customs and immigration problem rather than a military one, the Apache wars are seven generations back, and what the Lord Marcher actually does in an ordinary year is open the Diet and decline to proclaim. The March’s answer is that the form is what produced the water law, the compact practice, the heat regime and the habit of publishing the count, and that an ordinary province would have produced an ordinary drought. The counter-argument is that fourteen million people, a semiconductor industry and a retirement economy are not a frontier by any definition anybody would recognise, and that the March is now a very large state wearing a word.

Both arguments are made in the Diet most sessions, usually by people who want something else. The honest position is that the form has outlived the frontier and produced a body of law the Realm cannot replicate, and that nobody in the March proposes to give it up while the river keeps falling.

Chronology

See also

• The March Charter of 1884
• Phoenix
• Ahwatukee
• The Salt River Project
• Navajo Republic
• Barry Goldwater
• Gabrielle Giffords
• Michelle Lujan Grisham
• Sandra Day O’Connor
• Daily Life in the March of Arizona
• Confederation of Mexico
• Free State of Colorado

Trivia

Categories

Polities & the Federation · Marches · The Desert Southwest · Water Law · Indigenous Compacts · Heat & Climate