Phoenix, Arizona: The City Jack Swilling Wanted to Call Stonewall

Phoenix, Arizona, could have been Stonewall, the name Jack Swilling wanted. Englishman Darrell Duppa looked at the ancient ruins and suggested Phoenix instead.

He was thinking of the bird from old mythology that rises from its own ashes. The settlers digging canals along the Salt River went along, and it became the name that was agreed upon.

Stonewall, Salina, or Phoenix

The name is older than the town. In his 1916 history of Arizona, James McClintock says “the name of Phoenix originated several years before any town was established.” Jack Swilling, who had organized the canal company and had fought for the Confederacy, wanted “Stonewall.” Jacob Starer suggested Salina, but John Larsen objected that the word meant “salt marsh.” Then Duppa, “pointing to the evidences of ancient occupation, suggested the name that was agreed upon.”

Those evidences were real. Swilling saw how easily water could be taken from the river “following the lines of the ancient canals,” McClintock writes, and the first start on his canal was made “within an ancient ditch.” Thomas Farish, whose title page calls him “Arizona Historian,” tells it the same way in 1915: Swilling gave the name “at the suggestion of Darrell Duppa,” who explained that the phoenix “rose from its ashes more beautiful and stronger than ever.” Here, Duppa said, were “the remains of an extinct civilization,” and a new one would rise on its ashes. The U.S. Geological Survey’s naming record puts it in 1869.

The man with the classics

So who was Duppa? McClintock calls him “one of the mysteries of Phoenix in its early days.” Farish gives his full name as Brian P. D. Duppa, “known to old timers as Darrell Duppa,” an Englishman “of good family and scholarly attainments” who came to Arizona around 1863. McClintock adds that he was “the dissolute and exiled scion of an aristocratic English family” who “talked not at all about his antecedents.” He had a college education and “understood the classics well.” Money arrived from England every three months, and he’d spend what was left after his debts on a spree that could last “a week or more.”

McClintock’s later book, Mormon Settlement in Arizona, also credits him with naming Tempe, eight miles east on the Salt River. It’s not hard to see how a man like that ends up naming a town after a Greek myth. Sylvester Mowry, in a piece Farish dates to October 1870, put it nicely: whoever named the settlement “did so with a last gasp at his classics.”

Making it official

By late 1870, a letter in the Miner said the new settlements on the Salt River “are known and come under the name of ‘Phoenix.’” According to one old-timer, making it official took a federal hand. In 1910, an old postal agent named Ben Truman told a visitor that he had named Phoenix, “that is, officially.” The territorial governor, McCormick, had asked him to have the spot called Phoenix, “the name the settlement had previously been called,” and he passed that along to the post office department. You’ll want to keep in mind that it’s a memory from more than 40 years later, retold by a visitor to the Arizona Republican and reprinted by Farish in 1918.

The federal government’s own geographers repeated the idea. Henry Gannett’s 1905 guide to American place names says Phoenix was “named in prophecy of a ‘new growth,’ being situated in the midst of prehistoric ruins.” So if you live in Phoenix today, your city’s name was a bet on its own future, placed by a crew of canal diggers and one Englishman who knew his mythology.

Sources & further reading

• James H. McClintock, Arizona: Prehistoric, Aboriginal, Pioneer, Modern, vol. 2 (1916). Stonewall, Salina and Duppa’s suggestion (p. 565); the portrait of Duppa (pp. 612–613).
• Thomas Edwin Farish, History of Arizona, vol. 2 (1915). Swilling named the settlement at Duppa’s suggestion, and Duppa’s explanation of the bird (p. 253).
• Thomas Edwin Farish, History of Arizona, vol. 6 (1918). Duppa’s full name and background, and the October 1870 “last gasp at his classics” passage (p. 74); Ben Truman’s 1910 recollection (pp. 112–113); the letter in the Miner of December 10, 1870 (p. 165).
• James H. McClintock, Mormon Settlement in Arizona (1921), p. 219. Tempe’s name “credited to Darrell Duppa,” who “is also understood to have named Phoenix.”
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), p. 244. “Named in prophecy of a ‘new growth.’”
• GNIS feature 44784 (U.S. Geological Survey). Duppa named it in 1869 for the mythical bird, because of the earlier civilization in the area.