A sharpshooting team helped Arizona’s first flag fly
Arizona’s state flag has an interesting story to it.
It seems that, back in 1910, before we were even a state, we sent a team of sharpshooters off to the National Rifle
Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio.
Our guys got there and were looking around and noticed that all the other state teams had flags or emblems and we didn't. Boy, were we embarrassed.
So Charles Wilfred Harris, who was a colonel in the Arizona National Guard and captain of the state's team, decided something had to be done so our shooters wouldn't show up the next year without a flag to wave.
Harris got together with the legendary Carl Hayden and they came up with the design, and Hayden's wife, Nan, stitched up the first version.
Sometimes I wonder why we needed all those other people around back then, when the Haydens seemed to do pretty much everything.
By 1912, Harris had risen to adjutant general and designed a state flag similar to the one the rifle team used.
The official version is 4 feet tall and 6 feet wide, and divided in half top and bottom with a large five-point copper star in the center. Guess what the copper star stands for? Duh, copper.
The sunbeam sort-of bars in the top half represent the original 13 American colonies and a beautiful Arizona sunset.
The red and yellow of the rays supposedly were the colors of flags carried by Francisco Coronado as he and his conquistadors wandered around Arizona and the Southwest looking for the Seven Cities of Gold in 1540 or so.
The blue of the lower half is the same shade of blue in the United States flag and, along with the yellow of the sunset, are Arizona's state colors. I didn't even know we had state colors.
Anyway, Harris came up with this in 1912 and, in 1917, the Legislature finally got around to declaring it our official state flag.