Today’s question is about the saguaro, so those of who you have lived in Arizona for more than a few years are free to talk quietly among yourselves or put your heads down on your desks and rest a bit.

The rest of you, the newcomers, should pay careful attention because, like indicting a governor or driving badly, few things are more purely Arizonan than the saguaro, the bloom of which, after all, is our official state flower.

The Arizona cowboy was a curious mix of the northern Plains, Rockies, California, Texas and northern Mexico cowboy culture. The influence of all these was strong, yet the Arizona cowboys, or vaqueros, evolved into a unique breed of their own. In a frontier that was closing rapidly at the turn of the century, Arizona offered one of the last vestiges of the freedom that was associated with being a cowboy.

Right in the middle of downtown Wickenburg, there’s an old mesquite tree that folks around town say has been there longer than anyone can remember. Local historians who check into such things say it’s more than 200 years old, and claim they have evidence to prove it. They also say it once served as the community’s only jail.

Out of a frontier history that lasted more than 350 years, Americans have taken the era of the open-range cowboy, a brief 20-year span, given it immortality and called it the West. The heroic figures who emerged have come to symbolize all the manifestations of character we ascribe to the winning of the West. Most important, those qualities have come to represent our perception of our own self-image as rugged individuals.