Ariz. flag first flew at shooting match

By 1910, the lack of an official flag for the Arizona Territory was becoming somewhat of an embarrassment. It came to a head at the National Rifle Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio, when the best shooters in the soon-tobe state found themselves the only contingent without an emblem.

Arizona National Guard Col. Charles Wilfred Harris, team captain that year, decided the situation could not continue. He vowed that the Arizona Rifle Team would have a flag by the following year.

That’s how it happened that the very first time Arizona’s flag flew was at a shooting match in Ohio.

The shooting competition launched what would be a seven-year odyssey to adopt the official red, yellow and blue Western setting-sun motif that flies on buildings throughout the state today.

Historical records show that Arizona politics were at least as prickly 100 years ago as they are today, and the flag design prompted its own kerfuffle. When the Legislature finally adopted the state flag in 1917, the governor refused to sign the bill.

Harris reportedly drew the first flag design along with Carl Hayden, one of Arizona’s first representatives in the U.S. Congress and a future U.S. senator.

Several accounts have Nan D. Hayden, Carl’s wife, sewing the first flag that flew at the 1911 rifle match in Camp Perry.

Descendants of Mae Stewart, wife