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But what I have in mind is a semi-tropical stretch of pure desert, 40 miles east and west, 20 north and south - a vast silent plain of yellow, brown land. What Balzac called: "God with Man left out". The only upright things that interrupt the 40 mile flats are Saguaro cactus trees, which look like spiky giants with their arms upraised in the act of surrender.

Here the cold month is January, getting down as low as 50 degrees Fahrenheit. In mid summer it's often over 100 degrees in any discoverable shade. Here for, how many centuries nobody can truly guess, an Indian tribe built adobe houses, dug canals, prospered at farming and disappeared. The only name they are known by is unlikely to be their true name - Hohokam - meaning 'the people who have gone'.

Flash forward to the late 1860s. Bang in the middle of this desert, a white man - a prospector - pitched a tent. He saw there was water from the nearby salt river and old canals to run it through and set up a hay camp. Then he grew other crops. Contrary to the popular city folks' belief, the desert is wonderfully fertile, they always say: "spit on the desert and a flower will grow".

Within a year along came a young man who would help the prospector build new canals and mount eight mule teams to haul supplies 40, 50 miles to the nearest towns and to an army camp. This pioneer was an Englishman with the improbable name of Darrel Duppa.

As always in the West an Englishman on account of his fancy accent was given a title, he was known as "Lord" Darrel Duppa. And he's described in the only book I can find a mention of him as 'an adventurer, scholar, inebriate and all around regular fellow'. He comes into the story here for one memorable reason.

Once settled in this primitive village he looked around at the prehistoric mounds and the ancient canals, he thought of the once prospering tribe, and said: "Let's call this place after the mythical bird that was consumed by fire but always rose from the ashes. From this village," he said, "will arise a city Phoenix-like from the ashes of the past." They called it Phoenix. It is so today and it is the capital city of Arizona.

In no time the village acquired the primitive necessities. Adobe houses, a store or two, a butcher shop, a hotel, half a dozen saloons and though it didn't yet have paved streets it manufactured ice and delivered it in wheelbarrows. And once the railroad came through bearing new West-bound Americans, many of them stayed and baited the natives, who by then, a few hundred, were mostly Mexicans.

There was not much rejoicing in those days in the prospect of multiculturalism, and weekend brawls between newcomer Americans and the Mexicans, to the accompaniment of random gun fire, soon compelled the necessity of a court house and a jail.

There were 1800 inhabitants when the place was incorporated as a city, and after a boisterous election got itself a city council to replace a vigilante band that had handled the frequent murders with straightforward lynchings. Now Phoenix had a legal government and legislators who loved to call themselves Solons.

First thing a Western town official did once he got elected (and this is a detail that the movies have always got right) was to go off and buy himself a silk hat. Where, in the desert? He repaired at once in Phoenix to the shop of a recently arrived Pole - a Jewish immigrant, name of Goldwasser. Mr Goldwasser was - when he wagoned into Arizona - a travelling tailor. He travelled no more. He settled in Phoenix and eventually started a chain of clothing stores and in time Arizona's first department store, with a large painted sign proclaiming Mr Goldwasser's new English name - Goldwater.

This tailor was the grandfather of Barry Goldwater, former United States Senator from Arizona. Once Republican candidate for President. A thoroughly defeated candidate who had more historic influence on his party's future than any other defeated presidential candidate you can name. Who now, except professional historians, remembers William Crawford, Lewis Cass, Alton B. Parker, even Michael Dukakis?

But Barry Goldwater. The present Senator from Arizona who succeeded Goldwater when he resigned in 1989 said at the funeral on Wednesday: "In all the histories of American politics Barry Goldwater will remain a chapter unto himself. The rest of us will have to make do as footnotes."

Barry Goldwater died last week in his ranch house overlooking the Salt Lake Valley. He was 89. And I've gone into the history of the place his grandfather came to because it explains why Barry Goldwater was a new American type as a Presidential candidate. He was a frontier Westerner. It was as if John Wayne or Gary Cooper had come to take over a New York gentleman's club.

Before him the Republican Party had drawn its Presidential runners from the Eastern cities and the farming Midwest. The people who ran the party were upper and middle class Eastern establishment. For the 30 years the party had seen itself overwhelmed by Franklin Roosevelt and his introduction of a welfare state administered by a strong central government.

Successive Republican candidates eventually accepted the New Deal but said they could do it better. Then suddenly at the Republican convention in San Francisco in 1964, out of the desert sprang this straight-backed, immensely handsome Barry Goldwater. "Immensely" was carefully chosen. He looked like one of those presidential figures carved in rock on that Western mountain.

At the convention which spurned the Eastern establishment and its leader, Governor Rockefeller of New York and nominated Goldwater, he shouted: "Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice." I don't suppose many of the millions listening to it figured out what it meant. But it sounded manly and downright and the convention hall shook under the roaring applause. The word "extremism" was just what the Democrats wanted to hear.

The Democrats had only to remind the voters that Goldwater had backed the malodorous Senator McCarthy in finding Communists everywhere, and they had Goldwater whipped before the vote. And on election eve, add the note that the Senator had voted against the first Civil Rights Act which abolished the segregation of the races. In truth Goldwater abhorred segregation, had long ago integrated the Arizona National Guard and many years before brought blacks into the running of the family department store.

But Goldwater felt and said: "It's not the government's part to make men moral. Integration should be left to the states or the cities and if they don't do it they ought to be ashamed of themselves." It was a little too idealistic for most people who knew that, left to themselves, many Southern states and many strong labour union states in the North would have stayed segregated forever.

The fact is that Goldwater lived by a few amazing simplicities picked up from the daily experience of frontier life and his father's stories. Self reliance, work hard, do good, help your neighbour. But his political principles came from a very odd source - from his grandfather, the original Mr Goldwasser. It was from him that Barry learned by rote such a sentence as he recited at a rally of his I covered in a California valley: "I have always stood for government that is limited and balanced and against every concentration of government in Washington".

Well that, like many other obstinate sentences that were loudly applauded, came from Thomas Jefferson but by way of the talks with Goldwater's grandfather. That immigrant tailor was a 19th Century Polish immigrant familiar with pogroms and dictatorial government, whose hope for his life in America lay in the works of Thomas Jefferson.

The paradox here is that for generations the Democrats had always felt of Jefferson as their own ideological property. But they fixed on his pronouncements about liberty and free speech and never on his central passion that the best government is the least government.

After his defeat and for the next quarter century Goldwater stayed in the Senate, until he was 80. He was regarded by the Democrats as a harmless charming man. And by the conservative Republicans of the South and West, whom he had helped to take over the party, he was thought of as a renegade because, turned out he was in favour of abortion and approved homosexuals in the armed forces. He saw nothing inconsistent with his idea that government should stay out of private life; out of religion - he loathed the Christian coalition evangelists; abortion - something no man should tamper with; homosexuals in the army - it doesn't matter if you're straight what you have to do is shoot straight.

At that huge rally in the California valley I couldn't help noticing that the loudest cheerers were not Jeffersonian philosophers. His simple slogans - anti-big government, anti-Communists, no compulsory civil rights - attracted to his cause crowds of old boy rowdies and simple bigots. And when the rally was over I wrote, what occurred to me then, as the tragedy of his campaign: