A land filing is not a settlement. Winfield Scott had his 640 acres as of the previous summer, but he also still had an Army chaplaincy, which meant someone else had to do the actual pioneering. That someone was his brother, George Washington Scott — a Civil War veteran who had lost a leg at Chickamauga — who arrived in 1889, camped on the bare claim, and became the first year-round resident of what would eventually be Scottsdale. Population of the future city: one man, one tent’s worth of gear, and a great deal of brush to clear.
George’s job was to make the paper claim real — grub out the creosote and mesquite and get water flowing from the Arizona Canal’s lateral ditches onto fields. The brothers planted with an optimist’s portfolio: citrus, figs, almonds, grapes, peanuts, and barley, in service of Winfield’s dream of a citrus colony to rival California. The desert graded the experiment quickly. Hard freezes killed much of the citrus, the sandy bench soil drank irrigation water faster than anyone expected, and it was the unglamorous crops — barley and the orchard plantings that could take the heat — that actually paid. The lesson every Scottsdale farmer would relearn for the next half-century was on the table by the end of the first season.
Still, 1889 is the year the place stopped being empty. A canal, a claim, and now a resident: the ingredients were assembled. The town itself — the name, the school, the first store — belongs to the 1890s, when Winfield’s recruiting started filling the section with neighbors.