Two years after the filing, 1890 was a year of clearing brush. George Washington Scott was living on the claim; his brother the chaplain was still on active duty, visiting when he could and writing letters that talked up “Orangedale” to anyone who would read them. The Arizona Improvement Company had begun planting the Valley’s first commercial citrus the year before, and the Scotts were planting with the same optimism: oranges, figs, almonds, grapes, barley. The census that spring found 3,152 people in Phoenix and roughly 10,000 in the whole Salt River Valley; it did not find a place called Scottsdale, because there wasn’t one yet.
The Valley’s news that year came from a hundred miles away. On February 22 the Walnut Grove Dam, an earthen wall on the Hassayampa River above Wickenburg, burst in a winter storm and sent a wall of water down the canyon that killed more than a hundred people — Arizona’s deadliest dam failure. It was exactly the kind of storage dam that Valley boosters were beginning to argue the Salt River needed, and its collapse sharpened a decade of debate about whether such a thing could be built safely at all. The flood of 1891, which would wreck the Arizona Dam a year later, made the debate urgent from the other direction.
On May 19 the Arizona Republican printed its first issue in Phoenix — the paper, renamed the Republic in 1930, in which nearly every dated event in this archive was first reported. In 1890 it had nothing to say about the chaplain’s section beside the canal. That would change with the 1890s: the name, the school and the store were all a few years off.