The year the century turned, the Salt River was running out. The drought that had begun in 1898 was in its third year, and by the following spring the river would fall to under 800 miner’s inches — the lowest anyone had measured — with the Arizona Canal drawing the last of it. The Valley the census counted that spring, 5,544 in Phoenix and nearly 20,000 overall, farming 130,500 irrigated acres, had grown into exactly the kind of place a dry river could ruin. Scottsdale’s few dozen families, holding the highest and driest land under the canal, felt it first.
The response began in Phoenix. That spring the Board of Trade appointed a committee to investigate storing the Salt’s winter floods behind a dam in the canyons upstream; its chairman, Benjamin A. Fowler, began the trips to Washington that would occupy him “at various times since 1900,” as a later account put it, and end with the Reclamation Act of 1902, the Water Users’ Association of 1903 and Roosevelt Dam. Scottsdale’s survival was decided in those committee rooms more than in its own fields.
The founder himself was elsewhere for most of the year. From September 1899 to August 1900 Winfield Scott served as pastor of Lone Star Baptist Church in Prescott, running his colony by letter, and the best-known photograph of him and Helen at the ranch — with the mule Old Maud — dates from this year. He came home to a settlement of a school, a store and a post office that was waiting, like the whole Valley, for water. The wait and the dam are the story of the 1900s chapter.