The new century found the canals low and getting lower. A run of dry years that began in the late 1890s was still tightening its grip on the Salt River Valley, and with no storage upstream, Scottsdale’s ditches carried only what the moody river gave. Some of the farm families Winfield Scott had recruited were already weighing whether to sell out — and a number eventually did.
What 1900 had to show for twelve years of settlement was real but modest: a name, a wooden schoolhouse from 1896, a general store and post office, and fields of alfalfa and barley where creosote flats had been. The drought put all of it in question. Relief was coming, but nobody in the settlement knew it yet — the federal law that would finance a great storage dam was still two years off, and the dam itself a decade from finished.
The full story of the crisis and the rescue is told in the 1900s chapter.