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Landmark day • Tuesday, June 17, 1902

June 17, 1902: Roosevelt Signs the Reclamation Act

Two thousand miles from the dry canals, a president signs the law that will pay for the dam — the single most consequential thing that happened to Scottsdale in its first twenty years.

Illustrated plaque for June 17, 1902 in Scottsdale history JUNE 17 1902 FOUNDING & PIONEER YEARS

What happened

President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Newlands Reclamation Act into law on June 17, 1902. The act set aside proceeds from public-land sales in sixteen western states and territories to finance irrigation works, to be repaid over time by the landowners whose farms the water served. The Salt River Valley, four years into a ruinous drought, was first in line to claim it.

Why it matters

No local bank could finance a storage dam on the Salt River, and without one Scottsdale's canals ran dry in every drought and empty after every flood. The Reclamation Act broke the deadlock; within a year the Valley's farmers had organized to claim it, and within nine Roosevelt Dam stood in the canyon.

The problem the law was written for

By the summer of 1902 the Salt River Valley had been dry for four years. The river’s flow fell through 1899, 1900, and 1901 until some summers the Arizona Canal carried almost nothing to the ditches on the benchland where Winfield Scott’s colony sat. Fields browned. Stock was sold. Some of the families Scott had recruited from the Midwest gave up and left, and the ones who stayed spent the seasons arguing over water rights that meant little when there was no water to divide.

Everyone from Tempe to Peoria could see the fix. The Salt ran in floods and famines; a storage dam in the mountains would hold the floods and dole them out in the dry months. A site had already been surveyed where Tonto Creek meets the Salt, eighty miles upstream. What nobody could see was the money. The engineering estimate ran into the millions, the Valley’s private canal companies were broke, and no eastern bank was lending to a territory of dirt farmers on a river that had just washed out its own dam. The West’s irrigation boosters, led in Congress by Nevada’s Francis Newlands, had spent years arguing that only the federal government could build such works. On June 17, 1902, they won.

What the act did

The Reclamation Act put the proceeds of public-land sales across the arid West into a revolving fund for irrigation works, to be built by a new Reclamation Service and repaid — without interest — by the landowners whose acres received the water. It was, in effect, a long federal loan to farmers who would never have qualified for a private one. Roosevelt signed it with enthusiasm; the conservation-minded president would put his own name on the Valley’s dam nine years later.

The law offered; the Valley still had to claim, and the claiming took nerve. Within eight months Salt River Valley landowners — Scottsdale’s settlers among them — would incorporate the Water Users’ Association and pledge their own drought-stricken farms as the collateral the government required. That story belongs to February 1903. The signing is the hinge: the day a farm settlement’s survival was decided in Washington before most of its residents had heard the bill’s name. The rest of the year sits at 1902, and the whole decade of drought and rescue in the 1900s chapter.