This was the year the valley’s farmers did something a banker would have called insane. Taking up the offer Congress had made in the 1902 Reclamation Act, Salt River Valley landowners organized the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association, incorporated on February 9 (its own page) — the Salt River Project, still the valley’s utility today — and pledged their own acreage as collateral to fund a great storage dam. Scottsdale’s settlers signed alongside everyone else. It is hard to overstate the nerve involved: mortgaging a drought-stricken farm to pay for a dam none of them would live to see paid off, in a canyon 80 miles upstream that most of them would never visit.
The gamble was born of desperation as much as vision. The drought that started in the late 1890s had already driven families out of the settlement, and the pledge was, in plain terms, a bet that federal engineering could do what prayer and patience had not. It would take until 1906 for construction to begin and until 1911 for Theodore Roosevelt Dam to be finished — but from 1903 onward, Scottsdale’s future stopped being purely hypothetical.
The year carried a second, quieter milestone. On August 5 the territorial Board of Regents of the University of Arizona, to which Governor Alexander Brodie had appointed him in 1902, elected Winfield Scott its chancellor, the board’s presiding officer, a last public post for the chaplain-founder, who spent the decade preaching, farming, and boosting the town that bore his name. He would not quite live to see the dam finished. The whole decade’s arc — drought, pledge, and payoff — is in the 1900s chapter.