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Landmark day • Monday, February 9, 1903

February 9, 1903: The Valley's Farmers Mortgage Their Land for a Dam

The paperwork behind the bravest bet in Valley history: drought-stricken farmers put up their own acreage to guarantee a dam none of them would live to see paid off.

Illustrated plaque for February 9, 1903 in Scottsdale history FEBRUARY 9 1903 FOUNDING & PIONEER YEARS

What happened

Following Judge Joseph H. Kibbey's plan, landowners across the Salt River Valley incorporated the Salt River Valley Water Users' Association under the laws of the Arizona Territory. Members pledged their land — ultimately more than 200,000 acres — as security for repayment of a federal storage dam on the Salt River under the Reclamation Act of 1902. Scottsdale's farm families signed alongside everyone else. The Association still exists as the Salt River Project, the Valley's water and power utility.

Why it matters

The Association turned a federal offer into a binding commitment and made the Valley the first project of the Reclamation era. Its water rights, attached to the pledged land, still govern who gets Salt River water today — and its founding is why Scottsdale survived the drought decade at all.

Kibbey’s design

The Reclamation Act, signed the previous June, offered federal money for a storage dam but attached a condition that stopped the Valley cold: the government would lend only against land, and the landowners had to organize into a single body that could guarantee repayment. The Salt River Valley in 1903 was not a single anything. It was a patchwork of private canal companies, competing water claims, and farmers who had spent the drought suing each other over a river that no longer reached them.

Joseph H. Kibbey, a former territorial judge who had already written the Valley’s governing water decision, drafted the answer. Every landowner who wanted federal water would join one association, subscribe their acreage as security, and receive water rights tied to that land rather than to any canal company. The Association would then contract with the United States as agent for all its members. Farmers who signed were, in plain terms, mortgaging their drought-stricken farms to pay for a dam in a canyon eighty miles upstream that most of them would never visit. In early February 1903 they did it anyway, and on the 9th the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association was incorporated.

Scottsdale signs

The settlement Winfield Scott had planted fifteen years earlier was small enough that its signatures barely registered in the Association’s totals, and large enough that its survival depended entirely on them. The families still farming the benchland along the Arizona Canal had watched neighbors sell out through five dry years. Pledging their land was not vision so much as arithmetic: without a dam there would be no water, and without water the land was worth nothing to mortgage.

The bet paid. The Secretary of the Interior approved the Salt River Project within weeks, the government signed its contract with the Association on June 25, 1904, the first stone of Roosevelt Dam went in on September 20, 1906, and the finished dam was dedicated in March 1911. The Association became the Salt River Project, which still delivers the Valley’s water and much of its power. The water rights attached to those 1903 pledges still define which Scottsdale land is entitled to river water today. The year’s other milestone — Winfield Scott’s appointment as chancellor of Tempe Normal School — is at 1903, and the whole drought-and-rescue decade runs through the 1900s chapter.