By the town record’s reckoning, 1904 marks the tail end of the punishing drought that had starved the canals since 1898 — six years that emptied fields, sold off stock, and sent some of Scottsdale’s recruited families out of the valley for good. The settlement that survived to see the dry spell close was smaller and warier than the one that entered it.
But it was also, for the first time, a settlement with a plan. The year before, the valley’s farmers had pledged their land to the new Salt River Project to fund a federal storage dam; on June 25 the paperwork was done — the government signed its dam contract with the Water Users’ Association, making the Salt River Project the first project of the Reclamation era (the day has its own page) — and the waiting had begun. Construction would not start until 1906, so the interval was pure faith — farming what the river allowed while the future sat in a filing cabinet. Meanwhile the rails kept delivering health seekers, the “lungers” prescribed dry desert air for their tuberculosis, who filled tent cottages and sleeping porches around the farms and quietly reshaped who lived here.