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Landmark day • Saturday, June 25, 1904

June 25, 1904: Washington Signs On to Build the Dam

The federal government commits in writing: a storage dam at the mouth of Tonto Creek, financed by Washington and repaid by the Valley's farmers at about fifteen dollars an acre.

Illustrated plaque for June 25, 1904 in Scottsdale history JUNE 25 1904 FOUNDING & PIONEER YEARS

What happened

Interior Secretary Ethan A. Hitchcock and Association president Benjamin A. Fowler signed the contract under which the United States would build a storage dam on the Salt River at the mouth of Tonto Creek, then estimated at $2.7 million — roughly $15 an acre on the 180,000 acres in the project. The Association agreed to collect repayment from its landowners and to hand over the Valley's canal system to federal operation while the works were built. The Salt River Project became the first recognized project of the 1902 Reclamation Act.

Why it matters

The 1903 pledge was the Valley's promise; this contract was the government's. From this day the dam was a federal obligation with a design, a budget, and a repayment schedule — and the drought that had emptied Scottsdale's canals since 1898 had an end date, even if it was seven years off.

From pledge to contract

Sixteen months separated the farmers’ bet from the government’s. The Water Users’ Association had incorporated in February 1903 and the Secretary of the Interior had approved the Salt River Project in principle within weeks, but approval was not a contract. Through 1903 and the first half of 1904 the new Reclamation Service surveyed the dam site where Tonto Creek meets the Salt, priced the work, built the wagon road that would become the Apache Trail to haul cement and machinery into the canyon, and negotiated the terms on which the Valley would pay it all back.

On June 25, 1904, the terms were signed. The United States would build a masonry dam at the Tonto site for an estimated $2.7 million; the Association, as agent for its members, would collect and remit repayment at roughly $15 for every one of the 180,000 acres then in the project. In the meantime the government would take over the Valley’s canals and run them as a single system. The Salt River Project was formally the first project of the Reclamation Act — the test case for the whole federal irrigation program.

What it meant on the benchland

For Scottsdale the contract changed nothing that year and everything after it. The drought that had begun in 1898 was in its last season; the canals still carried a trickle; families who had held on through six dry years were farming what the river allowed. But the future now had a signature on it. Every farmer who had pledged land in 1903 could read the terms of the debt, the size of the dam, and the acreage it would water, and could decide whether to stay on the strength of them. Most did.

The winter of 1904–05 brought the rains that finally broke the drought — and a flood in April 1905 that washed out the Arizona Canal’s diversion works and pushed the government to buy the north-side canals and build Granite Reef Dam to replace them. The first stone of Roosevelt Dam went in on September 20, 1906. The rest of 1904 is at 1904, and the decade’s arc is in the 1900s chapter.