Between the pledge and the pour, Scottsdale waited — and then, in the wettest winter in years, got more water than it could use. The rains of 1904–05 ended the six-year drought; the April 1905 flood washed out the Arizona Canal’s diversion works on the Salt, drying the ditch at the worst moment and convincing the Reclamation Service to buy the north-side canals and replace their wooden dam with concrete at Granite Reef. The valley’s farmers had mortgaged their land in 1903 to fund a federal storage dam, but work in the canyon 80 miles upstream would not begin until 1906 — so 1905 belonged to the in-between, a farm village holding its breath on borrowed collateral.
Waiting did not mean idle. The farms diversified into anything the desert would tolerate: alfalfa, barley, dates, and — most memorably — ostriches, whose plumes for ladies’ hats commanded absurd prices and made the Salt River Valley one of the ostrich capitals of America. Health seekers kept arriving too, tuberculosis patients sent west for dry air, living in tent cottages and screened sleeping porches among the fields. Between the birds and the lungers, the settlement was already practicing its future trade: making money off the desert climate itself. What the dam’s groundbreaking set in motion the next year is picked up in 1906.