Eighty miles upstream, in a canyon most Scottsdale farmers would never see, the future finally broke ground. Construction of Theodore Roosevelt Dam began in 1906 — the first major project of the new Reclamation era, and the structure that would rise, stone by stone, into the tallest masonry dam in the world.
For the settlement down in the valley, the start of work turned an abstraction into a fact. Three years earlier, in 1903, Scottsdale’s settlers had joined their neighbors in pledging their own land as collateral to fund exactly this dam. Since then the bet had existed only on paper, while the memory of the drought years — dry canals, browned fields, families selling out — stayed uncomfortably fresh. Now there were crews in the canyon and courses of stone going up, and with every one of them Scottsdale’s future got a little less hypothetical.
The build would run five more years, through the rest of the decade and past the founder’s lifetime; the dam was not dedicated until 1911, with Roosevelt himself doing the honors. In the meantime the village went on being a village — farms, a wooden schoolhouse, health seekers in tent cottages — but the ground had shifted. A town that had spent a decade wondering whether it could survive the river now knew, at least, that the river was being tamed. What reliable water made possible starts to show in 1909, when nearly everything in town upgraded at once.