Upstream, the masonry kept rising. Roosevelt Dam had broken ground the year before, and through 1907 crews laid course after course of stone in the canyon — slow, visible proof that the land the valley’s farmers had pledged in 1903 was buying something real. Closer to home a second dam was rising too: Granite Reef, the concrete diversion dam begun the previous October below the Salt–Verde confluence, which would replace the wooden works the 1905 flood destroyed and feed the Arizona Canal past Scottsdale’s fields.
The texture of the period is well documented even where single years are not. The farms ran alfalfa, barley, dates, and ostriches — plume prices still absurd, the crash in that market a few years off. Health seekers kept stepping off the trains, tuberculosis patients prescribed dry air, filling tent cottages and sleeping porches around the settlement; some recovered, stayed, and became prominent citizens. Winfield Scott, now in his seventies, went on preaching and boosting. The village was quietly accumulating the pieces — water, people, reputation — that would cash out in the banner year of 1909.