The count came in first. On April 15 the census found 985 people in the Scottsville precinct, 718 of them on the Salt River Indian Reservation; the 267 left over is the number every history gives for the town, the nearest thing to an official measure of what two decades of recruiting, preaching, and ditch-digging had produced. Then, on October 19, the man who had done most of the recruiting died. Winfield Scott was 73 — Union Army chaplain, wounded at Gettysburg and Spotsylvania, territorial legislator, one-time chancellor of the University of Arizona’s regents, and above all the salesman whose 1888 filing on a square mile of creosote flats had started all of this. His funeral drew mourners from across the Valley.
The timing was almost unbearably neat. Scott had spent his last decade watching the colony fight the drought that nearly emptied it, and had signed with the farmers who pledged their own land in 1903 to fund a federal storage dam. By the fall of 1910 that dam stood nearly finished in its canyon 80 miles upstream; Theodore Roosevelt would dedicate it the following March. Scott lived exactly long enough to know the gamble had worked, and not quite long enough to see the water guaranteed.
What he left behind was small but no longer fragile: a brick schoolhouse, a general store, churches, a resort taking winter reservations nearby, and irrigated fields about to enter their most productive years yet. The rest of the decade — statehood, the dam’s dedication, and a war that turned those fields white with cotton — fills the 1910s chapter; all of it grew from ground Scott had bet on at $2.50 an acre.