For the first time in its history, Scottsdale knew where next summer’s water was coming from. On March 18, 1911, Theodore Roosevelt traveled up the Apache Trail and personally dedicated the dam that carried his name — the first great project of the 1902 Reclamation Act and, at the time, the tallest masonry dam in the world. He called it one of the achievements he was proudest to be associated with. The Valley farmers in the crowd, Scottsdale settlers among them, had pledged their own land as collateral back in 1903 to pay for it; their feelings about the reservoir filling behind the masonry were presumably more practical.
The change downstream was immediate and total. Two decades of watching the moody Salt River — including the drought years that had driven recruited families out of the settlement — ended with guaranteed, year-round irrigation water. Alfalfa, grain, dates, and orchards spread across the flats around town; farmhouses gained second stories; tax rolls fattened. Within two years, merchant-farmer Charles Miller would build one of the town’s finer homes, the kind of house that announced the frontier was over.
The dam did more than water the fields. Everything Scottsdale later became — the wartime cotton boom, the guest ranches, the resort city of a quarter-million — runs on the security this year delivered. Eleven months after the dedication, on Valentine’s Day, Arizona itself joined the Union; that story belongs to 1912.