Europe went to war in August 1914; in Scottsdale, the news would take three years to mean anything. The village was two years into statehood and three into the security of Roosevelt Dam — its first stretch of genuinely reliable farming after the drought decade — with irrigated alfalfa, grain, dates, and orchards, a brick schoolhouse, churches, and a population of a few hundred.
If anything was fading, it was the Valley’s strangest sideline. The 1910s were the decade fashion killed the ostrich-plume market that early Scottsdale-area farms had ridden, done in by changing hat styles and the automobile’s open cockpit.
The quiet would not last. The war already remaking Europe would reach these fields in 1917, when long-staple cotton became a strategic material — the turn that dominates the 1910s chapter.