Mid-decade Scottsdale was doing what Winfield Scott had designed it to do: farm, pray, and grow a little every year. Water from Roosevelt Dam ran on schedule, the fields held alfalfa, grain, dates, and orchards, and health seekers still arrived on doctors’ orders for the dry air — the migration that had been quietly reshaping the town’s population since the early 1900s.
Thirty miles south, something more consequential was under way. At the USDA experimental farm near Sacaton, on the Gila River Indian Community, an American extra-long-staple cotton was being perfected — the variety soon named Pima, for the Akimel O’odham farmers who developed it. Nobody in Scottsdale yet knew that the crop that would triple the town was maturing in its backyard.
The trigger came two years later, when America entered the war and cotton prices went vertical — see 1917.