Mid-decade Scottsdale was doing what Winfield Scott had designed it to do: farm, pray, and grow a little every year. The year opened with Arizona going dry at midnight on January 1, a day with its own page, the statewide law the settlement had never been able to pass for itself. Water from Roosevelt Dam ran on schedule — in April the lake behind it filled and spilled for the first time, its own page too — the fields held alfalfa, grain, orchards and a growing acreage of cotton, 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. In October the farmers voted to form a local of the county Farm Improvement Association and organized it at the schoolhouse on the 16th, where the Vice President, Thomas Marshall, spoke; the 1910s politics chapter tells that story.
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. Scottsdale growers already planted cotton, but nobody yet knew that the crop that would nearly quadruple 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.