Call 1916 the last ordinary year. The war in Europe was two years old and America was still out of it; Scottsdale was still an unincorporated farm village of a few hundred, five years into reliable water, working the diversified spread — alfalfa, grain, dates, orchards — that the drought generation had learned to trust.
Every piece of the coming boom was already in place, waiting on a trigger. The dam guaranteed the water. The USDA farm at Sacaton had perfected its long-staple Pima cotton. And modern war ran on cotton — tires, aircraft fabric, balloon cloth — with most of the world’s long-staple supply imported from Egypt past the U-boats.
The trigger came in April 1917. Within a season, the diversified fields were gone, replaced by cotton to the fencerows — the boom that the 1910s chapter says tripled the town.