America’s entry into the World War on April 6 — a day with its own page — reached Scottsdale as, of all things, a fiber shortage. Truck and airplane tires, balloon fabric, and aircraft wings all demanded extra-long-staple cotton, most of it previously imported from Egypt past the U-boats — and the substitute had just been perfected 30 miles away, at the USDA experimental farm near Sacaton on the Gila River Indian Community: Pima cotton, named for the Akimel O’odham farmers who developed it.
Prices went vertical, and the town went with them. Scottsdale farmers, who had grown some cotton before the war, ripped out the alfalfa and orchards the drought generation had so carefully diversified into and planted it fencerow to fencerow; by 1920 the Valley would plant 130,000 to 180,000 acres of it, by different counts. Gins ran around the clock. For a famously dry Baptist farm town, it was a boomtown moment in everything but saloons.
The families who stayed
The year’s most lasting change was human. Cotton is hungry for labor, and the boom drew Mexican and Mexican-American families to Scottsdale — many recruited directly from Sonora and Chihuahua by Valley growers. They picked, ginned, ditched, and hauled; they were also paid less and housed worse than Anglo workers, settling in a barrio of adobe homes south and east of the townsite. The growers thought they were importing temporary labor. They were wrong in the best way: families like the Corrals and Coronados stayed through everything that followed, opened businesses, and became permanent builders of the community — down to the Old Adobe Mission their hands would raise in 1933.
A town at war
With no government of its own, Scottsdale went to war through committees: a farm census meeting at the schoolhouse in May, a boys’ camp picking cotton by June, Red Cross sewing every week. In October an Arizona Republican column recorded an arrival of Mexican families at the Security Acres ranch, each worker carrying an identification card, and on October 21 several hundred people drove out to hear Vice President Thomas Marshall speak on the war from the porch of his Scottsdale bungalow. The 1910s politics chapter has the record.
The boom had roughly three years to run. The armistice that started its clock is the story of 1918.