America’s entry into the World War 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 ripped out the alfalfa and orchards the drought generation had so carefully diversified into and planted cotton fencerow to fencerow; by decade’s end the Valley would have on the order of 180,000 acres in the crop. 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.
The boom had roughly three years to run. The armistice that started its clock is the story of 1918.