Scottsdale spent 1918 at war, and with no government of its own it ran the war through committees. In April the Third Liberty Loan used the school district as its unit: Charles Miller was chairman, Mrs. Walter P. Smith led the women, and the quota was $20,000, “two per cent of the tax valuation.” At a rally in the schoolhouse Judge Sloan spoke “to the grown folks, while the children were gathered outside around a huge bonfire,” and “the Scottsdale district went over the top with a flourish.” In October Miller and Mrs. Morton Kimsey led the Fourth Loan’s house-to-house canvass, and the town passed its $19,000 quota “by several thousand dollars.” War Savings Stamps went worse: about 13 percent of the allotment by October. The 1910s politics chapter has the record, the names of the captains and the town’s war dead.
Around the committees the boom ran at full throttle: fields in cotton to the fencerows, gins working around the clock, and newly arrived Mexican and Mexican-American families settling south and east of the townsite. Akimel O’odham farmers from the Salt River community east of Scottsdale were regulars in the town’s commerce and tied their wagons along First Avenue; when businesses were later built on that street, it was called Pima Plaza for them. The crop making the Valley rich carried their people’s name too, for the O’odham farmers who had helped develop the long-staple variety at the USDA farm near Sacaton.
The armistice starts the clock
On November 11 the guns in Europe stopped (the day has its own page), and wartime procurement stopped with them. Cotton prices did not; running on momentum and speculation, they kept climbing into 1920. Every farmer in the Valley understood that the smart move was to diversify back out of cotton. Almost nobody did. The same weeks brought the influenza, mild at first and then, by December, in a dozen Scottsdale households; our health seekers note follows it.
Scottsdale ended 1918 richer than it had ever been and staked entirely on a single commodity. The bill arrived in 1920–21; the crash, and the town’s reinvention around Main Street merchants and winter guests, belongs to the 1920s.