November 12, 1981 — Interior Kills the Orme Dam | Scottsdale History

What happened

Six days after recommending 'Plan 6' — a new dam on the Agua Fria, a higher Roosevelt Dam and a rebuilt Stewart Mountain Dam — in place of the Orme Dam authorized by the 1968 Colorado River Basin Project Act, Interior Secretary James Watt announced on November 12, 1981, after consulting the Fort McDowell Tribal Council and Arizona's advisory committee, that Orme Dam would not be built. Its reservoir would have flooded about 15,000 acres, more than half the Fort McDowell reservation, including homes, churches, the cemetery and bald-eagle nesting sites.

Why it matters

Orme's cancellation preserved the lower Verde — the river and cottonwood bottom that Scottsdale's northeastern desert, Fountain Hills and the McDowell Mountain park look out on — and kept the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation on its land. It also reshaped the CAP: Plan 6 produced New Waddell Dam and the modified Roosevelt Dam, the flood-control and storage system that protects the Valley today. And it was the first great victory of a small Arizona tribe over a federal water project, eleven years before the same tribe faced down the FBI over gaming.

The dam on the map

When Congress authorized the Central Arizona Project on September 30, 1968, it authorized a dam with it: Orme Dam, at the confluence of the Salt and the Verde, about twenty miles northeast of Phoenix, to store CAP water and hold back the Salt’s floods. The reservoir would have covered some 15,000 acres — more than half of the Fort McDowell reservation created on September 15, 1903, including the homes of about 550 Yavapai, their churches, their cemetery, hundreds of archaeological sites and the largest concentration of nesting bald eagles in the Southwest. The water would have backed up to the doorstep of Fountain Hills and the eastern edge of the desert Scottsdale would later annex.

The Bureau of Reclamation assumed the tribe would sell. In 1976 the tribe voted 144 to 57 not to. “We refuse to sell our lands,” President Hiawatha Hood said on television the next year. “We want this dam eliminated because our people will, in the future, have no place to live.” The Carter administration deleted Orme from its 1978 budget; Arizona’s delegation — Goldwater, DeConcini, Rhodes — put it back; a lawsuit argued that even the CAP’s Salt River siphon would lock the dam in. A Central Arizona Water Control Study was set up in 1979 to find an alternative, with Carolina Butler, a Scottsdale housewife who had organized much of the opposition, among the citizens pushing it. In 1981 about a hundred Yavapai walked three days from the reservation to the state Capitol.

Plan 6

On November 6, 1981, Interior Secretary James Watt recommended “Plan 6”: no Orme Dam, but a new dam on the Agua Fria (New Waddell), a rebuilt Stewart Mountain Dam, a higher Roosevelt Dam and — until bald-eagle litigation killed it in 1987 — Cliff Dam on the Verde. Six days later, on November 12, 1981, after meeting the Fort McDowell Tribal Council and the governor’s advisory committee, Watt announced that Orme Dam would not be built. Plan 6 was formally approved in April 1984; the modified Roosevelt Dam and New Waddell are the reason the Valley’s floods of the 1990s and 2000s stayed in the river.

Victory Days

Every November since, Fort McDowell has held Orme Dam Victory Days — a pow-wow, rodeo, parade and carnival on the land the reservoir would have covered; the 43rd was held in 2024. The gravel trucks from the Verde bottom that Orme would have drowned were the ones the tribe parked across the road when the FBI came for its slot machines on May 12, 1992. Scottsdale’s own share of the CAP story — the plant of 1987 and the Groundwater Act that forced the city onto river water — runs through the 1980s chapter.