At a glance: Before anyone bought land here, the wealth of the Salt River Valley was water, and the work of moving it. For about fourteen centuries Hohokam communities dug and kept a canal network that watered tens of thousands of acres, and traded what they grew and made as far as the Gulf of California. After 1450 the mountains were a Yavapai range and the rivers O’odham farmland. In the 1850s and 1860s the O’odham and Piipaash sold wheat by the hundred thousand pounds to the mail company and the Army, and American settlers began digging ditches of their own. Then, in 1885, a company built a canal with money raised in four distant cities and put a price on the water: $500 for every 80 acres, and $1.25 an acre a year. That price, not the land’s, is where Scottsdale’s ledger opens.
Water moved by hand
The Hohokam period runs from about AD 1 to 1450 in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community’s own chronology; the O’odham call all their departed ancestors Huhugam. Its economy rested on canals. How long the network was depends on who is counting and what. Archaeology Southwest counts more than 500 miles of documented canals. The American Society of Civil Engineers, which lists the system as a historic civil engineering landmark, says more than 700 miles of major canals watered more than 100,000 acres. Omar Turney’s 1929 map, as the city’s archaeology overview captions it, traced up to 1,000 miles. Brian Fagan, writing in Archaeology in 2011, gave 300 miles in 14 networks watering 256,000 acres. The numbers disagree because they count different things, documented canals or every ditch, main lines or the whole system; the chart below draws all four.
Whatever the count, the scale was enormous for people with stone and wooden tools and no draft animals. The city’s overview, written by Don Meserve in 2003, says the largest canals were more than 50 feet wide, the deepest 20 feet deep, and the longest ran about 20 miles from Pueblo Grande to what is now Glendale; one canal was measured dropping between 1.2 and 4.8 feet a mile, enough to keep the water moving. Fagan estimated that many single canals took more than 25,000 person-days to build, and that each of the largest irrigation communities supported 6,000 to 10,000 people. No published estimate of the whole basin’s population was found.
Water was also power. Meserve notes that the villages at the headgates of the big systems, such as Pueblo Grande, show the architecture and goods of places that mattered more than their neighbors, because they controlled the water everyone below them needed. The far ends of the systems were the most exposed. Floods around AD 1300 may have left most of the Salt River canals damaged and unusable, and archaeologists estimate a system took one or two years to repair, long enough to be disastrous for the villages at the tail. More about the canals that crossed what is now south Scottsdale is in the note on the Hohokam canals and the history chapter before 1450.
What the uplands traded
North Scottsdale was never canal country. Its villages farmed with rain and runoff, using check dams, basins, rock piles and bordered gardens along the washes, and Meserve’s overview counts agave among their crops with corn, beans, gourds and squash (the agave fields are a note of their own). They were also part of a trade network that reached far beyond the valley. Hohokam artisans worked shell from the Gulf of California or the Pacific, up to thirty species of it, into bracelets, rings and pendants, some etched with acid from cactus juice. Turquoise came from distant sources, and macaw feathers and copper bells came from Casas Grandes in Chihuahua. A copper bell from Mexico was found at Pinnacle Peak Village in north Scottsdale.
That dependence on exchange is part of why the upland villages ended first. The Preserve’s cultural resource plan dates the collapse of the regional ballcourt system to about 1050 or 1070, when Pinnacle Peak Village and other large villages were abandoned. It links the collapse to years of agricultural shortfall on the rivers, whose channels were cutting down and widening, and argues that the shortfall reached the uplands “through reduced opportunities for exchange, making traditional lifestyles untenable in areas that were not directly reliant upon canal irrigation.” The upland economy lived on trade with the canal villages, and when the canals faltered, so did it.
Four centuries of other economies
After about 1450 the valley’s economy changed shape. The Preserve plan describes small bands of Kwevkepaya Yavapai using the northern McDowells as a seasonal resource zone, sheltering in rock overhangs and collecting yucca near Brown’s Ranch for basketry. The Akimel O’odham and, from the 1820s, the Piipaash farmed the Gila. None of these economies left the kind of figures this series is built on, and the chapter does not invent any; the history chapter for 1450 to 1887 tells the story of those centuries.
Wheat for the mail and the Army
The first numbers come from the 1850s, when the outside world arrived on the Gila wanting food. John P. Wilson’s documentary history of the Pimas and Maricopas, built from federal agents’ letters and reports, records the sales. Special Agent M. T. McMahon wrote that the Gila villages sold more than 300,000 pounds of wheat to the Overland Mail Company in 1859; an Interior Department agent put the 1860 sale at 400,000 pounds. Early in 1861 the mail company pulled out of Arizona, and the market nearly disappeared.
The Army replaced it. In 1862 the villages sold more than a million pounds of wheat to the government for the California Column, a figure the Community’s own history gives and that Wilson finds in the reports of Superintendent James Collins and Special Agent J. Ross Browne. Browne added that the wheat included part of the previous year’s crop, and Wilson cautions that the Army’s own purchase records are thin. Even so, two independent accounts agree on the scale: more than a million pounds of grain from the Gila villages in a single year.
They did not keep most of the margin. General James Rusling, passing through in 1867, wrote that traders had bought 2,000,000 pounds of wheat and corn the year before, paying one or two cents a pound in trade goods, and sold to the government at six or seven cents a pound in cash. Wilson points out that the government was buying flour, which the traders milled, not wheat; but two and a half years later the farmers were still getting about two cents a pound in goods for wheat while the government paid nine and a quarter cents for Pima flour. The grain chart below shows who was paid what.
The Army’s barley
Camp McDowell, founded on the Verde in 1865, made the Army the valley’s buyer of hay and grain. Its horses wanted barley, and by 1870, Wilson writes, barley had become “the heavy favorite of Arizona’s farmers in the Salt River Valley” because of “strong demand and good prices,” with the government buying several million pounds a year in the territory. That summer the post paid its grain contractor between $6.20 and $7.40 per 100 pounds of barley, and the farmers at Phoenix, who raised 100,000 to 125,000 pounds, sold theirs at 4½ cents a pound. The agent on the Gila reservation saw the same opportunity: farmers there got $3 to $3.50 in cash per 100 pounds of barley, against less than $2 in goods for the same weight of wheat.
Water taken, and a move to the Salt
The O’odham’s surplus depended on the Gila, and from the late 1860s settlers upstream diverted it. The Community’s history marks this as the start of what some call the forty years of famine. From 1871 families moved north to the Salt River, and by November 1878 Captain Adna Chaffee of Camp McDowell found about a thousand people farming its north bank, opposite Tempe, who had raised more than 300,000 pounds of wheat the season before. When settlers asked for their removal, Chaffee called it “nothing more nor less than a legal steal of about a thousand acres of improved land.” Inspector J. H. Hammond counted 1,300 people in 240 families on 1,000 acres the following March.
The land question was an economic one. President Hayes’s order of January 10, 1879 reserved, by the Community’s estimate, about 680,000 acres along the Salt, Phoenix included, and blocked new land entries along the river just as the Desert Land Act and the coming railroad were bringing buyers. Wilson’s summary is blunt: if the only farmland were inside a reservation, there would be no land rush. The June 14 order cut the reservation to 46,627 acres north of the river, and the land around it opened. That line is still Scottsdale’s eastern edge; the Community’s guide explains the government on the other side of it.
Swilling’s ditch: settlers dig their own
The first American canal in the valley was a cooperative venture. In 1867 Jack Swilling organized a company that built a canal from the Salt, the “Town Ditch,” which Thomas Farish’s 1915 history says was “intended to reclaim four thousand acres of land.” It was finished in 1868, and every acre under it was claimed by settlers within two years; Phoenix grew up beside it. The engineering record of the Arizona Canal describes how the valley’s early canals were paid for: by the landowners who received the water, or by men who worked on the digging in exchange for a water right. The people who used the water built the ditch.
The Arizona Canal: water as a product
The Arizona Canal broke that pattern. The Arizona Canal Company proposed a canal north of and above the valley’s existing canals, to water about 100,000 acres that had never been farmed, and issued $500,000 in stock in $500 shares. In February 1883 it acquired a water right for 50,000 inches of the Salt. Its contractor, the railroad grader William J. Murphy, was not paid in cash. According to the Historic American Engineering Record, he received company bonds that he had to sell to finance his own work, and spent much of the construction in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York trying to sell them. “The local backers of the Arizona Canal Company,” the record says, “expected to garner profits not from the actual construction of the canal, but from the sale of land and water rights to new settlers.”
Construction began May 7, 1883 and stopped within two weeks: the head and the first miles lay on the Salt River Reservation. Interior Secretary Henry Teller approved a right-of-way agreement in 1884, under which the company promised two livestock bridges, a stock tank at each, and water for the Community’s fields “when practicable,” and the Salt River Indians approved it “in open council.” Crews of thirty to fifty men with their teams moved tens of thousands of cubic yards of gravel, boulders and rock; by August 1883, 47 men had cut about a mile and a half.
The company accepted the canal in June 1885: 42 miles, with headgates at every section line. Its plans called for a capacity of 1,000 second-feet at the head, and its developers expected it to carry 375 cubic feet a second to water more than 75,000 acres. The final cost, including repairs after the spring flood of 1885, was $608,498.24. Then the company put its product on sale. A water right, enough for 80 acres, cost $500, with a yearly rental of $1.25 an acre.
In 1887 Murphy, William Christy and Clark Churchill organized the Arizona Improvement Company to sell what the canal had made valuable. Its stock was valued at $3,000,000 in 30,000 shares, and Murphy owned 6,500 of them. It already held about 10,000 acres between the Grand and Arizona canals, and Alfred McClatchie of the territory’s agricultural experiment station later wrote that it took up about 40,000 acres of public land under the Desert Land Act. Its officers expected to earn $500,000 to $1,000,000 from water-right sales and another $100,000 a year in rentals. The company laid out Grand Avenue, fifteen miles of it, and planned a hotel along it.
What 80 acres cost in 1887
The land itself came from the federal government, at a price set by law and then by circular. The Desert Land Act of 1877 priced arid land at $1.25 an acre, 25 cents at entry and a dollar at final proof, for a settler who would bring water to it. In 1887, without new legislation, the General Land Office issued a circular raising the price to 50 cents at entry and $2 at proof, $2.50 in all; the Interior Secretary upheld it in 1889 for land inside railroad-grant limits, and after an act of March 3, 1890 the price went back to $1.25. A Senate committee, recommending refunds in 1894, explained why the cheaper price was fair: desert lands “will not produce agricultural crops without artificial irrigation, which, under the most favorable conditions, is expensive.”
Multiply the published prices out for one 80-acre claim under the new canal in 1887 and the economics of the place are plain. The land cost $200. The water right cost $500, two and a half times the land. The first year’s water added $100. Before a plow, a house, a tree or a crop, a settler owed $800, and three dollars in every four of it went to the canal company. In this valley the land was cheap and the water was the investment, which is the argument Winfield Scott would make with his own money the following year, in the next chapter of the history and the next chapter of the Ledger.
What these centuries set in motion
- Water has always been the real estate. From the Hohokam headgate villages to the $500 water right, the value of land here has followed the value of water delivered to it. The same logic runs through the 1903 dam pledge, the 1948 sale of the town’s water company and the Central Arizona Project.
- The first canal built for profit was built with outside money. Murphy’s bonds, sold in four cities, are the valley’s first case of a pattern that runs through the city’s history: growth financed by capital from outside Arizona, through the resorts, the master-planned communities and the Airpark.
- The eastern boundary was set by an economic fight. The 1879 orders turned on who would farm the riverbank, and the line they drew still bounds the city.
- The numbers are thin and the series says so. Before 1888 there is no census of the place, no valuation and no price series. What survives is a handful of agents’ reports, a company’s notices and the archaeology, and this chapter prints each figure with who reported it.