At a glance: For its first twenty-three years Scottsdale had no government of its own, and it would not have one until 1951. Maricopa County ran its elections and roads. A school district, created in 1896, was the only elected body with a Scottsdale name on it. From 1903 the water users’ association decided who got water and what it cost. The founder sat one term in the territorial House and tried, and failed, to ban gambling. The rest was done by custom, by the man who owned the townsite, and by whoever came to the schoolhouse on a weeknight.
A colony, not a town
An Arizona settlement could incorporate as a town, but Scottsdale did not, and would not for sixty-three years. That left it to the layers above and around it. The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors set the election precincts, named each one’s polling place and party officers, and built or ignored the roads. The Territory of Arizona made the criminal law, the school law and the liquor law. The county sheriff was the police. When the mail carrier John Rubenstein shot and killed two men hauling hay on Winfield Scott’s ranch on May 6, 1901, Amos Nigh and a Pima man named Peter Johnson, it was a county deputy sheriff who arrested him. The Arizona Republican called it a killing “without provocation” by a man “undoubtedly crazy.” His conviction and sentence to the territorial prison at Yuma are recorded only in Scott’s biography.
What a town council would have done, nobody did formally. The schoolhouse served as church and meeting hall when it was not a classroom. The townsite’s owner decided what could happen on his lots. Custom, and the founder’s standing, decided the rest.
1896: the first public body
The first institution with Scottsdale’s name on it was a school district. On June 30, 1896, Scott and some of the first settlers petitioned the county school superintendent, and on July 13 the Board of Supervisors created School District No. 48 “at Scotts-Dale.” The community chose Winfield Scott, John Tait and Frank Titus as its first trustees, a fact the Historical Society’s timeline, Joan Fudala’s history of the schools and Richard Lynch’s 1978 biography of Scott all record.
Alza Blount had been teaching the settlers’ children in her adobe for some time already. The district hired her as its first teacher at $40 a month, and that fall the settlers built a frame schoolhouse where Hattie Green taught. The district’s 125th-anniversary history adds that Blount later served as the board’s clerk and her husband George as a trustee; no second source confirms either.
A school board was the one elected body most Arizona farm settlements had, and here it was the only one with a Scottsdale name on it. Scott’s biographer says its first election, in 1897, drew twenty-nine votes, many of them cast by women Helen Scott brought to the polls. That account rests on Lynch alone, as does his date for the start of women’s school suffrage in Arizona, 1883; another account dates it to a territorial law of 1897.
The chaplain in the legislature
The founder was the settlement’s politics. On September 15, 1898 the Phoenix Weekly Herald’s Scottsdale correspondent, signing herself “A. K. B.,” almost certainly Alza Blount, wrote: “Scottsdale is coming to the front, politically, Chaplain Winfield Scott, our oldest resident, having been selected by the republicans as their candidate for the legislature.” He campaigned across the county. In the Gila valley he followed Frank Cox, who had spoken there against corporations, and told the crowd that Cox “was the attorney for the worst corporation in the land,” the Southern Pacific. Closing the campaign at the Phoenix opera house, by Lynch’s account, he argued that “reservoirs will not be built until Arizona becomes a state.” On election eve the Arizona Republican told its readers that “Chaplain Scott, like Teddy Roosevelt, is a born fighter.”
He won one of Maricopa County’s four House seats on November 8 and sat in the 20th Territorial Legislature, which met in Phoenix from January 16 to March 16, 1899. He used the seat for the cause he had brought to the desert. James McClintock, a Phoenix newspaperman who ran for the territorial council on the same Republican ticket, left the account most often quoted, in his 1916 history of Arizona:
The Twentieth Legislature was notable for about the first attempts made to curb gambling and the liquor traffic. Measures of this sort usually were fathered by Member Winfield S. Scott of Maricopa County, a retired chaplain of the regular army. Announcement was made by him that on a certain date he would deliver a three-hour address on the vice of gambling. After only five minutes of his great speech the House brutally adjourned.
Lynch, working from the newspapers, tells it differently. In his account Scott held the floor while opponents slipped out, the sergeant-at-arms brought them back, a motion to cut off debate failed, and the gambling bill was set for a special order on March 3, when it lost 17 to 5. Lynch names W. S. Adams of Jerome as Scott’s chief opponent and describes the liquor measure as a bill to close saloons on Sundays. Both accounts agree on the result: neither bill passed. The House journal, which would settle the rest, has not been read for this chapter.
Scott tried once more. On September 27, 1906 the Republican county convention nominated him for the territorial assembly, and he took the nomination with a speech against the year’s great question, whether Arizona should enter the Union as one state with New Mexico. “I too honor and respect and believe in Theodore Roosevelt,” he said, “but I am a farmer and I believe I can run my own ranch better than he can.” He would rather be “snowed under 1000 feet deep than elected on a jointure platform.” He was snowed under anyway, as the county’s four assembly seats all went to Democrats in what the Republican called “the most sweeping Waterloo in local political history.” In his own precinct he led the field with thirteen votes, and Scottsdale voted 14 to 1 against joint statehood. So did Arizona, 16,265 to 3,141 by McClintock’s count.
A dry town without a law
Scott recruited sober, churchgoing families, and the settlement meant to stay dry. In 1897 Alza Blount put it in the Herald, in words Lynch quotes: “It is the determination of the first settlers of Scottsdale never to let alcohol get a foothold in this part of the valley. We are on the ground first and we do not propose to be caught napping.” (Salt River Stories, the regional history project, gives the line to Scott.)
An unincorporated settlement could pass no ordinance, so whatever kept it dry had to be private or territorial. Lynch reports three things: a deed restriction Albert Utley wrote against selling liquor on the store lot, a Scottsdale vote for prohibition in May 1897, and the formation that June of the territory’s first Anti-Saloon League. None of the three has been confirmed from a second source. The territory gave dry communities a legal tool in 1901, a local-option act under which, McClintock wrote, “scattered communities commenced to vote themselves ‘dry,’” Maricopa County’s among them. Whether the Scottsdale precinct used it is not known. The territory banned gambling in 1907, and Arizona went dry on January 1, 1915.
The precinct and its party men
By 1906 Scottsdale was a county election precinct whose returns were printed with the rest, and by 1908 it voted at the schoolhouse. The supervisors’ proclamation for the September 26, 1908 primaries named its officers for each party, the earliest list of Scottsdale’s party men anywhere. For the Republicans: Winfield Scott, inspector; V. A. Vanderhoof and E. O. Brown, judges; Percy Smith, clerk. For the Democrats: T. Philben, inspector; Wilford Hayden and H. L. Underhill, judges; Claud Marlar and a second clerk whose name the newspaper’s scan garbles. The precinct elected one delegate to each party’s county convention.
Two years later the territory elected the convention that would write Arizona’s constitution. For the August 6, 1910 primaries, which chose the county conventions that named the candidates, Scottsdale was allotted one Republican delegate and two Democratic ones, and Francis Frazier and Vanderhoof were its inspectors. The Democrats won about four-fifths of the convention’s 52 seats on September 12.
Water: the farmers’ government
The decision that mattered most in these years was not made in Scottsdale, though its farmers made it with everyone else. In February 1903 the Valley’s landowners incorporated the water users’ association and pledged their land to guarantee the federal loan for Roosevelt Dam; the association became the Salt River Project, and the day page for February 9, 1903 tells the story.
For a farmer the association was the government that mattered, and Scottsdale had a voice in it. On the evening of August 5, 1909, answering a call from B. H. Brewster, the water users of Scottsdale met at the schoolhouse to choose three delegates who would help the Valley answer the questions a U.S. Senate irrigation committee had sent ahead of its visit. Vanderhoof called the meeting to order, Charles Miller was chosen chairman, and the meeting elected Miller, Brown and William Wilbur. It drew up no resolutions, but the Republican reported its sense: cut the association’s expenses “as low as possible,” do away with its salaried officers, because “so long as Uncle Sam is in charge we are willing to trust to him for our water,” and deliver water more often than every twelve days, since “it is impossible to raise small truck under the present system.” The three sat with the other districts’ delegates at the courthouse on October 15, where the discussion, the paper said, “frequently drifted into a criticism of the Water Users’ association.”
Rules by the man who owned the land
Without a council, land use belonged to whoever held the land. In October 1909 the Republican’s Scottsdale column reported that A. G. Utley, who had platted the townsite in 1894, “has decided not to rent any more space for tent houses on the Scottsdale townsite and health seekers will have to place their tents east of the townsite hereafter.” He meant “to clean up his property in the townsite and make it attractive to those who will want to build permanent residences.”
That is the mechanism behind a story the town still tells, that the blacksmith George Cavalliere was told around 1909 to move his forge off Main Street because a smithy was smelly, dirty and noisy. There was no city to tell him. The rule, if it was one, came from whoever owned the lots.
1909: a unanimous bond for a brick school
On May 1, 1909, with thirty-two school-age children in the district, the voters approved a $5,000 bond for a new schoolhouse without a vote against it. The district’s published histories count the voters differently, thirteen in one and fourteen in another. Scott had argued, in the words of the city’s historic-register report on the building, for “a substantial brick building to provide testimony of Scottsdale’s permanence as a community.”
The trustees hired the Phoenix architect A. H. Coats; the city’s report gives the contract to C. H. Kunselman for $4,526 and the board’s acceptance of the building on January 13, 1910. The dedication, set for Saturday, February 19, was put off, the Republican’s Scottsdale column explained, “until the weather is more settled and ranch work is not so pressing.” It was held on February 26, 1910, Scott’s seventy-third birthday, before several hundred people, with two governors speaking: Richard E. Sloan of the territory and Thomas R. Marshall of Indiana, who was visiting at the Ingleside and would be vice president in three years. Scott presided. The building is the Little Red Schoolhouse.
Toward the state
Scott died on October 19, 1910, between the primaries that chose the constitutional convention and the vote that ratified its work. His obituary in the Republican recorded that “his canvass was made on the republican ticket as he has always been politically identified with that party.” Arizona’s voters approved the constitution on February 9, 1911, and the 1910s chapter carries the story into statehood, women’s suffrage and prohibition. The settlement he left had a school board, a precinct with party officers, a voice in the water users’ association and a townsite owner’s rules. It would keep that arrangement for forty more years.