What it means
When someone in Scottsdale says the canal, they mean the Arizona Canal, the broad, slow, fenced-off irrigation channel that cuts across the city on the diagonal from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa line at Pima Road to the Phoenix line at 64th Street. It is the water under the Soleri Bridge, the reason the Waterfront is called that, the flat path everyone bikes on and the oldest piece of working infrastructure in town. “Meet me on the canal” means the path; “across the canal” means the other side of a line that, for the first sixty years of Scottsdale’s life, was the edge of the irrigated world.
It is also the founding fact. Scottsdale exists because this canal made the desert bench north of the old ditches farmable, and Winfield Scott bought his square mile beside it in 1888. The canal path guide covers the walk; this page covers the name and the ditch.
Where you’ll meet it
The Waterfront’s patios along Camelback Road. Canal Convergence every November, when light art floats on the water. The bike commute from McCormick Ranch to Old Town. Every SRP water bill and every history of the Valley, where the canal is the line between the Hohokam alignments below and the new land above.
Where the word came from
The name is the company’s. The Arizona Canal Company was organized in the early 1880s by Phoenix investors, among them M.W. Kales, William A. Hancock and Clark Churchill, who looked at the “scorched, desolate desert” north of the existing canals, as the federal engineering record later put it, and saw tens of thousands of acres that could be watered if a ditch were run along the high ground. Every earlier Valley canal had followed old Hohokam alignments close to the river. This one would go where no canal had been.
They hired William J. Murphy, a railroad grading contractor just off the Atlantic and Pacific line, in the spring of 1883. Construction began on May 7, 1883. Murphy took the job largely on credit and spent much of the next two years in Los Angeles, San Francisco and the East selling the company’s bonds to pay his own crews, the first Valley canal financed by outside investors rather than by the farmers who would use it. He worked mule teams and scrapers, tried new excavating machinery with limited success, and finished in late spring 1885: about 42 miles of canal from a wooden diversion dam on the Salt River west toward New River, with capacity to irrigate almost 100,000 acres. A five-mile extension in 1894 brought the length to roughly 47.
The canal made Murphy a land developer. His Arizona Improvement Company founded Glendale and built Grand Avenue; he and his son opened the private Ingleside Club in 1909 among their citrus trees south of Camelback, which became the Valley’s first luxury resort. And in 1888 an Army chaplain named Winfield Scott paid 50 cents an acre down on 640 acres on the canal’s south side, the transaction from which the city counts its history. The Murphy guide tells the rest of his story.
What it is not
The Arizona Canal is not the only canal in Scottsdale. The Crosscut Canal branches off it at 64th Street and runs south to Tempe, and the CAP canal is a different system entirely, a federal aqueduct from the Colorado River that crosses the far north of the city beside TPC Scottsdale. Nor is it the Indian Bend Wash, which is a natural floodway the canal crosses by siphon.
The fine print
Private ownership did not last. The Arizona Canal Company went into receivership in the drought of the 1890s, and after Congress passed the Reclamation Act the federal government bought the Arizona Canal system at a foreclosure sale in April 1906 for $235,168, plus $78,993 for the Crosscut, Grand, Maricopa and Salt River Valley canals. The Reclamation Service replaced the wooden Arizona Dam, which Salt River floods had destroyed repeatedly, with the concrete Granite Reef Diversion Dam in 1908, two miles downstream, and the canal has started there ever since. The Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association, today’s SRP, has operated it since; the canal is the northernmost of SRP’s 131-mile delivery system.
The canal also made the Valley’s first electricity. Private companies built two hydro plants on it around 1902, one at Arizona Falls in Arcadia and one on the Crosscut on the Salt River Reservation; the Reclamation Service rebuilt Arizona Falls in 1913 and ran it until 1950. Flood control came later: in the late 1970s SRP and the Army Corps of Engineers built an inverted siphon to carry the canal under the Indian Bend Wash as part of the Greenbelt project, so the city’s floodway and its water supply could cross without meeting.
The path is a byproduct. SRP’s maintenance roads on both banks became public multi-use trails from the 1970s on, and the Arizona Canal trail now runs nearly 70 miles from the Community to Peoria, carrying U.S. Bicycle Route 90 and the Maricopa Trail. Scottsdale’s four miles got the Soleri Bridge on December 11, 2010, and the canal bank stopped being infrastructure people tolerated. The rules are SRP’s: no swimming, no fishing, no boats, and the water moving past the Waterfront patios is on its way to someone’s farm or tap in the West Valley.