What it means
The Desert Land Act is the federal law under which Scottsdale’s founding square mile passed from public land to private hands. In 1888 the Army chaplain Winfield Scott claimed 640 acres of creosote beside the new Arizona Canal, bounded by today’s Scottsdale, Hayden, Indian School and Chaparral roads. The law’s bargain was simple: the land was nearly free if you could make it bloom.
You will rarely hear the act’s name in Scottsdale. You will hear “homestead” constantly: Scott’s homestead, the founder’s homestead, the original homestead section. It is the natural word, and it is what most people mean, but it points to a different law. The distinction matters only to historians and title lawyers, and to anyone who wants to know why a desert town began with water rather than a cabin.
The founding transaction itself has a day page at July 1888, and the 1880s chapter tells the decade. This page explains the law and the word.
Where you’ll meet it
In histories of the founding, on the townsite page, in the legal descriptions of parcels between Indian School and Chaparral, and along the Arizona Canal Path, the water that satisfied the act’s one hard requirement.
Where the word came from
Congress passed the act on March 3, 1877, and President Ulysses S. Grant signed it. It applied to the arid and semi-arid West, Arizona Territory included. A settler could enter up to 640 acres, paying 25 cents an acre at filing and another dollar an acre at final proof, and had three years to “conduct water” to the land and show it was irrigated. Citizenship, or a declared intent to become a citizen, was required. Living on the land was not.
That last point separated it from the Homestead Act of 1862, which gave 160 acres to settlers who lived on and farmed them. The Desert Land Act assumed that in the dry West a farm needed water more than a resident, and it gave four times the acreage to make irrigation pay. The missing residence rule also made it easy to abuse. Land companies hired “dummy entrymen” to file claims they never meant to farm, and Congress tightened the rules from 1888 on, requiring irrigation maps and plans and, by 1890, cutting the limit to 320 acres.
Scott’s timing was close to the line. The Arizona Canal, finished by William J. Murphy in 1885, ran across the section, so water could reach its fields through laterals. A City of Scottsdale historic report on the Charles Miller house says plainly that Scott acquired the section “for citrus farming under the Desert Land Act, which required that the land be irrigated.” His brother George Washington Scott arrived in 1889 to clear the brush and open the ditches.
What it is not
It is not a homestead, legally speaking, and Scott did not have to live on the land; he stayed in the Army until 1893. It is not the Reclamation Act of 1902, which built dams rather than handing out land. And it is not history only: it is still law.
The fine print
The price is the puzzle. The City of Scottsdale’s own history says Scott and his wife Helen bought the 640 acres for $2.50 an acre, and this site follows the account of 50 cents an acre down, roughly $320, on a total of $1,600. Other popular sources say $3.50 an acre. Yet the act’s standard terms came to $1.25 an acre, 25 cents down. Nothing we found reconciles the figures; the land office file that would settle it has not been published. Treat any single number with care.
The act outlived almost every other land-disposal law. In 1976 the Federal Land Policy and Management Act repealed the Homestead Act and most of its relatives, but desert land entries survive. The Bureau of Land Management still takes applications for up to 320 acres in Arizona and several other Western states, at a $15 fee and 25 cents an acre down, with four years to irrigate and cultivate an eighth of the land. The agency warns that suitable land is nearly gone and estimates irrigation for a 320-acre tract at more than $250,000.
Scott’s section did its job. Miller bought land from Scott’s family in 1913, citrus and farms gave way to shops, resorts and subdivisions, and the square mile is still legible in the arterial grid.