What it means
When a Scottsdale old-timer says the Valley was “built by the Reclamation Act,” they mean a specific bargain. In 1902 Congress agreed that the federal government would build storage dams in the arid West, and that the farmers who got the water would pay the money back. The Reclamation Act was the law; Roosevelt Dam, finished in 1911 on the Salt River about 80 miles upstream from here, was the Valley’s first and biggest payoff; and the Salt River Project, which still runs the Arizona Canal past Scottsdale’s parks and sends power bills to half the city, is the organization the deal created.
The site’s SRP guide tells the long institutional story, and the 1900s chapter covers the drought that made the dam necessary. This page is about the pair of words, the deal they describe, and the numbers people get wrong.
Where you’ll meet it
On the Arizona Canal Path, where SRP signs explain the system. In every SRP board election, where votes are counted by the acre because the acres were the collateral. At the dam itself, at the end of the Apache Trail. And in the days pages for June 17, 1902, February 9, 1903 and March 18, 1911.
Where the word came from
“Reclamation” was the era’s word for making desert useful, and the National Reclamation Act, often called the Newlands Act for the Nevada congressman who carried it, was signed by President Theodore Roosevelt on June 17, 1902. It set up a Reclamation Service inside the Interior Department and a fund from public-land sales to build irrigation works in the West, on condition that water users repay construction costs. For the Salt River Valley, which had canals but no storage, had lost the Arizona Canal’s diversion dam to the flood of February 1891 and had watched farms die in the drought from 1898, it was the only offer on the table; private reservoir schemes had failed for a decade.
The catch was collateral. The government would not lend to a scattering of farmers, so Benjamin Fowler, Joseph Kibbey and a committee organized the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association, incorporated on February 9, 1903, with about 4,800 landowners pledging more than 200,000 acres as security. Scottsdale’s farm families were among them. Interior Secretary Ethan Hitchcock approved the Salt River project on March 14, 1903, one of the first five under the Act, and the Association signed its agreement with the government on June 25, 1904.
The dam took its name from the president who signed the law and came back as a private citizen to open it. Construction began in the Tonto Basin on August 24, 1903; the first stone was set on September 20, 1906, the last on February 5, 1911. At 280 feet high and 723 feet along the crest, with 355,800 cubic yards of cut masonry, it was the largest masonry dam in the world, and Roosevelt dedicated it on March 18, 1911, before Arizona was a state.
What it is not
The Reclamation Act did not give Arizona the dam. It lent the money, about $10 million for the dam and original works, and the farmers repaid it over fifty years, the final payment reaching the Treasury in October 1955. Nor is Roosevelt Dam the one you see from the Beeline; that is Stewart Mountain Dam at Saguaro Lake, built later.
The fine print
The Act’s conditions explain SRP’s odd shape today. Because the land secured the debt, each acre inside the 1903 boundary carried one vote in the Association, and it still does, which is why renters and most corporations have no say in an electric utility serving about a million accounts. The Reclamation Service ran the works until November 1, 1917, when the Association took over operation and maintenance of everything below Granite Reef Diversion Dam, itself built from 1906 to 1908 to feed the Arizona and South canals. The power side came later: Congress authorized hydroelectric development in 1906, and the Salt River Project Agricultural Improvement and Power District, a political subdivision of the state, was formed in 1937.
The dam has been rebuilt around its original self. Between 1989 and 1996 the Bureau of Reclamation raised it 77 feet, to 357 feet, encasing the 1911 masonry in concrete at a cost of about $430 million and adding roughly 20 percent to Roosevelt Lake’s capacity. That project was one of the pieces of “Plan 6,” the package the Interior Department chose in 1981 instead of building Orme Dam at the Salt and Verde confluence, which would have flooded half the Yavapai reservation. The American Society of Civil Engineers made the dam a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1970.
A date discrepancy is worth knowing. The Bureau of Reclamation gives the Association’s incorporation as February 9, 1903, and so does this site; several secondary accounts, including Wikipedia, say February 7. The pledged acreage, the 4,800 signers and the June 17, 1902 signing are not in dispute. Neither is the result: 250,000 irrigated acres, and a metropolis on them.