Why he matters
Scottsdale survived its first twenty years on a canal that ran dry. The drought of 1898–1904 nearly emptied the Salt River, and the only cure — a storage dam in the canyons upstream — was too big for any private company after the Walnut Grove disaster of 1890 and too big for a territory with no money. The man who got the federal government to build it was Benjamin A. Fowler, a retired Massachusetts publisher who arrived in Phoenix in 1899 and spent the next decade on trains to Washington. The Reclamation Act of 1902 was his lobbying; the Water Users’ Association of 1903, which Scottsdale’s farmers joined by pledging their land, was his organization; Roosevelt Dam was the result. He is the Phoenix figure without whom the 1900s chapter ends differently.
Where to find his mark today
The Arizona Canal. Dug in 1885, rescued by the association he founded, still carrying Salt and Verde water through the city.
Roosevelt Dam. Two hours east, the 280-foot masonry dam his association contracted for in 1904.
The Salt River Project. The association’s successor, which delivers water and power to the Valley today.
Seeing it for yourself
Walk the Arizona Canal path from the Waterfront east. The canal was there before Fowler — Murphy’s crews finished it in 1885 — but its water was a gamble every summer until the dam filled Roosevelt Lake in 1915 and the association took the canal over in 1917. The 1900 year page describes the drought that brought him into the fight; the 1903 day page describes Scottsdale’s farmers mortgaging their land to his association.
The full story
Benjamin Austin Fowler was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts on December 14, 1843, and had the résumé of a New England gentleman of his generation: Phillips Andover in 1862, a year in the Signal Corps at the siege of Port Hudson, Yale in 1868 (interrupted by illness from the army), a schoolmaster’s year at Danvers, a seat on the Andover school board, and from 1871 to 1898 a subscription-publishing business run from Boston, New York and Chicago. In 1868 he married Ella Frances Quinby of Medford. In 1899, his health failing, he came to Phoenix, and “at once,” his obituary says, “interested himself in a movement to secure national aid for reclamation of arid lands.”
The movement needed him. The Salt River’s private canal companies had gone broke in the flood of 1891, the drought that began in 1898 was about to take the river down to 800 miner’s inches, and the Walnut Grove Dam’s collapse in 1890 had made Arizona investors wary of storage dams. The Phoenix Board of Trade appointed a water-storage committee in 1900 and Fowler chaired it. He spent the winters of 1901–02 and 1902–03 in Washington — working with George Maxwell of the National Irrigation Association, Frederick Newell and Arthur Powell Davis of the Geological Survey, and Gifford Pinchot, and offering the Survey $1,500 of local matching money for Salt River surveys — while Senator Francis Newlands’ bill became the National Reclamation Act, signed on June 17, 1902.
The Act required the beneficiaries to organize and repay. Fowler chaired the committee that drafted the articles of the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association — Maxwell and Judge Joseph Kibbey did most of the writing — filed them with the county on February 7, 1903, and was elected its first president. Two days later Scottsdale’s farmers, Winfield Scott among them, pledged their land; 4,800 landowners put up more than 200,000 acres. On March 14, 1903 the Salt River Project was among the first five federal reclamation projects chosen, and on June 25, 1904 Fowler signed the contract with Interior Secretary Hitchcock to build the dam. He was president for seven years, through the completion of Granite Reef Diversion Dam in 1908 and the dedication of Roosevelt Dam by Theodore Roosevelt on March 18, 1911 — 280 feet high, 723 feet across the crest, then the tallest masonry dam in the world. In Phoenix he was, at various times, president of the Chamber of Commerce, the Agricultural Association, the Associated Charities and the YMCA, dedicated the Carnegie Library in 1908, and from 1909 to 1911 presided over the National Irrigation Congress.
The work used him up. Around 1913 he moved to Los Angeles, then Long Beach, “his health broken largely by his strenuous labors for the Salt River valley,” and he died there on April 11, 1921, at 77. The Arizona Republican’s headline was “Father of the Reclamation Act Dead.” The association he founded still runs the Arizona Canal through Scottsdale, and the founding era ends with the water he secured.