"Mormon Flat Dam" by Herb McLaughlin

Water reclaimed the Salt River Valley from the desertThe story of water storage and reclamation in our land is truly an American epic"RIVERS

"And a river went out of Eden to water that garden," Genesis 2:10.

Four thousand years ago, maybe centuries before that, the Egyptians were flooding their lands with the waters of the Nile, and because of the stability and assurance of the harvest that came from this labor they were able to weave the fabric of an immortal culture. So it was in India and China, where the civilization of mankind had its beginning. Wherever sun and land were brought together with water there arose cities, security, arts, sciences, philosophy, new religious concept, and a grace of living that can come only where there is no constant fear and no recurring catastrophe.

The first Spanish explorers who came into the "valley of Mexico and the Aztec capital were enraptured by the lovely panorama; green meadows, golden fields, blossoming gardens; while crossing in every direction like beautiful silver lace work, the numer-ous water courses flashed back the bright rays of the sun." In the Valley of the Sun, which is in Arizona, there were a people now known only as the Hohokam "the people who are gone." With stone hoes they cut away the roots of the saguaro and mesquite and loosened the pebbly sands, and with their hands and in baskets they hollowed canals and built high banks to hold the water until it should be set loose upon the land. They carried great stones and the brush they cleared from their land, and piled this rubble across the rivers when the waters were low, and sent the water gleaming over the sundrenched plains. Out of the soil came the melons and squash and corn they had planted. Knowing that the water would bring harvest, they built pueblos by the land, and thick-walled granaries to hold the corn.

ous water courses flashed back the bright rays of the sun." In the Valley of the Sun, which is in Arizona, there were a people now known only as the Hohokam "the people who are gone." With stone hoes they cut away the roots of the saguaro and mesquite and loosened the pebbly sands, and with their hands and in baskets they hollowed canals and built high banks to hold the water until it should be set loose upon the land. They carried great stones and the brush they cleared from their land, and piled this rubble across the rivers when the waters were low, and sent the water gleaming over the sundrenched plains. Out of the soil came the melons and squash and corn they had planted. Knowing that the water would bring harvest, they built pueblos by the land, and thick-walled granaries to hold the corn.

For several hundred years their pueblos followed the ribbons of water in their canals over the valley. They made pottery, andwove cloth from cotton and yucca fiber and painted it with the pigments they found in the bright hills and mountains around them. Generations were born, and learned to live and work and make a simple beauty and happiness together. But there were difficulties. The same benign waters that had brought them security, brought them trouble. The water table rose, saturated the land, poisoned it with salt residues. With infinite patience and labor the Hohokam gouged out new canals on new levels, until they could go no further. Perhaps drouth dried up the rivers, finally, until there was not water to reach the land on the long stretches. Maybe the predatory hunter tribes came out of the hills and took their corn and there was no adequate defense against them. It might have been that disease spread among their crowded villages. Whatever the cause, the Hohokam were gone long before history began to be writ ten on this Continent.

AND EDEN"

When the Spaniards came to Arizona in 1539 they found a people and a way of life much like that of the Hohokam, perhaps a continuation of it. The Papagos, Pimas, Maricopas were irrigating their lands by means of canals. They lived in villages, of houses made of adobe, surrounding a larger structure, a fortress with loopholes, where they might fight off attackers from the hills. In the hours when they did not till the soil they devoted themselves to making pottery of pleasing designs, and clothes of cotton and prepared skins.

Maybe Jack Swilling did not meditate on the value of irrigation to civilization when he saw signs of these ancient canals sweeping across the valley of the Salt River. A big, rangy Confederate veteran and a practical man, he figured that if the valley had been watered once, it could be watered again. He got Bryan Phillip Darrel Duppa, an English remittance man, interested, and with two other partners they formed an irrigation company. That was in 1865.

A man like Duppa could visualize a city, give it a glorious name; but it took men like Jack Swilling to build it. With great restless energy he cleared the saguaro, cactus, ocotillo and paloverde from a hundred and sixty acres of land. He built a large adobe house by the company ditch. He grew crops. He worked to get a post office, a county government; he helped get a grist mill established. Only a mound of rubble is where Swilling's house stood, but the young, beautiful city of Phoenix has placed the names of Jack Swilling and his wife Trinidad on a bronze tablet in front of the courthouse, for generations to remember.

In 1867 the population of Arizona territory was sixty-five hundred. A few families had settled by the ditches of the Salt River Valley, farmed with one hand on the plow, the other holding a gun to scare off Apaches. They grew crops, but at the cost computed in sweat, pain, hunger, anger, and death. The early corn and wheat would deepen on the land, summer would come with sudden storms and flash floods to tear out the dams in the river, pour tons of sand and gravel in the canals. And while the farmers worked to rebuild the dams, clean out the canals and ditches, the crops withered under the fiery sun. When the water glistened on the land again it was too late.

Finally the gentle winter would come and people would plow and plant again and hope, and think. That thinking discovered for them the true gold of Arizona, winter rains. In winter there is no burning sun, no sudden storms, no ripping flash floods. When rain comes it comes gently and trickles into the soil. The rivers are fullbellied from the snows that lay in the mountains; but they are gentle rivers, steady and tractable, calculable. The pioneers saw that in winter the rivers and creeks carried more water than was needed, and the good of them went down through the Gila and the Colorado and sloshed mud into the Gulf. When the summer heat and dryness came people remembered all the liquid riches that had gone down to the ungrateful sea. They began to think about places to put some of it away. It was this thinking that eventually saved their farms and towns from going the way of Babylon and Tyre and the towns of the Hohokam.

It took a long time for thinking to give place to concentrated action. It always does when the action needs the force of many minds and hands working together. People were coming in all the time, forming companies, making new canals, opening up new lands. They were people of many kinds mostly the kind who work best alone, without help, without interference. They had come here, many of them to get away from interferences and restraints. It took them a long time to learn to work together even where there was dire need of it, as in this matter of water storage.

More Confederate veterans came, joshing each other about coming out to Hell's Fire Valley to get away from taking the Oath of Allegiance. Miners, tired of pick and shovel and hard tack, stopped off and put pick and shovel to building canals so that they could eat green stuff and get the high prices paid for feed at the army posts. Gold hunters on their way to California, or back, stopped off, drawn by this spectacle of figs growing in the shadows of the tall saguaro, and Mormons building a church in a field of barley. People came from everywhere and they were of every kind, the same as any other place in America.

Mormons came in from the north. Caravans of them. They knew the alchemy of mixing land and mountain water. They had learned it since those first grim days of '47 in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. And they had learned to work together, as they prayed and sang together. Maybe the others learned something from them. Maybe it was only the beating of stark necessity that taught them.

For a few years there was plenty of water, and nobody paid much attention to men like John Hancock and their talk of water storage. Some thought it was only a trick idea to store up the water for the use of the original settlers when the rivers got low, and todeprive the later comers of their share, and they bitterly opposed the idea of reservoirs altogether.

Then in 1887 a thing began to happen that made even those people begin to wonder. Through most of the winter the skies had been clear over the mountains east and north and south which mothered the Agua Fria, the Verde, the Salt, the Gila, the Hassayampa. The rivers did not rise, the creeks did not come alive. With Spring came not rain but heat and dust. Dust picked up from parched and barren fields, from grain fields browned and dying in the sun. Whipped around the trunks of trees whose leaves were withered before they could come green. Dust filtered through the cracks in houses, through door and window frames, and tent flaps, and into dugouts, gritting food and mouths and eyes, and whetting tempers. Some men fought with fists or shovels or guns or vituperation over the little water there was. Others packed their goods in the wagons, turned gaunt faces West, East, North, and rumbled away. Some left the fruit of twenty years' labor. Here was something they hadn't calculated to meet, something they couldn't lick, and they might as well go first as last to a place where there was rain. Others turned their livestock loose in the river bottoms and went to sit in front of the store or the post office, stare at the sky and talk about rain.

There were hard-willed ones who refused to leave or to sit and wait for the weather to come sevens and elevens while the paloverde marched in and took back their lands. They had licked Apaches and Comanches and distance and weather and a lot of other difficulties before. They would lick this drought.

They began to hold meetings. The Maricopa County Board of Trade selected a committee to study water storage possibilities. Men rode over the sunbeaten hills, followed the course of rivers, stepped-off the valleys, put a level eye on the grades. Finally, in 1889, the County Surveyor, W. M. Breakenridge, with John Norton and James McClintock found a large basin with a narrow, rock-lined gorge below it, in the course of the Salt River. This was the damsite!

A mass meeting was called for Friday, August 31, 10 a.m., and that morning every saddle horse and rig in the valley was tied outside the Dorris Opera House, while inside, men argued this thing of a reservoir to cost two million dollars.

Territorial Governor Murphy suggested they ask the Federal Government to cede to the territory all public lands within its borders, which they would then sell to pay the cost of the dam. The farmers objected. That would take time. There ought to be a dam in that river, and pronto, if they were to save next winter's water.

Somebody then proposed that the County bond itself to pay the cost of the dam. But now the canal companies wanted four million dollars for their holdings. That would bring the cost of the project to over six million. The total assessed valuation of the County was only ten million.

Captain W. A. Hancock stood up then and made a little history by proposing that a company be formed to store and develop water for two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres, and that each owner should be assessed ten dollars per acre to pay the cost, and each city owner should pay five per cent of the value of his property.

That brought no relief to the tense, sweating faces of the farmers.

The meeting ended in the appointment of another committee. This committee went to work on the territorial legislature and got an appropriation of thirty thousand dollars for preliminary work.

The committee at length concluded that the County should bond itself and that all the land in the County should bear its prorata share of the project's cost, as Captain Hancock had proposed. They picked B. A. Fowler to go to Washington and persuade Congress to allow Maricopa County to bond itself.

Many Easterners had never heard of irrigation. Congressmen threw up their hands at this proposal to thwart the ways of nature. Fowler tried to tell them about the British in India, where an investment of three hundred and sixty million dollars had reclaimed thirtyfive million acres of land and saved fifty million people from recurrent famine. But Congress would not listen. If Arizona must have its project let it be financed privately-maybe by those who had made fantastic fortunes out of her mines. There must be no precedent set which would put the nation on a "wild spending spree."

Fowler was about to pack his satchel and go home, when he happened to meet a young lawyer-engineer named George H. Maxwell. The possibilities of this Arizona enterprise must have gone strongly to Maxwell's head, already full of its own tinder and ready to be ignited by a vision of vast deserts made to blossom through the instrumentality of man. Evidently Maxwell had practical judgment and persuasive power to go with his spark of vision. Under his eloquence Congressional minds began to reconsider. Representative Newlands of Nevada joined with him in preparing a reclamation bill.

Then fate put Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. Roosevelt Wide canals carry in orderly fashion water to cultivated fields. These scenes can be viewed in Maricopa, Pinal and Yuma counties. In a land fabled for scarcity of rainfall, one of the most arid portions of the western hemisphere, reclamation has brought hundreds of thousands of acres of desert land into cultivation. These acres produce millions of dollars annually in various crops for the soil is very rich.

Wide canals carry in orderly fashion water to cultivated fields. These scenes can be viewed in Maricopa, Pinal and Yuma counties. In a land fabled for scarcity of rainfall, one of the most arid portions of the western hemisphere, reclamation has brought hundreds of thousands of acres of desert land into cultivation. These acres produce millions of dollars annually in various crops for the soil is very rich.

1904 three million acre-feet of water went down Salt River. Three times the beginnings of the dam were swept away.

The dam was completed in 1911. Its basin was filled. The canals below were relocated and combined. A permanent diversion dam was built at Granite Reef. The water flowed out upon the thirsty land.

The mere anticipation of water brought people flocking into the Valley. A population of 5.544 in 1900 swelled to 11,134 in 1910, in Phoenix alone.

As the population grew, demanding more acreage, the Federal Government financed further developments, and the Salt River Valley Water Users Association undertook more, with private financing. First after the Roosevelt Dam came the Mormon Flat Dam on Salt River built between 1923-25. Then the Horse Mesa Dam on Salt River, built 1924-27. Next the Stewart Mountain Dam on Salt River, built 1928-30. The conquest of the Salt River was complete.

Clear mountain streams that had formerly gone into the Gila, the Colorado, and to the sea, were now held to spin the dynamos and pour docilely into the canals, from which the zanjeros turned them in neatly measured streams through the weirs and into the farmers' ditches. Each year the surf of green beat down another marginal rim of the desert. Finally, in 1936, the farmers turned their eyes to the Verde River and decided to fasten it to the earth with the Bartlett Dam. When this had been done the Salt River Valley Water Users' Association had enough storage capacity for 1,954,000 acre-feet of water. They had enough capacity when filled, to cover every acre of their land eight feet deep.

Farming is a "many crop" industry in central Arizona. The season, From desert citrus to the feeding of cattle, the reclaimed areas of central Arizona know no pause. Around these acres has grown in a land a high regard for the West. Arizonans had given his Rough Riders outfit a good deal of its frontier strength and daring. Roosevelt was astute enough to see that the only way the immense, semiarid acreages of the West could be developed in rapid and orderly fashion was by a wise and bold program of public expenditures, with adequate provision for amortization of the debt. He urged Congress to pass the reclamation bill. On June 17, 1902, with a cheerful showing of teeth, the President signed the Hansbrough-Newlands Act a piece of legislation that may some day rank in historic importance with the Magna Carta. For it began a series of public works that not only changed the face of the Salt River Valley in a few years, but altered the economy of the whole West, and may yet bring its rivers completely into harness and millions more acres of its lands under cultivation.

But the reclamation bill could not in itself grow alfalfa. There were many problems to be solved before the dam could be built. Many people had land but no water rights, others had water rights and no land. Some were unwilling to sign agreements that would make them liable for their prorata share of the project's cost. It took months of argument, persuasion, study and legal work to get everything in shape to proceed with the actual work of construction.

Ironically, the drought ended the year the dam was begun. In Since the system of reservoirs was built the Valley has never known a crop failure. Nor much of any other kind of failure. Here farming, always one of man's worst gambles, has become one of the surest things in the world. Engineers can tell to the fraction of a foot how much water will be available each season, and this surety takes away the guesswork which usually rules the farm. Here they can't afford any guesswork. Farming has become a big business, run with the efficiency methods of big business. It goes on twelve months out of the year. Some farms produce three or four crops a year. Where you have only five inches of rainfall and eighty-five per cent sunshine through the year, with good growing weather even in midwinter, you can't afford to let the land rest. Nor can you afford to grow only the low-price crops like grain, corn, alfalfa. These warm acres turn out trainloads of cantaloupes, cauliflower, carrots, cotton, oranges, grapefruit.

The seed industry is a profitable one, for here, because irrigation is stabilized and water is thoroughly controlled, the seedgrower can be assured of water at the right times and proper germination of his crop, and he has little fear of destructive rains at the wrong time. And the seed gets its full quota of actinic rays, important for fertility.

While farming is the blood and bone of the Salt River Valley it has provided a sound and healthy basis for many other profitable activities. Thousands of head of cattle and sheep are brought into the Valley from the higher ranges to be fed out. Shops and stores are needed to supply the clothes, the furniture, the gadgets, the equipment, the trucks, cars, machinery, fertilizer, insecticides and cosmetics a prosperous farmer and his wife will buy. And somewhere have got to be factories and men to make these things. And there must be warehouses, packing plants, sheds, nurseries, creameries, hatcheries, well drillers, tillage contractors. Entire floors of downtown skyscrapers are occupied by growers, shippers of produce. There are schools and colleges, newspapers, theaters, hotels, restaurants. There are hundreds of tradesmen and workmen to keep a city like this going and growing, for as the farms spread out the city grows.

Phoenix, with its satellite towns, has grown into a clean, bright city. Its tall, immaculate buildings in the business center are surrounded by pretty, rambling homes of modern or Spanish design, each with its lawn and garden and flowers, with perhaps a palm and an orange tree or two. Luxury hotels ramble, gleaming and colorful, on the cactus-grown foothills.

Phoenix is a city where a rancher can stomp into the finest hotel or restaurant or shop, wearing a pair of scuffed cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat, without being gaped at. In hotel lobbies gather cowpunchers, deputy sheriffs, zanjeros, engineers, mine superintendents, millionaires, governors, vegetable farmers, and motion picture stars, with everybody seeming equally at home. Here is the Old West and the New West, and here is democracy in practice.

There canals and acequias for use upon the land. The Bridge Canyon plan includes an immense dam at Bridge Canyon, at a point near the upper reach of Lake Mead. A tunnel 77 miles long would carry the water from here to the Big Sandy River near the mouth of Burro Creek. An acqueduct some 248 miles in length would carry the stream through a series of canals, short tunnels, and siphons to a point adjacent to the confluence of the Salt and Verde Rivers. A storage reservoir at the McDowell site on the Salt River would be constructed under any plan of diversion.

The Parker Pump plan, while less spectacular, has its advantages, to be weighed against those of the other two. Under that plan, a series of pumping plants, located along the western end of a 235 mile acqueduct extending from Havasu Lake to Granite Reef Dam, would raise the water 985 feet for delivery to Central Arizona.

Sunshine, water, deep soil-and vision. These are the four elements out of which cities and enduring cultures are built. Arizona, rich in land and brilliant sky and canyon-walled rivers, and an air that stimulates the mind to wrestle with the impossible until it becomes the probable, has given the Hohokam and Jack Swilling and Darrel Duppa reasons to look down in amazement at what has happened along the canals they dug with so much labor. And now, with the momentum given by science and new needs, the things that can happen in the next decade or two may yet be as amazing to us who are here as the past ninety years would be astounding to the "people who are gone."

Because of the perfect climate, is twelve months long. Water storage assures against crop failure. Modern farming is now a great industry.

Few decades great cities and towns, dependent chiefly on the farms.

Looking at this miracle wrought by the alchemy of sun and soil, and water and men's minds and hands, Arizonans are not fazed by talk of further stupendous undertakings. To them, miracles have become the commonplace. They would not laugh now at Sam Webb's proposal to bring Colorado River water out into the central valleys of Arizona. In fact they expect it.

Three projects have been under consideration for the delivery of water and power to the central valleys of Arizona, any one of which is of a magnitude that would have brought cries of "Fantastic!" twenty years ago. It will take further study of all elements that enter into each proposal, a careful balancing of advantage against disadvantage, before the decision can finally be reached as to which project is best. And that decision will be arrived at through cooperation with all groups to be affected.

The most impressive plan, to the layman, is the Marble Gorge plan. Here, 36½ miles below Lee's Ferry a dam larger than Boulder is contemplated. From here water would be taken through a tunnel 143 miles in length. Out of this tunnel the water would stream into a series of artificial lakes to be created along the Verde River, and the force of its drop would be turned into power. Then a canal would carry it to the present Granite Reef Dam, where the last kilowatt of its electrical energy would be extracted before it was turned into the