Story of the Salt

All winter the snows fall on Mount Baldy. This majestic mountain, rearing its ancient physiognomy out of the wilderness of Eastern Arizona, catches the snows and holds them. Baldy captures their beauty, their purity. their beneficial qualities, their usefulness. Then, in the Spring, when the warm sun creeps daily farther above the horizon, rising a little earlier each morning and slipping into its own western night a little later each evening, the snows begin to melt. Their prisms become liquid, and the water that is formed trickles from under the dwindling snow banks, moves hesitantly out among the pine needles and the budding snow orchids, gathers courage and dances down the glens, until it and other waters join to ripple over the rocks in some secluded canyon bottom. Thus the Salt River is born.

Only it is not yet the Salt. It is Coyote Creek, Pachete Creek, Paddy Creek, Bear Wallow . . . and many others. It will not become the Salt until after it has become the Black and the White. It will not get its salty flavor for a hundred miles, and it will not reach its full, ripe, useful maturity for still another hundred.

This great stream is nascent on the green slopes of Mount Baldy, and it becomes quiescent in the desert-just at the edge of a vast empire made fertile by the Salt's waters-12 miles southeast of Phoenix, underneath towering Estrella Peak. There, at the foot of this spire to which the Spaniards gave their equivalent of the name Star, the Salt is swallowed up by the Gila.

The Salt River, a comparatively small stream, for its size does more work for humanity than any other river on the face of the earth.

The Salt is given leavening and character in its gorges. its canyons, its shallows. For 200 miles from where the White and Black join, to where the Salt dies at the edge of the desert to be reborn into the great and historic Gila, the Salt runs through all sorts of country and all types of climes. It crosses alkaline beds which give it its flavor and its name. It moves swiftly through famous Salt River Gorge north of Globe and Miami; and it slows to a standstill behind the giant dams of the Salt River Valley Water Users Association. The Salt is a mature giant by the time it reaches those dams, pouring enough water behind them in an average year to cover 700.000 acres one foot deep. His zeal and energy curbed and controlled by civilization, the giant spends a quiet. prosperous. and conservative middle-age. building up riches, establishing a heritage for all generations to come. And then, as an old man his substance spent wisely, for he can see the increase a thousandfold on every side he falls exhausted on the level floor of the desert. and expires far from the land of his nativity.

The Salt River directly drains portions of eight of Arizona's fourteen counties. Six of these counties have a heavy investment in the waters that rush down the Salt, while another two are tapped to a lesser extent by the long arm of the Salt's principal tributary, the Verde.

The counties which the Salt drains, going clockwise from due North, are: Yavapai, Gila, Navajo, Apache, Graham, Pinal, Maricopa and Coconino.

The rainfall over this huge watershed varies from three to 20 inches annually, and the runoff provides water and power for one of the world's greatest agricultural efforts, the 240,000-acre Salt River Project, lying in a fertile valley 20 miles wide and 50 miles long in which Phoenix. Arizona's capital, and her sister communities of Mesa. Tempe, Tolleson, Glendale, Scottsdale, Chandler, Gilbert. Peoria, and Sunny Slope form the principal population elements. No one knows what the population of the watershed was in prehistoric times. But it was well populated, comparatively, with large Indian tribes. Some of these tribes were aggressive, like the Apaches. Some were peaceable. like those lost folk, designated arbitrarily as the Hohokam because no name is known for them although their evidences remain, who dwelt in the Salt River Valley.

These aborigines had a system of irrigation set up for centuries before the whites came in and began their own irrigation system about 1867. A close study of the prehistoric canals by Dr. Omar A. Turney called this early-day irrigated empire "The Land of the Stone Hoe." Certainly it was a magnificent land in its agricultural development, and magnificent even in the mysterious manner in which its culture came to an end and vanished before the white man could arrive - vanished without a trace as to the reason, leaving one of archaeology's great voids behind to eternally excite the curiosity of posterity.

Here by these Salt shores, within the very sight of those of us who dwell in this valley today, lie the makings of an Atlantis like mystery; only in case of the Hohokam it is Time, and not the Sea, which has swallowed them.

But the Salt River Valley was not the only place where pre-historic folk lived on the watershed of the Salt. At Kinishba (also an arbitrary, coined name, meaning Brown House, given to the spot by Dr. Byron Cummings), one of