HAER No. AZ-6

page 9

typically supported small enclaves of 25- to 30-acre farms. Early irrigation systems in Utah comprised a relatively rudimentary technological achievement, but they proved successful in supplying the religious community with food, and the communal settlements that they engendered eventually became prototypes for western agrarian development. The basis of Mormon irrigation systems centered around a social/religious structure in which individuals shared responsibility for the long-term success and stability of the community. This communal spirit (often reinforced by strong church leadership) fostered the growth of numerous Mormon settlements in central Utah in the 1850s. Pursuing an aggressive program of expansion virtually from initial occupation in Utah, church leaders directed formation of satellite colonies throughout the western region. Latter Day Saints followed a trail blazed in 1864 by pioneer Mormon Jacob Hamlin and crossed the Colorado River aboard a ferry operated in the Grand Canyon by fellow church member John D. Lee to develop communities across northern Arizona in the 1870s. In the Central Valley, they formed the agricultural settlement of Mesa in 1878, which would eventually become the nexus of Mormon life in Arizona.^

Although they formed a somewhat insular group, the Mormons' success in developing permanent settlements did not escape the notice of others interested in the growth of Western America. Mormon efforts set an important precedent for later pioneers seeking to colonize the West by building irrigation-based communities. The most famous of these were the Anaheim Colony in Southern California, founded by German farmers in 1854, and the Greeley Colony in Northern Colorado, established in 1869.5

The origins of the present-day irrigation system and agricultural settlement in Arizona's Central Valley date from 1867. That year William John "Jack" Swilling, flamboyant Confederate army officer, prospector, Indian fighter and entrepreneur, opened an irrigation ditch with John Y.T. "Yours Truly" Smith, the post sutler at Fort McDowell. They formed the Swilling Irrigation Canal Company, and with some $400 contributed by local investors, opened the Swilling Ditch by clearing an ancient Hohokam canal. Eventually called the Town Ditch, Swilling's canal extended from the north bank of the Salt River, northwest a mile-and-a-half across the desert, and then curved back toward the river. In 1868 a man named Frenchy Sawyer started the first permanent Anglo farm in the valley, irrigated by the Swilling Ditch. Sawyer was soon joined by others, and two years later the townsite of Phoenix was platted."

The Mormon successes in Utah and nascent irrigation activity

in other parts of the West were slowly attracting the attention of American society during the 1870s. But the status of irrigation development in the eyes of American culture underwent a major transformation with the publication of John Wesley Powell's Report on the Lands of the Arid Region in 1879.7

HAER No. AZ-6

page 10

Previously known for his successful navigation of the Colorado River from its headwaters in Wyoming through the Grand Canyon, Powell had become very knowledgeable about conditions in Western America, and he quickly developed into a major advocate for the economic development of its water resources. Because of his scientific status and his association with the Smithsonian Institution, Powell's claim that vast areas of desert land could be "reclaimed" for agricultural development by impounding seasonal floodwaters for use throughout the year caught the imagination of Congress and the American people. With Powell's charismatic lecturing and writing attracting widespread attention, the notion of opening the West to expansive agricultural development through irrigation began to attain the status of a crusade by the 1880s.

Despite the sale of considerable Western land holdings by the government to private interests (including massive railroad land grants), social activists intent on finding a way to counteract the baneful effects of industrial development in Eastern cities saw irrigation as a way to allow population growth to continue in rural agricultural settlements. Adhering to a form of Jeffersonian Agrarianism, advocates of the so-called "irrigation crusade" considered Western reclamation projects as an ideal means of allowing small family farms to foster ideals representing the best attributes of American society. The notion that life closely rooted to the soil was somehow intrinsically better than one despoiled by the "evil" influences of the city appealed to many Americans. A vocal advocate of this sentiment, Powell continued to espouse the virtues of Western irrigation throughout the 1880s as Director of the Interior Department's U.S. Geological Survey. In 1888 he received authorization from Congress to create an agency to explore the potential for development of the region's water resources.

Known as the Irrigation Survey, this formative effort to locate and survey reservoir sites functioned from late 1888 through 1893. Undertaken in conjunction with hydrographic work that measured water flow in major rivers and streams, the surveying of reservoir sites was designed to demonstrate the capacity of the West to support increased agricultural development. Although it was officially denied that the survey was intended as the forerunner of federally sponsored irrigation projects, the law establishing the Irrigation Survey provided that reservoir sites identified by Powell's staff could be "withdrawn" from entry (i.e., obtaining title to the land) by the government in behalf of people wishing to obtain federally-owned public lands.10 The intent of this withdrawal provision was apparently to prevent speculators from using information developed by survey personnel to file upon choice lands and then reap large profits by later resale.

Such speculative exploitation was, of course, anathema to the concept of Western agricultural development by small, independent farmers. But without any specifically stated goal of the Irrigation Survey concerning the ultimate use of the data it generated, the notion that reservoir sites could be closed indefinitely to development aroused consternation among numerous settlers who already inhabited the arid region. In response, Congress enacted a law in 1891 [Act of March 3, 1891; 26 Stat., 1095-1101] that allowed

HAER No. AZ-6

page 11

individuals and private irrigation companies to file claims to reservoir sites on public lands with the provision that they proceed with work within five years or face forfeiture." During the early 1890s the Irrigation Survey conducted field work across the West, employing engineers such as Frederick Haynes Newell and Arthur Powell Davis, both of whom later would serve prominently in the U.S. Reclamation Service. The main stumbling block to the irrigation crusade, as perceived by Powell, was that most of the best irrigable land in the West had already been removed from the public domain and was in the hands of private landowners. As Stanley Davison has described at length in his book, The Leadership of the Reclamation Movement, 1875-1902, this eventually led to an embarrassing confrontation at the 1893 National Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles. 12 Speaking to an audience of enthusiasts led by William Smythe, editor of Irrigation Age, Powell informed them that many of the objectives of the populist-based irrigation crusade were passe, given that the best irrigable lands were already outside the public domain. His message was not well received, and he aroused a vehement reaction from the crowd. By the next year, Powell had resigned from the Interior Department, and, in the words of Davison, he had been overtaken by the "triumph of sentimentalism" championed by Smythe. Smythe's followers continued to advocate the social primacy of the small family farm and the ability of existing public domain to support future large-scale irrigation development. Arguments that the water rights of existing irrigation enterprises would almost certainly preclude the separate development of any new major reclamation projects fell largely on deaf ears. The notion of opening the West to a new generation of independent small farmers held enormous popular appeal. Eventually this sentiment would find political expression in a national reclamation program that espoused the ideals of the irrigation crusade while providing benefits to land long removed from the public domain.

By the mid-1890s it was still politically implausible to advocate a federally sponsored system of reclamation projects. Instead, in 1894 Congress approved a program proposed by Wyoming Senator Joseph Carey. The Carey Act authorized the government to cede up to a million acres of public land to individual states on their assurance that the acreage would be developed through viable irrigation projects. Eventually Carey Act projects proved to be important in some northern states such as Idaho, where the act helped fund the construction of the Milner Dam and the Twin Falls Canal that irrigated more than 300,000 acres of land in the Snake River Valley. The Carey Act failed to foster much short-term activity, however, and it proved generally unsuccessful in opening up the public domain to irrigation projects.13

While Congress attempted to integrate federal policy with state-controlled reclamation initiatives, privately financed projects continued to open land for settlement. Some of these efforts proved profitable, but there were also several financial failures, notably the Bear Valley Irrigation Company in Southern California." In basic terms, it was economi

HAER No. AZ-6

page 12

cally feasible to build diversion dams and distribution canals. But the costs and physical risks associated with building large storage reservoirs in remote mountain locations and the problems involved in erecting lengthy feeder canals through rough terrain could not provide a sufficient payoff to warrant investment by outside financiers. By the turn of the century, irrigation activity in the West had yet to achieve the success its promoters had earlier envisaged. At the same time, huge quantities of floodwater continued to flow into the ocean or dissipate in dry desert lakes.

As it happened, Phoenix played an essential role in events that

soon drew the government directly into the irrigation business. In the twenty years since Jack Swilling had built his ditch, several additional canals had been built in the valley that diverted water from the Salt River. The Tempe Canal [1871], San Francisco Canal [1871], Utah Canal [1877] and Mesa City Canal [1878] all branched from the river's south bank; the Maricopa Canal [1868] and Grand Canal [1878] extended north of the river. A controversy over water rights flared in 1879, when a drought precipitated angry confrontations over which canal companies had priority to use the Salt River's reduced flow. In large measure the shortage occurred because the Grand Canal and the Mormons' Utah and Mesa City canals had come into operation within the previous two years and had begun diverting water several miles upstream from the headgates of the existing Salt River Valley, Tempe and San Francisco canals. 15

The controversy erupted in violence in June, 1879, when Phoenix farmer John Ellis shot another farmer named Michael Huff in a dispute over ditch water rights.16 Despite reported instances of physical intimidation and violence, the more typical response to perceived misappropriation of water was to threaten legal action, and, failing in this, to initiate litigation. During the drought, owners of a few small, private ditches in the Phoenix area sought to enjoin the Grand, Tempe and Mesa canals from diverting water from the Salt. The return of heavy river flow late in the year rendered the point moot, however."

The issue of water supply took on a new urgency in the mid-1880s, when the recently formed Arizona Canal Company began planning a large-scale diversion system that threatened to diminish the flow into virtually all of the existing canals in the valley. The headgate for the Arizona Canal would be situated at a diversion dam on the Salt River, some 25 miles upriver from Phoenix. The 40-mile canal would carry water to farmlands in the north side of the valley. Construction on the canal started in September 1883, and in December 1884 work on the large timber crib diversion dam commenced. Completed the following year, the Arizona Canal Company's dam and canal experienced almost continuous maintenance problems, eventually driving the firm into bankruptcy in the early 1890s. But this did not occur until large areas of the Salt River Valley had been opened for irrigation. The company's water delivery system proved technologically successful, and

HAER No. AZ-6

page 13

the canal became a key component in the burgeoning agricultural economy of the valley. In fact, by the turn of the century over 110,000 acres were under irrigation in Maricopa County, the site of Phoenix and other agricultural towns such as Tempe and Mesa, and the county was home to more than 20,000 settlers." These included many farmers who had come from the Eastern and Midwestern United States, but, beginning with an initial influx in 1877, a sizable portion of the valley's population consisted of Mormons sent from Utah to colonize Arizona. The Mormons concentrated their irrigation-based settlements in the Central Valley around Mesa, founded as a town named Hayden in May 1878, where the church subsequently built one of its architecturally imposing temples. Clearly, farmers had long been attracted to Phoenix. The Central Valley's warm climate, long growing season and the fertile soil of the Salt River's alluvial plain combined to make irrigated agriculture a profitable venture. With the connection of the region to the Southern Pacific Railroad system in 1887, a greatly increased market for these farmers' crops became available. This market was further expanded eight years later, when a branch was extended to Phoenix from the main line of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway that crossed northern Arizona. With these rail connections completed, the major problem then facing the community concerned fears that the free-flowing Salt River might run dry during drought periods and wreak widespread economic havoc among the farmers. As in other parts of the arid West, the way to avoid such an occurrence was to impound seasonal floodwaters. (See figure 2.)

Figure 2. Map of Salt River and Phoenix area, taken from Engineering News, 12 January 1905.