Walking along the Arizona Canal in 1895


Let's walk along the Arizona Canal in 1895. We're at the Granite Reef Dam, which is on the Salt River, on the Salt River Pima Indian Community. We're walking west.

The canal was completed in 1885, so it's been there for ten years. It's used by, and protected by the Pimas, and goes all of the way across the northern part of the Salt River Valley to Peoria, Arizona. We'd better get going, it's a long walk!

The Arizona Canal was privately funded, and dug by hand, using man and mule-power. More about the men who build the Arizona Canal. And even ten years after its completion, it's waaaayyyyy out in the desert. As we cross over what is now Pima Road out of the Indian Reservation to what is now Scottsdale, there's hardly a trace of life, except cactus and Gila Monsters. Watch where you step!

The canal does a sharp bend right about there and starts heading south where it goes around the base of Camelback Mountain. At about where 56th Street and Indian School Road will be someday, we stop at the falls and eat lunch. The water from the canal tastes muddy, but it's fresh.

From there the canal begins to curve around the west side of Camelback Mountain and starts going northwest. We stop and look south towards Phoenix, which has been there since 1870. Not a lot of tall buildings yet, but it's just visible. The city limits are Van Buren and 7th Street, so it's quite a distance to town. There are scattered ranches in the valley, but not a lot yet. Some people say that a great city will be built here someday. It's hard to believe.

At about where 24th Street will be someday, we climb up onto a hill which gives an awesome view of the valley. This would be a great place to build a mansion some day!

When we get to about where 19th Avenue will be someday, we see a lot of damage from flooding, where the Cave Creek overflows into the canal. Hopefully that will be fixed someday!

We finish up at New River, near where 73rd Avenue will be someday. We're just north of Peoria, and Glendale, which are little towns that the Arizona Canal Company has optimistically promised will be real cities some day. Time will tell.

Thank you for walking with me.
Become a PhD (Phoenix History Detective) with Brad today on Patreon!

Click here to become a Patron!
History Adventuring posts are shared there daily including "then and now" photos, billboards, aerials, videos, and super high-definition photos of historic Phoenix, Arizona. Discounts for seniors, students, teachers, and veterans.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why cars in the future won't need stop signs, red lights, or stripes on the road

Image
Time-travel with me into the future. Where we're going, we'll still need roads, but our cars won't need the kind of stuff that human drivers need, like stop signs, or stuff painted on the road. And if you're already panicking that computers will take over, don't worry, they already have. The fact that you're reading this right now combines so much amazing computing power that it would have been unthinkable to anyone in the 1960s, or '70s, when I was a kid. Speaking of being in the geriatric age group, if you're like me or older, you took a lot of pride in knowing the rules of the road, such as what to do at a stop sign if four cars approach at the same time, the difference between a "yield" sign and a "merge" sign, or maybe how to parallel park. But calm down there old-timer, that type of knowledge will just be as quaint as how to use a horse and buggy is nowadays. Sorry! The best way to picture how traffic will flow in the future is ...
Read more

Watching a neighborhood grow and change in Phoenix, Arizona

Image
I stopped to take a closer look yesterday at where the old Circle K had been in my neighborhood, which is a suburb of Phoenix. And it's got me to thinking about how much Phoenix grows and changes over the years, and how people feel about it. This particular neighborhood was built in the mid 1980s, when there had been only a smattering of houses and a community college (Glendale Community College, built in 1965). There are some houses that I can tell are from the 1970s, and a few even older, but what happened here is that the neighborhood suddenly appeared in 1985 or thereabouts. There are three shopping centers on the corner of 67th Avenue and Peoria - the one in the photo is called "Peoria Station", and it was designed to kinda look like a train station. The other three are called Westporte Village, Brittany Square, and Crossroads Plaza. I've lived in this neighborhood for a very long time, and no one ever uses those names, even though the signs are still up. But the...
Read more

Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?

Image
As someone who has been interested in history since I was a little kid, I've always asked the most childish questions, and quite often never got an answer. As a kid, I was told to run along and play, and don't bother the grownups, so I set my questions aside to work on when I myself became a grownup. But some questions I really haven't found a satisfactory answer for, and get thrown away as I find myself learning the more important stuff. I now understand the grownups, but the kid in me still has childish questions like "Why did Adolf Hitler always have such a bad haircut?" The first question to ask is whether a particular style (whether hair, clothing, etc.) was in style at the time. The moustache was, and you can Google a photo of Charlie Chaplin, who wore the same style of moustache at the time, and quite stylishly. The wide lapels were in style in the 1930s, as was were the tall shirt collars and small ties. But the haircut wasn't - it's just awful. Me...
Read more