What the Phoenix metro area looked like before people started building dams


If you like Phoenix history, like I do, you've probably wondered what the area looked like in its virgin condition, before people started building dams. You know, before the Starbucks, and the freeways, and all of the stuff we look at all of the time. Luckily, it's easy to see.

Sonoran Desert near Phoenix, Arizona. Saddle Mountain, near Tonopah.

No, you can't see it where the dams are. But you can see it anywhere else in the Sonoran Desert where dams were never built. It's just called the desert, and the areas where water flows are called washes. If you see a wash going through an area that has canyon walls on each side of it, there you go. That's what the Salt River looked like before it was dammed. Or you can pick any dammed river you want and go where a dam wasn't built, and see what it looked like for the past ten thousand years (after the end of the ice age). One of my favorite places to go is Saddle Mountain, near Tonopah.

Except for beavers (and I'm no expert on wildlife!), people are the only animals that dam up rivers. They do it so that they can have water for agriculture, or just so that they can have water stored up when it gets hot and dry. And it gets hot and dry in the Phoenix metro area!

Time-travel with me to the days of the Hohokams. No one really knows exactly when they started damming up the Salt River, and building canals, but it was many hundreds of years ago. When the Phoenix pioneers first started thinking about living in the Salt River Valley, in the 1860s, the gigantic canals of "Those Who Have Gone" (the Hohokams) were there, dry and empty. Their dams had long since failed, but there was clear evidence of the hand of man.

I can see the desert before people arrived. I see it all of the time, and I'm already getting anxious to get back out there and see it again. I spend too much time on my computer! If you want to see it, don't worry, there's plenty. Just get on any Arizona highway.


Image at the top of this post: Pueblo Grande, one of the places that the Hohokam lived, and farmed. They dammed the Salt River and built canals. You're looking southeast towards where Tempe is nowadays. On the right is South Mountain.
Thank you to my patrons on Patreon who help support History Adventuring! If you like these blog posts, and would like to make suggestions for future ones, please go to patreon.com/Phoenix HistoryAdventuring where you can show your support for as little as $1 a month. Thank you!

What Patreon is http://bradhallart.blogspot.com/2016/03/supporting-creators-on-web-with-patreon.html

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