The day the Arizona Dam collapsed, 1905

Long before the Roosevelt Dam was built, in 1911, the Salt River had various dams that diverted the water of the Salt River into canals in the Phoenix, Arizona area, and the biggest one was the Arizona Dam, which is long-gone.

It was built in 1885 to supply water to the brand-new Arizona Canal, which was dug under the supervision of William Murphy. The canal, which is still there, goes from east of Scottsdale, Arizona, to Peoria, not far from where I live. I like to ride along the canal, where the water flows gently, and I often see ducks.

But the canals all dried up in 1905 when the Arizona Canal collapsed. And that includes the Grand Canal and the Buckeye Canal. I'd imagine that a lot of people were angry about this, and for farms that relied on the canals, like the Sahuaro Ranch, it would have been terrible.

Of course there was well water, but in the desert that's not enough for large-scale farming, which had already begun. It sounds to me that this had been a good time for opportunists to get land for cheap from people who were giving up on the idea of a steady supply of water for the Phoenix area.

Fortunately, this didn't cause a flood in Phoenix as had been feared. But it would have given an impetus to get the big dam built, and Dwight Heard was talking to his friend Theodore Roosevelt about it you can be sure.

Images from the Weekly Arizona journal-miner, April 19, 1905. Library of Congress.

Update: The Arizona Dam was not rebuilt, but the Granite Reef Dam replaced it very nicely, and is still there. This is from the SRP site:


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