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    Roosevelt Dam
    Roosevelt Dam
    Roosevelt Dam
    Ebook180 pages56 minutes

    Roosevelt Dam

    By Kathleen Garcia

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    About this ebook

    At 5:48 p.m., on March 18, 1911, former president Theodore Roosevelt pushed the button allowing the first waters to be released from the world s highest masonry dam. The dam was one of the first projects authorized under the Newland Reclamation Act of 1902. The act provided federal money for state reclamation projects and established the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which, between 1902 and 1907, began 30 projects within 11 western states. The confident promoters of the Roosevelt Dam began developing the project at the confluence of Tonto Creek and the Salt River five months before receiving formal approval by the newly established bureau in 1903. As a result of a 1992 expansion and renovation project, today s dam stands 357 feet high and bears little resemblance to the dam dedicated by Theodore Roosevelt.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateMar 9, 2009
    ISBN9781439636435
    Roosevelt Dam
    Author

    Kathleen Garcia

    Author Kathleen Garcia holds a master�s degree in Southwest and Arizona history from Arizona State University. For more than 20 years, Garcia worked at the Phoenix Public Library providing assistance for the Arizona Room Collection and helped launch Arizona Images (www.azhistoricalimages.org), which digitized the library�s James H. McClintock Collection from the Phoenix Museum of History�s collections. Photographs from James H. McClintock Collection, as well as from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, comprise the majority of this book.

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      Book preview

      Roosevelt Dam - Kathleen Garcia

      finished.

      INTRODUCTION

      Water has been the limiting reagent for civilization in the arid Arizona desert since the Hohokam settled the desert 1,000 years ago. These ancient people settled near the Salt River and built canals to water their villages and crops. The first Anglo settlers in the valley, John Y. T. Smith in 1866 and John W. Jack Swilling in 1867, settled near the flowing Salt River. Swilling immediately saw the agricultural potential of using the ancient canals of the Hohokam Indians to irrigate the rich valley soil. As more settlers moved to the prosperous valley, a reliable supply of water became a major issue. The flow of the Salt River was often erratic, its flow anywhere from a small stream to a massive flood. The river’s unpredictability led valley residents to decide that a water storage system was necessary to secure an even and steady flow of water from the Salt River.

      Phoenix was the first of the valley communities to take action to secure a storage reservoir. In April 1889, the Phoenix Chamber of Commerce learned that a senatorial sub-committee on irrigation headed by Sen. William M. Stewart, of Nevada, would stop in Phoenix on September 4, 1889. In June, the chamber of commerce formally asked the Maricopa Board of Supervisors to bear the cost of locating a water storage site on either the Salt or Verde River watersheds. The county took on the burden and sent William M. Breakenridge, Maricopa County surveyor; James H. McClintock, scribe for the expedition; and John H. Norton, valley farmer and rancher, to survey the watersheds of both rivers in July and August 1889.

      The expedition left Phoenix on July 18 and returned on August 10, 1889, having traveled 370 miles through the Superstition, Sierra Ancha, and Mazatzal Mountains. These three mountain ranges constitute some of the roughest terrain in Central Arizona. James H. McClintock described the expedition and the locating of the best dam site:

      The journey was a rough one, through much of Central Arizona, keeping, of course, with the drainage area.... Many dam sites were found and a few reservoir sites.... best of all was the natural combination discovered at the junction of the Salt River and Tonto Creek. There was a narrow canon for the dam, in hard rock of advantageous stratification, furnishing the best of building material.

      While the confluence of the Salt River and Tonto Creek proved to be the best site, it was another decade before the federal government took on the project. For Washington believed government sponsoring of large reclamation projects was implausible in the 1890s. But, as McClintock stated in his history of Arizona, The principal reason why the Roosevelt dam was built is that the people of Phoenix went after it with all their might.

      In 1900, B. A. Fowler headed a public interest group that included the Phoenix and Maricopa County Boards of Trade to form an organization known as the Water Storage Committee. The first step the committee took, in 1901, was to arrange for Maricopa County to offer $1,500 for a federal survey of the proposed dam site at Tonto Creek. The Geological Survey accepted the county’s offer, and Arthur Powell Davis, nephew of John Wesley Powell, was sent to Arizona to survey possible dam sites. Davis surveyed a number of sites, but in the end, his report focused on the site 76 miles northeast of Phoenix at the confluence of the Salt River and Tonto Creek, the same location the Breakenridge survey had recommended in 1889.

      Davis finished his survey in June 1902, just days before Congress passed and Pres. Theodore Roosevelt signed the Hansbrough-Newlands Reclamation Act on June 17, 1902. The act, authored by Francis Griffith Newland (a Democratic representative from Nevada), begins, An Act appropriating the receipts from the sale and disposal of public lands in certain States and Territories to the construction of irrigation works for the reclamation of arid lands. It authorized the formation of the Reclamation Service as part of the Interior Department; the service later became the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The act required that water users repay construction costs of projects to ensure the continuation of funding for future endeavors.

      Because landowners who benefited from the project would use their land as collateral, Salt River Valley farmers and ranchers felt some type of organization was needed to represent them to the government; thus incorporation proceedings for the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association were begun in the fall of 1902. Each landowner became a shareholder in the corporation, with the amount of shares dependent on the amount of land owned. In the end, over 200,000 acres throughout the valley were secured as collateral.

      On March 12, 1903, Secretary of the Interior Ethan A. Hitchcock, on recommendation of the Geological Survey, gave approval for the construction of the Tonto Basin Dam pending the adoption of the articles of incorporation of the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association. Valley residents were in such a hurry to get the project started that in the fall of 1902, before formal authorization was assured, the surveying of a road to the site and a right-of-way for a power canal were begun.

      A great deal of work had to be completed before actual construction on the dam could begin. Preliminary work included building a road from Mesa to the dam site; power canals, including pressure tunnels under Pinto and Cottonwood Creeks; siphon/tunnels through parts of the mountain; a power plant; a cement mill; a coffer dam to divert river water around the construction area; a sawmill and

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