Jack Swilling (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Full-Text Christine Lewis.

In 1892 Judge Joseph H. Kibbey, one of Arizona's illustrious pioneers, described the Salt River Valley before the settlers came as a desert, uninhabited except by jack rabbits, coyotes, and rattlesnakes. Its main vegetation was sagebrush and cactus. It was a level, fertile valley about fifteen miles wide, through which the Salt River flowed west for forty miles to its junction with the Gila. The Salt River was a fluctuating stream. Sometimes it was a raging torrent which flooded the level land...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Earl Zarbin.

Each year thousands of people come to the Salt River Valley, some to visit and some to live. They see a thriving, growing community. But like many who have spent most, or all, of their lives there, they don't know much about the Valley's origins or how it developed. The men and women who built the Valley were like today's people. They were trying to improve their own condition. In doing that, they contributed to the well-being of one another. Jack Swilling was one of them. Swilling...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Earl Zarbin.

Now, and into the foreseeable future, most water brought into the Salt River Valley, home to Phoenix — the nation’s sixth most populous city in 2017 — and other growing communities, is used for urban purposes. To the visionaries who passed this desert area in the 1800s, their predictions of a future metropolis were more than fulfilled. The most significant event in the transformation from desert to home to America’s 12th-largest metropolitan area with more than 4.5 million people was the...