Salt River Project

Robert Autobee

Salt River Project

Year: 1993

Summary

Humanity's resourcefulness inspired two attempts to draw life out of the desolation of Central Arizona's Salt River Valley over the past 1,500 years. Building over the remains of an irrigation culture left behind by lost Indian tribe, the Hohokam, federal and private engineers of the early 20th Century adapted much when the United States Reclamation Service completed first its major work, the Theodore Roosevelt Dam.

The scale of Reclamation's plans separate the two efforts. The Roosevelt Dam was the Bureau's first multipurpose undertaking, designed for flood control, irrigation storage and Central Arizona's first hydroelectric power source. The dam stimulated area boosters to build Phoenix up from a desert outpost to the nation's ninth largest metropolis in less than a hundred years. Hailed as an engineering triumph at its completion in 1911, the preliminary result of the Salt River Valley project was the creation of an agricultural oasis. The project's ultimate consequence was the growth of one of the most urbanized areas in the United States anchored by a city whose name is synonymous with second chances – Phoenix.