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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 organized the first modern irrigating canal company more than a century ago. Water was then, and is today, the essential element around which everything in the Valley is built. Yet, many important decisions about water remain to be made today and will need to be made in the future. Knowing something about how we got where we are today may contribute to making the right decisions tomorrow. Earl Zarbin's interest in the water history of the Salt River Valley and his research into the subject led to the articles in this booklet. They were first published in The Arizona Republic, where he worked for 30 years before early retirement at the end of 1988.

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 on either side, and sometimes it dwindled to a mere trickle. To the early settlers, stated Judge Kibbey, the water of this unstable river became an as essential to the maintenance of human life as air itself. The first homeseekers entering the Salt River Valley following the Civil War were quick to realize that the key to the development of that area was irrigation. Before them lay the remains of ancient waterways that stretched for miles along both banks of the Salt, attesting to the fact that in the dim past other civilizations had flourished there. They noted, too, that the gradual descent of the river through the valley was so gentle that at almost any point a ditch could be made. Encouraged by the prospects, early settlers cut small channels and began raising garden vegetables, as well as hay and grain, finding markets for these products in the reactivated army posts in the territory. In time, however, the agricultural potential of the valley became more apparent, and associations were organized to construct elaborate waterways capable of irrigating thousands of acres. Typical of these large-scale ventures was the Tempe Irrigating Canal Company, which for over fifty years stood as a monument to the efforts and determination of Arizona's desert pioneers to create permanent homes in a semiarid region.