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This is, in the end, the story of those who call the Valley of the Sun home. From its earliest conception, SRP was created by—and for—the communities it serves. Over time, SRP’s water and power services have helped ensure the successful achievement of its original purpose: the economic development of the Valley and the region. When the Association was formed in 1903, the population of Maricopa County was barely twenty thousand. On his visit to the Valley just eight years later for the dedication of the massive storage dam that bore his name, President Theodore Roosevelt assessed what he saw as the bright prospects of a burgeoning community. To a crowd gathered on the steps of Old Main at Arizona State University, Roosevelt declared: “I believe as your irrigation projects are established, we will see 75 to 100 thousand people here. . . . You have the great material chance ahead.” In the 106 years since his speech, the water and power provided by SRP have helped the Valley harness Roosevelt’s “great material chance” to a degree even the president might not have imagined—today, the Phoenix metropolitan area boasts over four million residents, placing it among the largest in the United States. Just as it has throughout its first century, SRP continues to build upon the achievements of the past in pursuit of a better future. In 1917 the federal government transferred operation of the first project completed under the National Reclamation Act, the Salt River Project (SRP), to a group of local water users in Arizona, the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association (Association). The transfer marked an important milestone in the early days of the nation’s efforts to develop water infrastructure in the West. It also carried with it an understanding that would become a hallmark of future projects: that the success of reclamation projects required not only federal investment, but also a strong base of local support. As the first project operated by a local entity, SRP became the model of what reclamation could accomplish in developing Western lands. The fact that SRP’s 1917 contract with the federal government is still in effect today testifies to the endurance of an approach that continues to be the foundation for managing water and power in the Valley. The collective spirit that guided the Association’s early development was not a certainty at its formation. When the Association was formed in 1903 as a mechanism for residents to put forward their lands as collateral for the federal funds to construct Roosevelt Dam, the idea of a common organization to unify the competing interests of Valley water users was viewed with skepticism by many who saw it as an unwarranted intrusion into private endeavors. The experience of local water interests up to that time was marked by litigation and division more than cooperative and shared purpose. In light of this background, the Association’s formation and ultimate success in unifying disparate interests is even more significant. Valley residents ultimately realized the federal support to build the necessary water infrastructure for growth could only come through local collaboration and a pooling of interests that justified such a large investment. This book tells the story of the enduring partnership of those common interests, spanning federal, state, and local governments and a range of private interests, which through its continuity withstood the uncertainties of weather, economic cycles, and political movements and transformed a fledgling territorial corporation into a regional water and power provider. In the process, Arizona and SRP grew together into a state of several million residents and an organization that today supplies nearly 800,000 acre-feet of water annually and delivers power to more than a million customers.

The Salt River Valley consists of nearly half-million acres in central Arizona. It is a semiarid area with alluvial soils suitable for agriculture, but low rainfall makes irrigation a necessity for cultivation. Early settlers knew that a system of canals and laterals was necessary for agricultural production. For sustained growth, the farmers needed a water storage facility. With the passage of the National Reclamation Act in 1902, the federal government authorized the Salt River Project (SRP). As work progressed on the construction of Theodore Roosevelt Dam, the U.S. Reclamation Service acquired a system canals and laterals for SRP. While this report focuses on the SRP water delivery system, much of the information is also generic to the irrigation systems throughout Arizona. This context history of the Salt River Project water distribution system is arranged in four parts. The first section details the history of the irrigation system of the Salt River Valley with emphasis on the distribution system. The second piece looks at the various structures and associated works that make up the distribution system. The third section examines the impact of the urban landscape on the water distribution system. The last section contains two case studies examining two laterals and their history.

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.