Changing Times Along The Canals of Phoenix

People's ideas change over the decades:

Part of the canals’ mystique is that some of their routes predate Phoenix by nearly two millennia. Beginning around A.D. 200, Hohokam Indians, using handheld digging tools, moved tons of earth and engineered the largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere. Some 250 miles of canals fanned like tufts of hair from the Salt River, irrigating several thousand acres of corn, squash, beans, pumpkins and cotton. Having reached a population of twenty thousand, the Hohokam abandoned the Salt River Valley around 1400, possibly because they had depleted the soil.

For the next four centuries the drainage cooked in the sun, its canal system choked with the debris of flash floods. The dormancy lasted until just after the Civil War, when gold miners burst into the Arizona Territory. Migrants to the West Coast passed through the valley. U.S. Army forts were established to the northwest at Prescott and Wickenburg, and upstream from Phoenix at Fort McDowell, to fend off Apaches. Miners, migrants, and soldiers all needed to be fed. In 1867 a scheming ex-Confederate soldier named Jack Swilling responded with the Swilling Irrigation and Canal Company. Using Mexican labor, he retrenched many of the old Hohokam canals. Alfalfa for horses and grain for persons soon flowed from the Salt River Valley to the forts.