This environmental impact statement evaluates the interplay between settlement and environment in the Salt River Basin—a settlement that eventuated in the city of Phoenix, Arizona, in the late 19th century. The prospects of the Salt River providing fertile soils in the basin encouraged long-term settlement in the area. American settlers in this region justified this conclusion as they observed the presence of pre-historic canals that demonstrated the example of humans leveraging the waters of the Salt River for agriculture and, therefore, long-term settlement of the basin. Thus, Phoenix originally envisioned itself as an agricultural community—a community that resurrected the legacy of the canals that served as vital arteries in the region. But as it recognized an economic niche harvesting and shipping its agricultural produce at competitive rates, Phoenix in the late 19th century and the early 20th century prioritized its growth, enabling it to compete with neighbors such as Tucson, or even with California cities, in economic output to the country. Guided by its progressive vision of a modern American city, Phoenix worked in conjunction with private enterprise and the federal government to see canals built and dams constructed as a means to conquer the desert, with its constraints on comfortable living. Transcending these constraints demonstrated human—specifically white American—ingenuity as the city sought to distribute the waters of the Salt River throughout the burgeoning communities that composed Phoenix.
The use of canals and dams in this arid region nevertheless enabled people of the city, particularly those of wealth and means, to live contrary to how riparian people lived: As Phoenix grew, people did not want to live near the waters of the Salt River, instead expecting that the waters come to them wherever they settled.[1] Settling further from the basin, enabled as they were by Reclamation Act projects that moved water to areas it naturally would not flow, the people of Phoenix altered larger segments of the Sonoran Desert landscape, along with the flora and fauna native to the desert, to affect an urban experience that would appeal to white Americans from the East.
Description of the Impacted Environment
The Salt River’s constancy supported the growth of cottonwoods and willows, as well as vast meadows of wild grass and thick mesquite forests. Creosote bush and white bur sage, known for their drought tolerance, thrived in the area. As symbols of the Sonoran, cacti such as the saguaro, the cholla, the barrel, the prickly pear, and the hedgehog pervaded the landscape.[2]
In addition to supporting this vegetation, the Salt River also hosted a variety of wildlife. Six species of hooved animals, 29 species of rodent, five types of rabbit, 46 types of birds, and various reptiles and amphibians inhabited this ecosystem—all of which created a food chain that benefited the 23 varieties of carnivores, including mountain lions and bobcats.[3]
Impacts to Native Species
Phoenix’s canals and agricultural development, however, impacted these native species, both flora and fauna. Where once cacti and the mesquite dominated the area, the vast agricultural fields, fruit orchards, and citrus groves defined the landscape by the late 19th century. Fields of wild grass turned to fields of alfalfa. While native species of cacti and shrubs were not eliminated from the Sonoran landscape altogether, agriculture reduced their presence. With markets in the Midwest and the West increasing their demand for dairy and beef, these farms also specialized in dairying, cattle ranching, and feedlots.[4] It follows that as agricultural and engineering feats altered the landscape, and as farmers and engineers defined the boundaries of their properties, the wildlife likewise retreated further from the areas they had naturally inhabited. A scenery where bobcats hunted in the wild grasses had transformed to one where cattle grazed the agricultural fields.
Phoenicians altered the ecosystem to support its agriculture, but this transformation served a dual purpose of civilizing the desert as a part of its urbanization project. While the Do Away with the Desert campaign of the 1920s expressed the city’s desire to alter the landscape wholesale, in reality people and organizations, such as the Women’s Club, continued to tolerate elements of the desert, provided these elements remained in the background while rose gardens and abundant foliage occupied the foreground.[5] Communities erected desert trees such as the cottonwood and the mesquite along the canals to provide communities with shade. Organized in a grid,[6] so long as these desert trees demonstrated the white man’s mastery of the desert, these Sonoran vestiges could remain, albeit in an ancillary role.
Air and Water Impacts
While Phoenix boosters did not celebrate the Sonoran Desert Landscape, they embraced its dry air as an angle to promote migration to the city. Health professional across the country recommended the warm, dry air as a treatment for respiratory illness. Even those who did not suffer from ailments chose to come to Phoenix for its health benefits, especially as physicians such as Dr. E Palmer, writing for the New York Medical Journal, claimed Phoenix’s dry air provided for the healthiest climate in the nation.[7]
Phoenicians might have boasted about Phoenix’s air quality, which was complemented by the fragrance of the citrus orchards that the canals made possible through irrigation. But residence complained frequently to the Phoenix Water Company about the bitterness and saltiness of their tap—a taste to be expected from water sourced from a river the Spanish had named Rio Salado. Eager to maintain its population growth, Phoenix found a source of water outside of the Salt River basin, the Verde River. Forty miles away, the Verde River provided 15 million gallons of sweet-tasting river water a day to Phoenicians when its pipeline was completed in 1922.[8]
Social Impacts to Local Communities
The Reclamation Act, with its federal and private support for water relocation projects, enabled people of means—namely white Americans—to move beyond the basin and thus beyond the dangers of the Salt River flooding its banks. White Americans could exercise greater choice in where they wanted to live in the Phoenix area, with scenery and comfort guiding their choices. White Americans expanded ever northward, enjoying the scenic views of Camelback Mountain or the Phoenix Mountains, the presence of which provided them with a cooling breeze and with shade from the ever-present Phoenix sun depending on the time of day.[9] Thus, the water relocation projects that enabled white Americans to move away from the Salt River further enabled them to enjoy a respite from the otherwise continued onslaught of the harsh, relentless Phoenix heat during the summer.
The presence of canals also provided people with a social environment. Communities enjoyed the canals as locations for picnicking, laundering, camping, and swimming—activities that enabled family and community bonding. Children created diving boards or hung ropes from trees along the canal banks while parents canoed and fished in the canals. These leisure activities also allowed communities to enjoy brief respite from Phoenix heat, for the canals lowered temperatures and humidity levels upwards of 20 percent in their areas. The canal environments were comfortable and scenic enough to host weddings.[10]
The canals re-created the benefits of the Salt River riparian environment, providing the vegetation and the wildlife that one might expect on the river.[11] The corollary is that the canals, by re-creating this environment, enabled the affluent to stay away from the dangers of the actual Salt River, the banks of which could flood. Thus, one might argue that the Reclamation Era canals contributed to racial segregation and stratification, for minorities could not choose to move away from the Salt River basin. The cost of living kept them in the flood zones of the Salt River. Any enjoyment they received from the actual Salt River came with all of the risks. In fact, a flood in February 1891 swept away the adobe houses near the Salt River. This flood left hundreds of Mexicans homeless, their adobe homes melting away in the flood waters. Those who saw Phoenix as a white American city—a city that, unlike Tucson, had no Spanish-Mexican heritage—regarded the flood as a blessing, for the “mud houses” no longer distracted from the architectural feats that epitomized Phoenix’s progressiveness and stateliness.[12]
Impacts to Historic and Cultural Sites, Particularly to Indigenous Sites
Indeed, because Phoenix was a city whose origins were decidedly Anglo-American, not southwestern vis-à-vis a Mexican presence, the city’s only substantial pre-American, pre-European legacy centered on the canal culture of the Hohokam, hunters and gathers who occupied the region hundreds of years earlier. Scholars do not agree on the number of inhabitants who composed the Hohokam people or the immigrants who worked among them, but archeologists nevertheless have accounted for a thousand miles of canals.[13] As white settlers discovered these canals in the 1870s, the forces of wind, water, and overgrowth of desert vegetation were the only factors that had eroded or otherwise obscured the presence of these landmarks. But when Anglo settlers realized the agricultural potential of these lands, and when the city, prioritizing its growth and its eastern appeal, developed streets and residential areas, traces of the canals and mounds were further obscured. The Hohokam village called Las Colinas, in particular, lay buried under 20th century development—buried but preserved. Other landmarks, however, were not preserved; in fact, as Phoenix continued to grow into the 1930s, requiring roads to facilitate travel around the sprawling city and its suburbs, many of the mounds reminding Phoenix of its pre-history had been dug up, repurposed as dirt for road fill.[14]
While Phoenix in the 19th and early 20th century did not have a Southwest cultural heritage as Tucson had, the Mexican population that immigrated to the Phoenix, who contributed to the land development, who knew how to leverage irrigation in a dry farming environment, and who helped construct buildings with adobe brick architecture to withstand the Sonoran environment, nevertheless had a significant presence and impact on the nascent city. Phoenix, in other words, required Mexican knowledge of the Sonoran to make this otherwise white American establishment function. The Hohokam had actually acquired their knowledge of irrigation from an unknown location in Mexico[15]—demonstrating the wider regional indigenous legacy that contributed to Phoenix’s existence. The blessings Phoenicians found in the destruction of the adobe houses in February 1891 indicated their lack of regard for this wider indigenous legacy in the region.
Economic Impacts
In any event, Phoenix’s efforts to irrigate the land paid dividends. Phoenix would see their efforts produce wheat, hay, corn, and barley. These harvests made their way to mining towns at prices significantly less expensive than the prices of suppliers in California, New Mexico, Tucson, and Mexico.[16] The economic importance of Phoenix agriculture convinced South Pacific Rail, which had initially bypassed Phoenix en route from California to Tucson, to connect Phoenix to this network, a connection that would ensure this agriculture would continue to meet the outside world. Eventually, Phoenix’s strength in the region saw the city become the territorial capital in 1889.[17] Come World War I, the United States had to depend on domestic sources of cotton for tires and airplane fabric. The Salt River Valley, benefiting from federal and private investment in dams and canals through the Reclamation Act, proved to be the ideal location to cultivate this cotton.[18]
Increasing its economic position, and selling itself as a progressive city that appealed to northerners and southerners alike, Phoenix enjoyed an increase in out-of-state investment. Northern-style department stores soon entered Phoenix. Investors from California and Chicago financed further railroad projects, namely, the Maricopa and Phoenix railroad in 1895.[19] The economic success of the city encouraged boosters to capitalize on this success, promoting the state as the “Garden Spot of the Southwest.” Aimed at tourists, the city developed the Let’s Do Away with the Desert campaign of 1926, hoping to turn these tourists into new residents of the city, whose presence would continue to establish connections to the east. Their presence would in turn continue bringing investment dollars to this seeming oasis in the desert, supported as it was by canals and dams.[20]
Alternatives
Phoenix’s priorities in Anglo-American urbanization, which saw canals leveraged as a means to alter the Sonoran landscape, might have taken a different trajectory, namely, the trajectory of its southern neighbor, Tucson. Tucson likewise occupied a region within the Hohokam’s area of settlement, where the Hohokam built canals to transport the waters of the Santa Cruz River to support its agriculture. Unlike Phoenix’s culture, Tucson’s culture was decidedly southwestern, containing a significant Mexican population that inhabited the city well before United States acquired the southern part of Arizona in the Gadsden Purchase. Co-existing with this Mexican element in its culture, Tucson embraced its Southwest heritage more noticeably,[21] along with the Sonoran landscapes over which the Spanish city had been built.
Phoenix might have followed in Tucson’s example, embracing the Southwest and its landscapes with more appreciation. But embracing the Southwest, the Sonoran Desert, and its wider Mexican culture might have prevented Phoenix from being the first to receive federal Reclamation Act funding, which sought to Americanize these desert regions. Failing to receive this timely funding, Phoenix might not have had the impetus to attract residents to the city, helping it grow. Without growth, Phoenix would not have become the regional powerhouse it had become, let alone the territorial and state capital of Arizona. Statehood itself might have been delayed if Phoenix had not regarded itself as something separate from the surrounding Southwest. Canals were the key to this sustained mindset, giving Phoenicians the encouragement to affect a city with all-American appeal.
[1]. Andrew Ross, Bird on Fire: Lesson from the World’s Least Sustainable City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 54.
[2]. Patricia Gober, Metropolitan Phoenix: Place Making and Community Building in the Desert (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 20; Michael F. Logan, Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 19.
[3]. Logan, Desert Cities, 19.
[4]. Gober, Metropolitan Phoenix, 20-22.
[5]. VanderMeer, 52.
[6]. VanderMeer, 53.
[7]. VanderMeer, 33.
[8]. Logan, 80.
[9]. Gober, 26, 28.
[10]. Philip VanderMeer, Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 54; Gober, 21, 24.
[11]. VanderMeer, Desert Visions, 54.
[12]. VanderMeer, 27.
[13]. Ross, Bird on Fire, 45.
[14]. Michael H. Bartlett, Thomas M. Kolaz, and David A. Gregory, Archeology in the City: A Hohokam Village in Phoenix, Arizona (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986), 39-40.
[15]. Bartlett, Kolaz, and Gregory, 17.
[16]. Daniel D. Arreola and Rio Hartwell, “Phoenix Population Origins, 1870-1900,” Geographical Review 104, no. 4 (October 2014): 446.
[17]. Arreola and Hartwell, “Phoenix Population Origins,” 447, 452.
[18]. Gober, 25.
[19]. Arreola and Hartwell, 448.
[20]. Logan, 104.
[21]. Logan, 3.
Bibliography
Arreola, Daniel D., and Rio Hartwell. “Phoenix Population Origins, 1870-1900.” Geographical Review 104, no. 4 (October 2014): 440-456.
Bartlett, Michael H., Thomas M. Kolaz, and David A. Gregory, Archeology in the City: A Hohokam Village in Phoenix, Arizona. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986.
Gober, Patricia. Metropolitan Phoenix: Place Making and Community Building in the Desert. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.
Logan, Michael F. Desert Cities: The Environmental History of Phoenix and Tucson. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
Ross, Andrew. Bird on Fire: Lesson from the World’s Least Sustainable City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
VanderMeer, Philip. Desert Visions and the Making of Phoenix. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010.
Goodbye To All That 