6/7/2023 0 Comments Hohokam irrigation canals![]() The farmers in the Phoenix basin who wished to be part of the Salt River Project formed the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association and, in 1903, the Association partnered with the Reclamation Service to harness the Salt River’s run-off. Reclamation Service was given approval to build the Salt River Project. ![]() These efforts led President Theodore Roosevelt to sign the Reclamation Act of 1902. Motivated by their frustration, they joined with other westerners to lobby for a Federal program to build large irrigation projects. Although they built irrigation canals, they could not afford to build a storage reservoir, so each year farmers and ranchers watched as the river surged with the spring snowmelt, with no way to store the excess water for summer use. The settlers dug new canals-including the Arizona, the Grand, and the original Crosscut-the latter of which, as the name suggests, cut across to connect the Arizona and Grand. By then, only traces of the Hohokam canals remained. Reclamation had constructed its Crosscut Powerplant – with more plants to come – on a canal at the center of the Salt River Project, with the ambition to sell the power to local farmers and industries to offset project costs, but it soon also fueled these efforts to drain the soil.īefore Reclamation came to the Salt River Valley, the settlers who established Phoenix and other towns in the late 19th century followed in the Hohokam’s footsteps. However, Reclamation found a solution: pumps powered by hydroelectricity could draw water out of the drenched land. But this new influx of water was so great that over several years it raised the water table, perhaps recreating-nearly 500 years later-the same conditions that led to the Hohokam’s departure. Reclamation Service began the massive Salt River Project, which once again brought consistent water to the basin’s cultivators. Waterlogging deprives plants of the oxygen needed to grow, and can also build up amounts of salts in the soil sufficient to kill crops.Ĭonstructed on a ravine, the Crosscut Powerplant receives water from penstocks connected to the new Crosscut Canal.īureau of Reclamation historic photo collectionīy the late 19th century, centuries after the Hohokam departed, settlers from the United States and Mexico arrived with dreams of establishing farms and towns along the Salt River. Or perhaps the intensive irrigation created waterlogged soil. Some archeologists link the ancient Hohokam’s departure to environmental circumstances such as droughts or repeated flooding. Today, the Pima (Akimel O’odham) and Papago (Tohono O’odham) believe the Hohokam-a Pima word meaning “those who have gone”-to be their ancestors. When the Spanish arrived less than a century later, they found Indian peoples living along the Salt on lands previously occupied by the Hohokam, still farming using canal irrigation. Then, sometime around 1,400 A.D., the Hohokam abandoned the settlements they had called home for at least 1,700 years. The Hohokam built their complex irrigation system, said to rival those in ancient Egypt and China, on both sides of the Salt, leading to the growth of stable urban centers populated by as many as 50,000 people in the basin alone – and this in the midst of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, where temperatures can reach 120 degrees. Named for its brackish waters, the Salt River rises in eastern Arizona and flows southwesterly for more than 200 miles before converging with the Gila River just west of Phoenix. The Salt River can be bone-dry one month and a flooding torrent the next, when the winter rains come or the snowmelt rushes down from the White Mountains, where the Salt originates. Hohokam farmers dug hundreds of miles of canals, some as much as 30 feet wide and 10 feet deep – a remarkable accomplishment achieved with only hand tools and human labor in this land of extremes. The Crosscut Powerplant, center, sits at the beginning of the Grand Canal.īeginning around 300 B.C., the Hohokam practiced irrigated agriculture in the Salt River Valley of Arizona.
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