Phœnix offers to the resident or the visitor a good proportion of the best that life can give: in good society, that which is intelligent, moral, cultured, and sympathetic; in an admirable school system; in churches of many denominations,—Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Christian Science, and others,—all having their fine houses of worship and earnest congregations. There is an excellent and a constantly growing public library, and there are four daily and several weekly newspapers, business blocks that would do no discredit to any large Eastern city, a circuit telephone system completely equipped, gas and water works, free city and rural mail delivery, good hotels, a theatre, and an opera house. There are banks and a Board of Trade. There are clubs both of men and women. The State Normal School of Arizona is nine miles distant—in Tempe.
There are three railroads that centre in Phœnix which transport the traveller with the usual accepted ease and luxury of modern railroading; and a new road to form a link in a second Santa Fé transcontinental line will then place Phœnix on a trunk road over which the Santa Fé traffic will largely pass.
The winters in Phœnix are most attractive. From October till May there is a climate all balm and sunshine without the enervating quality felt in the tropics. The region all around has good roads, and driving and riding are most enjoyable.
Seventy-five miles east from Phœnix, in the Tonto Basin, the government is building a vast water storage dam which it is expected will liberally irrigate two hundred thousand acres of land which, under reclamation, will produce in rich abundance both agricultural and horticultural products. The climate and conditions combine those of the temperate and the semi-tropical zones and favor products grown in both. The Tonto dam will be, with the possible exception of the Assouan dam in Egypt, the greatest storage enterprise in the world. It will be constructed of hard sandstone imbedded in cement, making it as permanent as the mountains. It will be two hundred and eighty-five feet above foundations and only two hundred feet wide at the bottom. Above will be a lake about twenty-five miles long, with storage capacity for one and a half millions acre-feet, which means enough water to cover that number of acres a foot deep. Even to the best of cement, Nature has provided on the ground every necessity for construction. Along the hillsides above is being dug a power canal, to discharge above the dam, there to generate not less than five thousand horsepower,—more than enough for the demands of construction. When the dam is finished this power will be transmitted electrically to the vicinity of Phœnix, here to be used for pumping. The government engineers have made plans for eventually developing eighteen thousand horsepower, by harnessing the falls of the river and the canals.
The Salt River Valley has more than fifty thousand acres devoted to alfalfa, which sometimes yields six crops in a year. Wheat, barley, and corn are also grown, and the orange groves produce the finest fruit known in the Eastern markets, antedating by a month the California oranges. Grapes, apricots, and dates abound; and if Maricopa County does not literally as well as figuratively find that her land is flowing in milk and honey, it is certainly not for lack of the most favorable conditions.
The Arizona strawberries, too, are a feature of importance in the fruit market, as for both size and flavor they absolutely exceed almost any other in the United States.
All this sunny prosperity of conditions and loveliness of climate reacts on life. There is a poise, a serene confidence, and a charm of good-will and joyous companionship felt in Phœnix that give to this delightful young city an individuality of its own.
The great dam now being built in the Tonto Basin has made it necessary to destroy the town of Roosevelt,—a village of two thousand inhabitants, with its churches, schools, water-works, electric lights, and other appliances of modern civilization. "Roosevelt must perish," writes a press correspondent, "that a desert may be made to bloom. Already the marvellous engineering work is well under way. The walls of the narrow cañon through which Salt River rushes on edge are being locked by a massive monolith of solid masonry, the highest arch dam in the world."
The writer continues:
"This wonderful structure of sandstone and cement will be two hundred and eighty feet in height from foundation to parapet. Placed by the side of an eighteen-story skyscraper, this dam would rise ten feet above it, while its length on top would be more than two city blocks. A turbulent stream, with its enormous floods, will beat itself into stillness against the masonry monster, its foam and spume lost in a deep lake twenty-five miles long and two miles wide.
"By day and by night the dull roar of dynamite breaks the desert stillness, and the cañon walls go crashing down to furnish material for this structure. On the hill far above, the rock crushers never stop grinding the limestone, and great kilns, white hot, are burning daily hundreds of barrels of cement.
"When night comes, myriads of electric lights burst forth, weirdly illuminating a busy army of toilers working gnome-like in a shadowy cañon. A star-gemmed heaven looks down upon a wondrous scene, unreal, awesome, and inspiring.
"This great work of the government possesses unusual attractions for the engineer and the layman. It is located in a valley which has been the abode of three races, one of which lived here when Cæsar sat upon his throne. In an age forgotten the cliff-dwellers built their eyrie-like homes along the cañons of this stream, and in the narrow valleys the lines of their irrigation canals may yet be traced. Centuries later the Apaches came, and for many years their tepees dotted the basin. Then came the white man, who sought to reconquer the desert, which had resumed its sway after the cliff-dwellers vanished.
"The battle with unfriendly nature proved too much for the pioneer, and Uncle Sam took a hand in the fight. No problems could daunt his engineers. They laughed at floods and mocked at desolation. A dam site was discovered sixty-two miles from a railroad, and they proceeded to connect it with civilization by a marvellous road which winds its way for forty miles through deep cañons, along the face of frowning precipices, over foaming cataracts, and across broad areas of treeless desert. It opens up to the transcontinental traveller a new region of compelling interest and of splendid scenery. Better than that, it provides an easy thoroughfare for the transportation of heavy machinery of all kinds and the supplies for the new community which sprang into life almost at a word.
"... Every stone that is laid in the narrow arch, which is to retain the foaming river now rushing through the cañon, brings nearer and nearer the day when Roosevelt shall vanish beneath an inland sea. When the great dam is completed, in 1908, and its massive gates of steel, weighing eight hundred thousand pounds, are shut down, a rising flood will cover the site of the city with two hundred feet of water.
"The ingenuity of man has been taxed in this work. Its isolated position, the difficult physical conditions, the tremendous and unexpected floods, have tried the mettle of the engineers. The enormous amount of cement required was in itself a problem which forced Uncle Sam to turn manufacturer in order to solve it. Nature, having kindly furnished an ideal site for a dam, was thoughtful enough to provide materials near at hand for making cement. A cement mill was quickly erected at a cost of one hundred thousand dollars. The downward rush of the river was utilized for electric power to operate the mill, and many thousand barrels of first-class cement have already been used in the works.
"But while the city of Roosevelt, with the homes of its two thousand inhabitants, is doomed, a fair valley is to be redeemed in which the agricultural possibilities are not exceeded anywhere in the world. Under almost tropical skies, with a soil of wonderful fertility, the farmer in Salt River Valley will cultivate his orange groves, his fig trees, his vines, while his broad meadows will yield him heavy harvests of alfalfa six and seven times a year.
"The great lake which will be created by the Roosevelt dam is to be tapped by canals hundreds of miles long and extending all over the broad valley around Phœnix. Vast areas now absolutely worthless will be transformed quickly into blossoming orchards and purpling vineyards, and hundreds of happy homes will dot a plain where now the giant saguaro rears its spiny head and the Gila monster roams at will."