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  • Making the Desert Blossom:Spreading the Gospel of Irrigation
  • Katherine Heslop (bio)

Introduction

Places in the West rise and recede from the ecological realities of a setting in space. The harsh realities of arid regions within the American West require humans to join forces to survive—a rule that has applied from pre-contact societies to the massive urban aggregations of today (Logan 2006, 6). The changeover involving a shift from bare survival in the arid Southwest to living well required raising levels of comfort, wealth, and prosperity, and those altered community settlement patterns were inescapably shaped by irrigation advocates’ embrace of reclamation. The enthusiasm of a few believers for a nearly universal faith required a forceful spreading of the gospel of irrigation, and to make that happen demanded a sophisticated campaign that depicted the story of irrigation as progressive and essential. Pictorial art was a sizable element of that campaign, and propagandistic proselytizing came to be institutionalized in southwestern thought and federally supported action.

Making the Desert Blossom,1 a 1928 painting by Frank J. MacKenzie of the Salt River Valley near Phoenix, Arizona, is a portrait of the social and cultural reclamation geographies presented by the challenges of arid-land soils (Figure 1). The Bureau of Reclamation commissioned plein aire artist MacKenzie to create this panoramic painting for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition in Seville, Spain. The painting suggests a paradox, displaying modern, early-twentieth-century reclamation technology that might reinvigorate the Jeffersonian ideal, bringing yeoman farmers and homemakers to lay claim and settle yet another so-called last frontier of the American West. The American agrarian paradigm never was put through a more trying test as it confronted western aridity. Phoenix and the Salt River Valley exemplify a region [End Page 29] where water was central to history. Without the Salt River, the region’s main river and riparian ecosystem, no permanent urbanized human society—and certainly not a metropolitan area of 3.2 million people (2011)—would have been able to sustain itself in this desert landscape. The pre-contact Amerindians2 and Anglo cultures exploited the Salt River watershed in accordance with their own suitable cultural concepts (Logan 2006, 4). The Salt River Valley displays fundamental patterns of human use of nature, a fragile alliance subject to constant adjustment that speaks to a mutualistic nature-culture presence. Despite physical landscape restraints, the Salt River provided an opportunity for agricultural development through technology, permitting the conversion of a desert environment into an agrarian landscape, exactly what was accomplished by cultures from pre-contact Hohokam to latter-day Euro-/Anglo-American societies. Federal reclamation subsidies, authorized by the Reclamation Act of 1902, enabled an aggressive transformation of the Salt River Valley into the Salt River Project (SRP), through the construction of the Theodore Roosevelt Dam, establishing the first federal multipurpose reclamation project (Figure 2).


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Figure 1.

Making the Desert Blossom, 1928 painting of the Salt River Valley by Frank J. MacKenzie.

(Photograph by Jason Jurgena. Reproduced with permission, Bureau of Reclamation)

Irrigation established Greater Phoenix in the Valley of the Sun. Arguably one of the most successful Reclamation Service projects, by the 1950s the Salt River Project had outgrown its primary purpose of providing a reliable water storage and delivery infrastructure to the valley’s cities, agricultural lands, businesses, and industries. This could better be considered an intermediate landscape that not only provided the structure for the development of metropolitan Phoenix, but transformed arid western lands into a modern American urban society.3 [End Page 30]


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Figure 2.

Untitled map of the Salt River Project, 1934. Cartographer: T. A. Hayden.

Courtesy Arizona State University Map Library.

Water in the West is a symbol of regional identity, as watersheds ultimately join disparate areas into a powerful whole. Fresh water is a precious resource and an economic boon. Despite its essential value, fresh water in the American West is scarce and ill distributed. Precipitation in the West is anything but evenly available. Surface water, which infiltrates quickly, originates from either seasonal rainfall/snowmelt or infrequent torrential rainstorms dousing the desert over a short period. Such...

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