About Phoenix | Phoenix History

It was Jack Swilling that decided that the Salt River Valley could become a fertile home. The brown dry soil was mostly free of rocks and located in an area relatively free of snow or frost. Jack Swilling devised and in 1867 implemented a plan to reopen the miles of irrigation canals first dug by the long gone Hohokum Indians.  In the following year a small community had formed about four miles east of the present downtown Phoenix.

Swilling came to Arizona as a prospector and joined the Confederate Army at the start of the Civil War. When he refused to forage livestock from friends and neighbors in Pinos Altos, he deserted from the Confederate Army and joined the Union Army as a scout and courier, becoming familiar with most of Arizona in the process. He went on to become the city’s first Postmaster.

The city of Phoenix has grown to over 1.5 million people, the fifth largest in the United States. A series of dams upriver on the Salt River control the annual flooding, including two inflatable dams in nearby Tempe that also maintan a lake used as a recreational area.