American Indian Culture and Research Journal

[T]he Indians . . . continued to increase their cultivated lands and were prosperous and contented. White people began to take water from the river about forty years ago. The first diversion being so small we hardly noticed it, but they gradually took more out each year till we noticed our loss by not being able to irrigate all our fields. We were forced to abandon them little by little, until some twenty years ago when we were left high and dry. —Chir-purtke, sixty-seven-year-old Pima elder, June 1914 INTRODUCTION On 17 June 1902, after more than a decade of political debate and maneuvering, the National Reclamation Act became law. This legislation provided direct federal subsidies for the development of irrigation projects across the arid West. Initially, reclamation projects focused on public, rather than private, lands; and since there were large tracts of public lands in the Gila River and Casa Grande valleys, many people—including government officials—believed the first federal reclamation project in Arizona would be built there. Political leaders and farmers from these valleys, banking on a large area of public lands waiting to be developed, were well aware of the chief factor they believed would carry them in their desire for the first federally financed reclamation project: the well-known but unfulfilled government promises to alleviate the water problems of the Pima tribe.