Here in Mesa: Park of The Canals 1878 via LIDAR...There were people here before Mormon settlers arrived in the late 1870's

THIS WAS 8 CENTURIES EARLIER    

More than a thousand years before pumps, concrete channels, and modern surveying equipment reshaped the Salt River Valley, Indigenous engineers were already moving enormous quantities of water across this desert.

Park of the Canals preserves a surviving fragment of that achievement, and a landscape where ancient engineering ultimately helped shape the modern city built around it

Park of the Canals — Mesa, ArizonA                

33°26′41.29″N 111°48′58.67″W

In 1878, a government surveyor said it was impossible for gravity to get water onto the mesa, then they found their answer in a 500-mile network of canals dug 8 centuries earlier.

Surrounded today by neighborhoods, highways, and the modern infrastructure of Mesa, a remarkable piece of one of North America's greatest prehistoric engineering systems still survives. Park of the Canals preserves remnants of the enormous irrigation network built by the people archaeologists call the Hohokam, whose canals transformed the otherwise arid Salt River Valley into an agricultural landscape capable of supporting large communities.

The scale of that system is hard to appreciate today. More than 500 miles of prehistoric canals have been recorded throughout the valley, some extending more than 12 miles and reaching extraordinary dimensions, up to roughly 100 feet wide and 15 feet deep according to historical interpretation at the park. Using hand tools and baskets to remove soil, generations of Hohokam engineers diverted water from the Salt River and carried it across the desert by carefully controlling the gradient of the channels.

By around AD 1000, the system was supporting agriculture across an enormous portion of the valley. Corn, beans, squash, cotton, and other crops grew along these waterways, and settlements developed throughout the irrigated landscape. This wasn't simply a collection of ditches, keeping water flowing across such distances took considerable knowledge of terrain, hydrology, and engineering.

LiDAR makes the contrast between that ancient landscape and modern Mesa especially striking. Roads, subdivisions, flood-control works, and the modern canal system dominate the surrounding terrain today, yet portions of the older channels remain visible within the preserved corridor. The park protects both prehistoric canal remnants and archaeological traces of Hohokam habitation, and the site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 for its archaeological, agricultural, and engineering significance.

The story of these canals didn't end when the Hohokam system stopped operating. When Mormon settlers arrived in the Mesa area in the late 1870s, Captain William Hancock, the U.S. government surveyor who had surveyed the city of Phoenix, initially told Mesa's founders that getting water onto the mesa by gravity flow simply wasn't possible. He reluctantly agreed to survey the area anyway and discovered that the old Indian canal, extended by the Mormon pioneers, could actually work, provided the canal head was moved about 100 feet farther upriver from where earlier surveyors Pomeroy and Sirrine had placed it.

The main Mesa company arrived on February 14, 1878, and construction began three days later. Workers were paid $1.50 a day for a man, $3 a day for a man with a team, and total labor costs ran to about $48,000. Slips and Fresno scrapers, pulled by teams, were used to clean out the old Indian canals rather than dig entirely new ones. By April 1878, water had been let into the first mile of canal, enough to irrigate the crops already planted, and by October 1878, water was flowing up the bluff, seemingly defying gravity, exactly what Hancock had once said couldn't be done.

That water flowed through this canal to diversion gates just south of Park of the Canals, the only point on the mesa where water can flow in three directions. The best-preserved section of the ancient canal cleaned out and used by the 1878 Mesa pioneers sits about thirty yards southwest of the park today.

Those pioneer canals were eventually superseded by larger modern works, including the Consolidated Canal built in 1891–92, but the underlying achievement stuck: Hohokam canals were followed and reused by 19th-century settlers, and portions of Arizona's modern irrigation network still trace routes laid out by Indigenous engineers centuries earlier.

Today the archaeological landscape survives inside a 31-acre city park in the middle of Mesa. From ground level, the remaining channels can be surprisingly subtle. From above, and especially in LiDAR, the broader relationship between the preserved canals, surrounding terrain, and modern development becomes much easier to see.

More than a thousand years before pumps, concrete channels, and modern surveying equipment reshaped the Salt River Valley, Indigenous engineers were already moving enormous quantities of water across this desert. Park of the Canals preserves a surviving fragment of that achievement, and a landscape where ancient engineering ultimately helped shape the modern city built around it.

Special thanks to Travis Mogensen for pointing this site out in the comments on the recent Pyramids of Casa Grande post.

#LiDAR #Arizona #NativeAmericanHistory #mesaaz #phoenix