Monsoon ends this month, and while meteorologists and residents alike analyze how this year’s rainy season is going, we take a look back the wettest year of rain on record in Phoenix. Hoping for rain is an annual wish in Arizona – they had just the opposite problem here 120 years ago.
(Wiki Commons)
This street scene on Feb. 4, 1905, shows flood waters from Cave Creek.
(Photograph by Walter J. Lubken, courtesy Wiki Commons)
A completed culvert on the Power Canal located about four miles east of Roosevelt Dam on March 29, 1905.
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It is hardly considered good form for any Arizonan to admit satiety in the matter of rain. Nevertheless there would be no protest in these parts if there could be two or three days of sunshine now.”
Editor's note: This article first appeared in Sun Life Magazine, an Independent Newsmedia publication.
This month marks the official end of monsoon season in the Valley – on Sept. 30 to be exact. The average monsoon rainfall in Phoenix yields about 2.43 inches, or about one-third of the Valley’s total annual precipitation.
Whether or not you experience that much rain at your own residence is another story at the mercy of unpredictable storm patterns. And even if at times it doesn’t quite feel like the Valley reaches that average, we do and then some. Consider that the 2022 monsoon brought 2.23 inches of rain, which was right on target, and in 2021 residents were blessed with a whopping 4.2 inches of monsoon rain per the official gauge at Sky Harbor International Airport.
Longtime Valley residents easily recall the wettest monsoon ever. Back in the summer of 1984, monsoon dropped a record 9.56 inches on Phoenix in the traditional June 15-Sept. 30 season alone. The summer of 1911 proved just as wet, with 9.31 inches, and the 1946 monsoon quenched the parched Valley with 7.45 inches.
Imagine an entire calendar year of rain in the desert. Record-busting totals.
More than a century ago Phoenix residents had to deal with a literal deluge of historic proportions.
While Phoenix averages around 7 to 7.5 inches of annual rainfall, residents back in 1905 weathered a record 19.73 inches of rain over 12 months. Considering that the city’s driest on record was the 2.82 inches yielded in 2002, residents dealt with unprecedented rainfall in 1905 that was as unpredictable as it can be today.
“If you have the pattern set up right in a given summer you can get repeated thunderstorm events,” Mark O’Malley, meteorologist with the National Weather Service-Phoenix said. “And just by random chance, those years, you happen to have numerous days of thunderstorms directly on top of the reporting station.”
O’Malley added that climate indicators don’t go back that far so a true circumstantial cause for that wildly random rainfall total is lost to history.
But residents in 1905 didn’t care about setting records. In some cases, they were in survival mode.
Phoenix was booming as it was, with a population of 5,544 in 1900 swelling quickly to 11,134 by 1910.
Unsurprisingly, drought was definitely an issue by 1905.
“While the Salt River was essential for the area's agricultural and economic growth, its flow was erratic — too little or too much water challenged Valley farmers,” the Bureau of Reclamation notes. “Alternate drought and flood cycles in the early 1890s, and extended drought in the late 1890s, forced thousands of acres out of cultivation and contributed to an all-around economic malaise. Drought sent many settlers packing in search of areas with more dependable water supplies.”
There were no such issues in 1905 as the deluge particularly walloped Valley residents in the first four months of the year.
As early as Jan. 10 a report in the Arizona Republic said, “It is still raining and no one knows definitely if it will ever stop.” Marking some foreshadowing, the downpour badly damaged the Tempe Canal telephone line.
Four days later cattle rancher, L.L. Harmon – the future president of the Arizona Cattle Grower’s Association, and mayor of Phoenix by the early 1920s – had gone to Southern California to secure a spring pasture site, which he did with an option on 12,000 acres of feed until April. Had Harmon done so a year earlier he would have saved $10,000, or around $370,000 in today’s money, trying to feed his cattle in parched Arizona.
The rain even this early into the year changed all that.
“It was his intention if, before that time, feed became as scarce here as it was last spring, to gather all the cattle on his range and ship them to California,” a Jan. 14, 1905, article reported. “Since the rain here, however, it will be unnecessary to ship cattle out of the territory.”
A week later, the wet stuff wasn’t letting up.
Reports showed that Tonto Basin in western Gila County “was submerged.” Elsewhere, roads were impassable, and the stagecoach from Globe to Roosevelt was running hours behind. All washes and drains were “roaring torrents, and the river is a veritable monster, carrying everything in its way.”
“Old timers in the basin say that this has been the hardest rain for years,” a Jan. 21 article noted.
It got worse.
Rain started falling at 9:20 p.m. Feb. 7 and continued through to 6:45 a.m. the next morning. Accumulation totals showed 2.04 inches in just one week, and 5.35 inches in the 37 days since the first of the new year. Low atmospheric pressure was recorded, and a storm center then was still off the coast of Southern California.
It was still coming down by Feb. 12.
“It is hardly considered good form for any Arizonan to admit satiety in the matter of rain,” a report of the time noted. “Nevertheless there would be no protest in these parts if there could be two or three days of sunshine now.”
With rain still falling by Feb. 22, a team of around 60 men had been working to repair a canal near Buckeye already damaged due to heavy rains when the downpour forced them to halt their work. A resident near the Powers Butte Canal there was literally running out of food. He fashioned a crude raft made of cottonwood logs and limbs to try and cross to get closer to fellow neighbors and nourishment under a bright shining moon. He slipped into water up to his arms.
“Wet and without any shoes he was compelled to walk two and one-half miles” where he finally arrived at the home of a friend, a Republic article of the time noted. He was “nearly frozen” as it also was one of the coldest nights of the young year.
A completed culvert on the Power Canal located about four miles east of Roosevelt Dam on March 29, 1905.
(Photograph by Walter J. Lubken, courtesy Wiki Commons)
February did bring some good news to soggy residents of the Arizona Territory that wouldn’t achieve statehood for another seven years, though. A bill had gone through the U.S. Senate to soon adopt Oklahoma and New Mexico into the United States “with Arizona eliminated,” to put to an end early speculation that the territory would become part of New Mexico.
Hanging onto their future statehood independence notwithstanding, there was still no let up for Valley residents by March.
“Tempe and the surrounding country was visited by the worst rain and hail storm so far yet this season,” a report read. “Near the Double Buttes (known today as the Papago Buttes) it seemed to split and the worst of it went south and east. Southeast of the buttes it rained harder, some say, than they ever saw it rain anywhere. It came in a sheet and could be seen coming for miles.”
One report calculated 1.42 inches had fallen in 45 minutes on March 16. By March 31, total accumulation for the year was already 10.22 inches – nearly twice the 5.57 inches of rainfall measured in all of 1904.
“Mighty little confidence is placed in appearances and it will take more than three days of sunshine to demonstrate successfully that the trouble is over,” a report from the time stated.
By April 12, 12.23 inches of rain had dumped on Valley residents for the year.
“The pile structure portion of the Phoenix & Eastern railroad bridge in Tempe, erected for temporary repair of the bridge which was injured in the last preceding flood was swept away yesterday morning as the result of another big rise in the Salt River,” a local report noted.
Believe it or not, residents finally caught a break. Rainfall dissipated by the summer months, but the accumulation was not over.
That fall the Arizona State Fair was set to debut at its new location – the State Fairgrounds still in use today at McDowell Road and 19th Avenue.
Originally scheduled for late November that year, rain postponed the event to the week of Christmas to add a holiday touch to its inaugural version at the new site.
“(Postponement) had been under consideration for two or three days as a last alternative made necessary by the destructive copiousness of the rain,” a report from the time wrote.
The debut State Fair ended up going through Sunday, Dec. 31.
Even the weather forecast for that last day of the year in 1905, which featured rainfall desert residents have never experienced since, was ironically appropriate.
“Warmer in the north portion (of the Valley),” it read, “… and rain.”
Steve Stockmar News Editor | Sun Life Magazine & Arts & Entertainment
YourValley.net
Meet Steve Steve Stockmar joined Independent Newsmedia, Inc., USA, in 2017, and has been an Arizona journalist for almost 30 years. He serves as editor of Sun Life Magazine and contributes to West Valley communities where he focuses mostly on arts & culture, education, and profiles of neighbors making a difference.
Community: Every season Steve serves as a “buddy” with the Miracle League of Arizona in Scottsdale, has volunteered his time with Family Promise in Glendale, and previously served on the Ghostlight Theatre board in Sun City West.
Education: Graduated from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff with a Journalism major and English minor.
Random Fact: Steve once won a 50-player live Texas Hold ’Em poker tournament.
Hobbies: Anguishing over his beloved Chicago Cubs and Bears; listening to Beatles and Grateful Dead music.
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