Principle of the Quarter

The laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them to a separate and equal station.— Declaration of Independence, 1776

The Founders built the entire American system on one premise: certain principles of right and wrong exist independent of any government. They called it Natural Law — the idea that reason and observation reveal universal rules for human conduct. Just governments don't create rights. They recognize ones that already exist.

Jack Swilling saw opportunity where others saw only ruins. In 1867, he returned to the Salt River Valley with investors and workers and established the Swilling Irrigation and Canal Company. His plan was audacious in its simplicity: clean out the ancient Hohokam canals and use them exactly as their original engineers had intended. The gamble paid off. By 1868, Swilling's crews had cleared several miles of the old canals, and water flowed again through channels that had been dry for 400 years. Farmers planted wheat, barley, corn, and vegetables. The hay camp that supplied Fort McDowell with feed became a permanent agricultural settlement. On October 20, 1870, a town meeting established a formal community. Darrell Duppa, an eccentric English aristocrat with classical education, suggested the name Phoenix — a city rising from the ashes of a vanished civilization.

Phoenix's early growth followed the contours of those resurrected canals. The Arizona Canal, completed in 1885, ran forty-one miles from a diversion dam northeast of present-day Scottsdale, following the route of a major Hohokam canal and feeding numerous smaller laterals. The Grand Canal, finished in 1878, also traced Hohokam routes. Many of Phoenix's major streets today — such as Grand Avenue and Indian School Road — run alongside or directly atop these historic waterways. Modern utility corridors, fiber optic lines, and even the light rail system follow paths first surveyed by Hohokam engineers over a thousand years ago.

The principles that guided Hohokam engineering — observation of natural patterns, gradual refinement through trial and error, cooperative labor for common benefit — echo the Natural Law philosophy that animated America's Founders. Both the Hohokam and the American revolutionaries believed that human reason, applied to observable reality, could create systems of order and prosperity. The Hohokam didn't have written permits or federal agencies; they had generations of accumulated knowledge about hydrology, geology, and agriculture. Similarly, Jack Swilling and his partners didn't wait for territorial government approval to resurrect the canals — they recognized a natural opportunity and applied practical reason to exploit it. This was self-governance in its most literal form: people organizing themselves to manage a shared resource according to principles derived from nature itself.

The challenges facing Phoenix today would be familiar to both the Hohokam and the city's nineteenth-century pioneers: how to sustain a growing population in an arid environment with finite water resources. The Salt River, which once flooded violently in spring and ran dry by summer, now flows year-round thanks to a series of dams — Roosevelt (1911), Mormon Flat (1925), Horse Mesa (1927), and Stewart Mountain (1930) — that together form a 2.5 million acre-foot storage system. The Salt River Project, established in 1903 as one of the first federal reclamation projects, is now a quasi-governmental entity serving 2 million people. It operates according to principles the Hohokam would recognize: cooperative water management, shared infrastructure costs, and governance by water users themselves.

Visitors to Phoenix can still see Hohokam canal remnants. Pueblo Grande Museum and Archaeological Park, located just east of Sky Harbor International Airport on Washington Street, preserves a Hohokam platform mound and village site occupied from 450 to 1450 AD. The museum displays original canal sections and explains the engineering principles behind them. The nearby Park of Four Waters, at the confluence of ancient canals and modern water infrastructure, features interpretive signs explaining how twenty-first-century Phoenix still depends on routes mapped out centuries before Columbus.

This continuity — from Hohokam engineers to Jack Swilling's pioneers to today's water managers — illustrates a truth the Founders understood: legitimate governance emerges from practical wisdom applied to real conditions, not imposed from above by distant authority. The Hohokam didn't inherit their canal system; they built it over generations, refining and expanding based on what worked. Phoenix's founders didn't petition a king for permission; they resurrected existing infrastructure and established a community. Today's Phoenix residents don't passively receive water from some abstract entity; they participate (or should) in the governance of water districts, improvement districts, and municipal utilities that descend directly from those original cooperative efforts.

As Phoenix approaches 1.8 million residents and grapples with Colorado River shortages and aquifer depletion, the city faces the same fundamental question the Hohokam faced: can human ingenuity and cooperative governance manage finite resources in an unforgiving environment? The answer, as it was 1,000 years ago, lies not in abandoning Natural Law principles of reason and observation, but in applying them with renewed urgency. The canals still flow through Phoenix. The question is whether the civic wisdom that built them — and rebuilt them — still flows through the people who depend on them.

During America's 250th anniversary, Phoenix's ancient waterways offer a profound civics lesson: self-governance isn't a 1776 invention. It's a human necessity that emerges whenever people confront shared challenges requiring cooperative solutions. The Hohokam governed themselves for fourteen centuries. Phoenix's pioneers governed themselves when no territorial authority yet reached them. Today's Phoenicians govern themselves — or fail to — every time the city council debates water policy, every time the school board allocates resources, every time voters approve or reject a bond measure. The infrastructure is ancient. The responsibility is eternal. The choice is yours.