Six years later, when Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson Miles for the final time, the frontier came to an end. Suddenly, Arizona and Sonora were safe for global capital, which poured in from eastern United States, California, and the British Isles, as the Southern Pacific and other railroads extended their arteries of commerce across deserts and mountains. Both Arizona and Sonora became extractive colonies of the industrial world, their natural resources ripped from the ground and shipped somewhere else for finishing, processing, and consuming. In Arizona, this was the era of the "Three C's," when cattle, copper, and cotton dominated the economy.

The first major extractive industry to explode across the landscape was stock raising. In 1870, there were perhaps 38,000 head of cattle in the Arizona territory. By the early 1890's, there were about 1,500,000 head of cattle and more than a million sheep.

The second major extractive industry--copper mining--depended even more heavily upon the railroads. Unlike gold and silver, copper was an industrial rather than a precious metal. The evolution of the industry therefore became the triumph of technological innovation over declining grades of ore. Staggering amounts of earth had to be moved from mine to smelter in railroad cars, not in freight wagons or on the backs of mules. In copper districts like Bisbee, where Phelps Dodge Corporation's Copper Queen reigned supreme, thousands of miles of shafts and tunnels burrowed underground. And while most of these early districts were in the uplands fringing the Sonoran Deseret, Phelps Dodge and other giants eventually chewed into the desert as well, particularly after open-pit mining became feasible. At Ajo, Mammoth, Twin Buttes, and Silverbell, giant holes begat gargantuan slag heaps, which rose above the desert floor like pyramids erected in honor of the Electrical Age.

Water Control and the Transformation of the Desert
The third major extractive industry--agriculture--led to the ultimate transformation of the Sonoran Desert. For 3000 years, farmers had cultivated their crops along those few stretches of the desert where surface water flowed near arable land. In Sonora, the major agricultural areas were located in the river valleys of the zona serrana, the mountainous central and easter portions of the state. ...  During the Spanish colonial period, the serrana attracted Spaniards and their mestizo decedents as well, who raised wheat, fruits, vegetables, and sugar cane along its cottonwood-shaded floodplains.

After Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, however, Guaymas became Sonora's most important port of entry, and a strong commercial axis between Guyamas and Hermosillo (formerly Pitic)--the gateway to the serrana--developed. Merchants and military officials cast covetous eyes on the rich coastal floodplains of western and southern Sonora, particularly the Yaqui and Mayo river valleys.

Speculators soon descended upon the Yaqui Valley with grand plans to irrigate the coastal plains. In 1890, the Mexican government granted Carlos Conant Maldonadl 300,000 hectares (one hectare, or ha = 2.47 acres) [741,000 acres, or 1160 square miles] along the Rio Yaqui, 100,000 ha along the Rio Mayo, and 100,000 ha [383 sq mi] along the Rio Fuerte in northern Sinaloa in return for surveying the area and building canals along each river [for a total of 2000 square miles]. ... The Richardson Construction Company bought Conant's grant in 1906. In exchange for selling 400-ha blocks of land and supplying irrigation water to the colonialists, ... Richardson received exclusive right to sixty-five percent of the Rio Yaqui's flow for 99 years.