By Stuart Rosebrook
Arizona’s first territorial capital became a commercial transportation hub soon after its founding in 1864.
On December 31, 1886, the first Prescott and Arizona Central Railway locomotive pulling freight and passenger cars arrived in Prescott from Seligman, where it connected to the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad, a subsidiary of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. The hastily built rail line wasn’t successful or dependable, leading to the construction of the Santa Fe, Prescott and Phoenix Railway between Ash Fork and Prescott, which began operations in 1893.
Thirty years before the first successful rail line connected Prescott to the world, the Walker Party discovered gold along Lynx Creek. Miners encountered established Indigenous trails nearby, which followed riparian corridors with sources of water to the north, south, east and west.
With the founding of Fort Whipple and Prescott along Granite Creek in May 1864, they became a hub of commerce for the military, miners and merchants. The territorial legislature, boosters, mine owners and military leaders developed trails into wagon and stage roads, connecting Prescott to Wickenburg; San Bernardino, California, via Colorado River ferry crossings at Ehrenberg and Hardyville; Santa Fe, New Mexico, via Beale’s Wagon Road across the Verde Valley and Mogollon Rim; and the Salt River Valley via the Black Canyon. General George Crook added the Crook Trail, connecting Fort Whipple to Fort Verde and Fort Apache. Within a few years, Prescott was the commercial center of central and northern Arizona.
Early on, the Black Canyon Road from Prescott east and south to the Salt River Valley was considered the most efficient route south. On October 12, 1865, Richard Gird’s Official Map Of The Territory Of Arizona, documented the first reference to the Woolsey Trail, later becoming the Black Canyon Road. In 1869 the Engineer’s Office of the Military Division of the Pacific published Itineraries of Routes in Arizona and Southern California, listing the Black Canyon as “a proposed wagon road.” In the fall of 1873, local newspapers and merchants hailed the beginnings of profitable freighting on the Black Canyon Road. The federal government realized the route’s importance, and in 1875, the Treasury Department appropriated $15,000 to the War Department to build a military road from Fort Whipple to Camp McDowell.
In 1877 the territorial legislature moved back to Prescott from Tucson, and a silver strike at Tip Top mine in the southern Bradshaws induced the first stage line south through the Black Canyon to Phoenix via the new mill town of Gillett. The legislators authorized the enlistment of volunteers to construct a road from Prescott to Phoenix, while the Arizona Miner promoted better roads because “hundreds of Maricopas will every summer visit points in Yavapai and Mohave counties, and citizens of the northern counties will travel to Phoenix…every winter.”
In January 1878, Thomas Cusack’s stagecoach line made its first mail delivery from Prescott to Phoenix via Gillett. Three months later, William H. Caldwell and Alfred LeValley bought the line from Cusack and advertised, “We intend to make this a permanent business and to that end we are stocking the road with the very best stage horses to [be] found in the country.” The stagecoach era in Prescott lasted nearly four decades, until the 1914 automobile revolution replaced stages, freight wagons, buckboards, mule-trains and shortline railroads that had helped build Arizona on rough-hewn routes.
Stuart Rosebrook, Ph.D., executive director of Sharlot Hall Museum, based the majority of his Prescott transportation research on his unpublished master’s thesis “The Black Canyon Highway: Highway to History, 1863-1948 (Arizona State University, December 1994).
On June 7th, at Sharlot Hall Museum’s Education Center, 2pm to 3pm, see Rosebrook’s lecture about “Early Transportation in the West”- Check our Event Calendar https://sharlothallmuseum.org/event-calendar/ for information.
“Days Past” is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners International (www.prescottcorral.org). This and other Days Past articles are also available at archives.sharlothallmuseum.org/articles/days-past-articles/1 The public is encouraged to submit proposed articles and inquiries to dayspast@sharlothallmuseum.org Please contact SHM Research Center reference desk at 928-277-2003, or via email at archivesrequest@sharlothallmuseum.org for information or assistance with photo requests.