The Mountain View Hotel · Oracle, Arizona
In 1895, William “Curly” Neal and Annie Box Neal opened one of the most celebrated frontier hotels in the Arizona Territory. It stands today as a testament to an amazing — nearly forgotten — story.
Curly & Annie Neal
An orphaned frontier scout and a six-foot hotelier raised across four heritages — together they built something the Arizona Territory had never seen.
1849 – 1936
Born in the Cherokee Nation — the son of a Black father and a Cherokee mother who had survived the Trail of Tears — Curly Neal was orphaned by the age of seven. He came west as a young man in 1878 with little more than nerve. He scouted for the Army alongside William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and settled in Tucson. He and Buffalo Bill became lifelong friends.
Within a decade he had built one of the largest overland transportation operations in southern Arizona: mail contracts, stage lines, freight wagons, livery stables, and a cattle ranch that ran thousands of head. He carried gold bullion through bandit country and, by his own account, never lost a shipment. In 1890 he bought the Oracle land that would become the Mountain View.
1870 – 1950
Annie Box was born in Oklahoma and raised across four heritages — Cherokee, Black, English, and German. Six feet tall, convent-schooled in Tucson, a midwife and a published composer before she was grown, she married Curly Neal in 1892.
The Mountain View was hers. She shaped it down to the last detail and ran it with a grace that drew travelers from across the world. The Tucson Citizen called her “the queen of hostesses.” A later history of the hotel would remember her as “the saint of the Santa Catalina Mountains.”
The Mountain View
The Mountain View opened in February 1895 on 160 oak-studded acres in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. Its walls were two feet thick, built of large adobe blocks made on the property; deep porches wrapped the building on every side. Annie supervised the construction every step of the way. It cost some $90,000 to build and furnish — a fortune in its day.
For twenty-five years the guest register filled with names from forty-five states and thirteen nations: an ambassador, a United States postmaster general, Russian and European nobility, celebrated authors — and Buffalo Bill Cody himself, who one Christmas played Santa Claus for the children of Oracle.
“The peer of the best city hotels in all Arizona.”— Los Angeles Herald, 1896
The Restoration
When Annie Neal sold the Mountain View in 1938, the frontier era that made it was already passing. The hotel stood empty for years. In the 1950s, the porches were torn off, and a church addition was built against it. Stucco was spread over the original red brick facade until the Mountain View all but disappeared from view.
It is still there. Behind the plain walls on American Avenue stand the two-foot adobe, the wraparound porches, and the rooms that once welcomed the world. The MountainView Fellowship of Oracle has made saving the building from further decay its primary goal, followed by efforts to bring it back — to restore the building, keep it alive and in use, and tell the full story of the remarkable couple who built it.
Stay in Touch
The restoration is just beginning, and there is a great deal of story still to tell. A narrative film, a deeper history, and a way to support the work are all on the way. If you want to help, visit mfoo.org for more information.
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MountainView Fellowship of Oracle · Oracle, Arizona
