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 in 1878 with little more than nerve, scouted for the Army alongside William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, and settled in Tucson. The two 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.

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 would remember her as “the saint of the Santa Catalina Mountains.”

The Mountain View opened in February 1895 on 160 oak-studded acres in the foothills of the Santa Catalinas. Its adobe walls were two feet thick — the blocks made right there on the property — and 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 U.S. 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

When Annie sold the Mountain View in 1938, the frontier era that built it was already gone. The hotel sat empty for years. In the 1950s the wraparound porches were torn off, a church was built against it, and plain stucco was spread over the old red-brick face — until the grand hotel all but vanished from the street.

But it’s still standing. A hundred and thirty years later, right on American Avenue in Oracle. Behind those plain walls are the two-foot adobe blocks, the rooms that once welcomed the world, and a building that still looks much the way it did in 1895.

The MountainView Fellowship of Oracle exists to save it from further decay — and bring it back.