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The Archive
Photographs, deeds, clippings and oral histories, with sources attached to every item. The archive is being built now; here is how it is organized.
Collections
Collection
The Neals
The documented lives of Curly and Annie, and the record where it disagrees with the legend.
CollectionThe Hotel
1895 to today — the building, its rooms, its guests, and its condition now.
CollectionBuffalo Bill at Oracle
What Cody was actually doing here, who brought him, and who got the credit.
CollectionOracle & the Southwest
The town, the mines, the Control Road, and the country around them.
CollectionPrimary Documents
Deeds, clippings, census pages and letters — scanned, transcribed, sourced.
In preparationFilm
The documentary and the short films, as they are finished.
In preparationBooks & Merchandise
The written history and the shop.
Timeline
- 1849Curly Neal born in Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation
- 1870Annie Box born, January 8
- 1878Curly arrives in Tucson with the Army
- 1879The Box family arrives in Tucson by wagon train
- 1885Curly wins the Tucson–Oracle mail contract
- 1890Curly buys the Anna mine property in Oracle
- 1892Curly and Annie marry, January 4, in Tucson
- 1894The hotel is built
- 1895The Mountain View opens, February
- 1902Buffalo Bill Cody’s mining company is at work near Oracle
- 1908A Tucson paper calls Curly “the Negro Neale”
- 1912Cody plays Santa Claus at the hotel at Christmas
- 1917Cody dies in Denver
- 1936Curly Neal dies, September 30
- 1940sThe hotel stands empty
- 1950Annie Neal dies, May
- 1957The building becomes a church
- 2022Garry Davis buys the building
People
- Box, Hannah — Annie’s mother
- Box, Wiley — Annie’s father
- Bowyer, Herbert — foreman of the Neals’ ranch
- Cody, Louisa — guest at the hotel
- Cody, William F. “Buffalo Bill” — guest and friend
- Neal, Annie Box — hotel founder and host
- Neal, William “Curly” — hotel founder, freighter, mail contractor
- Wilson, George Stone — guest from 1906; memoirist
A–Z index
- Bowyer, Herbert
- Box, Hannah
- Box, Wiley
- Campo Bonito mine
- Cody, Louisa
- Cody, William F. “Buffalo Bill”
- Faith
- Freight, stagecoaches and the mail
- Hotel life and its guests
- Mammoth
- Mining
- Mountain View Hotel
- Music
- Neal, Annie Box
- Neal, William “Curly”
- Oracle, Arizona
- Race and the historical record
- Tahlequah, Cherokee Nation
- The building then and now
- Tucson, Arizona
- Wilson, George Stone