The Neals

William “Curly” Neal (1849–1936)

Curly Neal was born in 1849 in Tahlequah, in the Cherokee Nation. His mother was Cherokee and his father was Black. He was orphaned young, and as a young man he worked as a scout for the Army.

He came to Tucson in 1878 and left the Army the following year. He cooked in a Tucson restaurant and dug cellars on the side, then built a livery and freight business. In 1885 he won a contract to carry the U.S. mail between Tucson, Oracle and the mines beyond, and he held it for decades. His wagons also carried gold bullion from the Mammoth mines to the bank in Tucson, and the record says he never lost a shipment.

In 1890 he paid $1,000 for the Anna mine property in Oracle. That land became the site of the Mountain View Hotel.

From about 1908 the record turns. A Tucson newspaper that year called him “the Negro Neale” in its coverage of a land case he lost, and the town that had relied on him slowly closed its doors to him. He died on September 30, 1936, at St. Mary’s Hospital in Tucson, the day after an accident with a car in the hotel’s back yard. He was 87.

Annie Box Neal (1870–1950)

Annie Magdalene Box was born on January 8, 1870. Her family came to Tucson by wagon train in 1879, when she was nine, and were among the first Black settlers in the town. She studied piano at St. Joseph’s Academy in Tucson, and as a teenager she published a piece of music, the “Oklahoma March,” inspired by that journey.

She married Curly Neal on January 4, 1892, at San Augustin Cathedral in Tucson. When the Mountain View opened in 1895 she ran it, and in 1896 the Tucson Citizen called her “the queen of hostesses.” She arranged for a Catholic priest to come up from Tucson each month to hold services in the hotel’s music room, since Oracle had no church. She was also a midwife, and godmother to many of the children born around Oracle.

After Curly’s death she stayed on at the hotel. She died in May 1950, at 80.

Photographs of Curly and Annie will appear here once reproduction rights are confirmed with the archives that hold the originals.

Where the legend and the record part ways

• “Curly died at the hotel.” The accident happened at the hotel; he died the next day in a Tucson hospital.
• “They married when the hotel opened.” They married in January 1892. The hotel opened three years later.
• “Buffalo Bill owned the hotel.” He was a guest. The Neals built it and owned it.

Sources: Barbara Marriott, Annie’s Guests: Tales From a Frontier Hotel; obituaries in the Arizona Daily Star and Arizona Republic, October 1, 1936, as quoted in the Oracle Historian, Winter 1984–85; Tucson Citizen, August 6, 1896; Wanda Winningham, Front Porch News, Spring 2023.

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