Whiskey Row and the Town That Invented Itself: Prescott's Frontier

Montezuma Street in Prescott, Arizona, was known as Whiskey Row by the eighteen seventies, when it held the densest concentration of saloons, gambling halls, and hotels in territorial Arizona. The street fronted the territorial capital's main plaza, and for a period in the eighteen sixties and seventies, Prescott was Arizona's capital and its most important town, the administrative center of a territory that the federal government had carved out of the New Mexico Territory in eighteen sixty-three.

Prescott National Forest traces to a forest reserve set aside in eighteen ninety eight around the Bradshaw Mountains and the Sierra Prieta south of town. The forest today covers approximately one million two hundred thousand acres of ponderosa pine, chaparral, and riparian corridor surrounding the city on three sides. It is why Prescott, at a mile above sea level, looks and feels different from the desert floor below: the trees are there because the mountains created the moisture and the national forest boundary preserved them.

The Yavapai people had lived in this landscape for centuries before the territorial government arrived. The Yavapai called themselves Wipukpa, the people of the rough country, and their territory covered much of what is now central Arizona. The Army conducted campaigns against Yavapai communities throughout the eighteen sixties and seventies, culminating in the Skeleton Cave Massacre of eighteen seventy-two, in which Army soldiers killed Yavapai men, women, and children sheltering in a cave in the Salt River Canyon. The survivors were eventually confined to the San Carlos Reservation. The Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe was formally organized after the Indian Reorganization Act of nineteen thirty-four and holds a reservation within the Prescott city limits today.

Whiskey Row burned to the ground in nineteen hundred. The saloons reopened within the week.