What it is
Frontier Town is a block of boardwalk storefronts on the south end of Cave Creek Road, built to look like a mining-camp main street and selling turquoise, hot sauce, candles and soap to visitors for more than fifty years. It was here before the town incorporated in 1986 and it calls itself one of Arizona’s last remaining Western town destinations, which, with Rawhide gone from Scottsdale, is close to true. There is a gallows, a Boot Hill cemetery with joke headstones, rusted wagons, hitching rails and, among the reproduction facades, two things that are not reproductions: the stone Leather Mill building from the late 1880s, one of the oldest structures left in Cave Creek, and a 1936 Works Progress Administration outhouse displayed as an exhibit.
About ten shops line the boardwalk. Ortega’s Turquoise Trails sells Native American jewelry; Suzanne’s Hot Stuff sells salsas and sauces by the case; Cave Creek Mercantile, Cave Creek Candles & Gifts, Cactus Carlos, Coyote Creek, Glory Bee’s, Jennifer’s Web, Desert Maven and Udder Delight fill out the rest with gifts, decor and skin care. In the middle, Hansen’s Cowboy BBQ smokes brisket and ribs Thursday through Sunday, and Arizona Rustic Weddings runs a small chapel beside a pond with a footbridge. On weekend afternoons gunfighters stage a shootout on the main street.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
You do not; you come for Cave Creek and spend an hour here between lunch and the saloons. Old Town Scottsdale has the same false fronts on Main Street, and better galleries behind them. What Frontier Town has that Old Town does not is the context: a working Western town around it, a real 1880s building on the lot, bikers in the lot, and prices that have not been to a resort. If you are shopping for the one piece of turquoise you will take home, Ortega’s here is a fair place to look before the Old Town galleries, and our Native art buying note tells you what to ask.
The practical version
Forty minutes from Old Town, on the left as Cave Creek Road enters town, across from Big Earl’s. Free to enter, free to park, shops open roughly ten to five daily, the barbecue Thursday to Sunday. An hour is plenty. The Cave Creek Museum, five minutes away, is where the actual history is.
When to go
Weekend afternoons, October through April, when the gunfighters perform, the barbecue is smoking and the strip is full. The shows are short and loud; ask at any shop for the next time. Weekday mornings are the quiet version, with the shopkeepers glad of the company and the boardwalk to yourself. In summer the shops are air-conditioned but the boardwalk is not; go early, and treat it as a twenty-minute stop.
What to buy
Turquoise and silver at Ortega’s, where the family name has stood for Native American jewelry in Cave Creek for a long time; ask about the maker of anything you like. Hot sauce at Suzanne’s, which is the souvenir that gets used. Candles, soaps and desert-themed kitchen things at the Mercantile and its neighbors are gift-shop goods, honest about what they are. Nobody here is going to sell you a cowboy hat worth owning; for that, Watson’s Hat Shop up the road at Stagecoach Village makes them by hand, and in Scottsdale Porter’s has done it since the 1940s.
What to eat
Hansen’s Cowboy BBQ, at the picnic tables in the middle of the compound: brisket, ribs, pulled pork, brisket tacos, the standard sides, Thursday through Sunday. It is a smoked-meat counter, not a sit-down, and it is good enough that you need not go back to the strip. Across the road, Big Earl’s does burgers in a 1930s gas station and is the better choice with children.
With kids, and the neighborhood
An hour works: the gallows, the Boot Hill headstones, the wagons, the gunfight, a soda. The chapel and pond are a nice place to let small children run. Frontier Town anchors the south end of the strip in our Cave Creek guide; Harold’s, the Hideaway and the Buffalo Chip are a few minutes north, the museum is up Skyline Drive, and the Rancho Mañana villas are a short walk away if you are staying up here.
The story
Cave Creek’s Anglo history begins in the 1870s with the Cave Creek Mining District, a stage station and a scatter of gold and silver claims in the hills to the north, and almost none of its buildings from that time survive. The Leather Mill building on the Frontier Town lot, a stone structure from the late 1880s, is one of the few that do, which makes the compound an odd thing: a reproduction Western town wrapped around a real one. The 1936 outhouse is a Works Progress Administration job from the Depression, when federal crews built across the north Valley, and it is displayed here as the historical artifact it is.
The Western-town idea itself is a mid-century one. After the war, Arizona’s roadside entrepreneurs discovered that visitors would pay to walk a boardwalk, watch a gunfight and buy a bolo tie, and themed towns went up from Tucson to Scottsdale. Frontier Town was Cave Creek’s, built more than fifty years ago on a stretch of road that was then a dirt two-lane with a few saloons on it, and it has outlasted most of its peers. Rawhide, the biggest of them, was built on north Scottsdale Road in 1971 and moved to the Gila River reservation in 2005 when the land under it was sold; our Rawhide page tells that story. Frontier Town never had to move, because Cave Creek, which incorporated in 1986 specifically to keep itself rural, never let the land around it turn into anything else.
The Scottsdale connection
Old Town Scottsdale is also a Western set, and a much better-funded one. The false fronts on Main Street and Brown Avenue were put up in the 1950s to make a farm town look like a frontier one, and the Old Town guide explains how well it worked. Frontier Town is the same impulse at a smaller scale and a slower pace, and the comparison is the fun of it: here the hitching rails get used, the lot is full of motorcycles, and the shopkeepers live up the road.
Getting there
Scottsdale Road north to the Carefree Highway, west two miles to Cave Creek Road, then north about two miles; Frontier Town is on the left as the strip begins, with its own lot and overflow parking on the dirt behind. Forty minutes from Old Town, twenty from the Pinnacle Peak resorts. Walkable from Big Earl’s, the museum is a five-minute drive up Skyline Drive, and the saloons are a few minutes north.