The most consequential business in Scottsdale history opened in 1926 with a handful of rooms and a Hopi name. Jessie Benton Evans, an Italian-trained painter who had settled at the foot of Camelback Mountain, built an adobe guest house with her son and called it Jokake — from a Hopi word for “mud house.” Her artist and architect friends had been wintering nearby for years; now there was somewhere for paying guests to stay.
The timing was right. The Southern Pacific’s Phoenix line and Route 66 tourism were lifting winter travel across Arizona, and the Ingleside Inn had proven the concept nearby back in 1909. What Jokake added was the formula: adobe romance, Camelback views, and eastern guests who returned every winter. The handful of rooms grew into the area’s signature winter resort, and the grounds would much later seed the Phoenician resort. Nearly every guest ranch and resort Scottsdale built afterward — and it built them for a century — was a variation on what Evans improvised here.
For the town, the inn completed the decade’s pivot. The cotton crash had proven the fields couldn’t carry Scottsdale alone; the Main Street build-out gave it commerce; and Jokake gave it an export — winter itself, sold by the season. Guest ranches multiplied from here through the 1930s, when the Depression, improbably, turned out to be a golden age for exactly this kind of tourism.