Scottsdale’s winter-visitor economy got its flagship in 1936. The Camelback Inn opened on December 15 astride the Scottsdale–Phoenix line and became an instant institution (the day has its own page) — the grandest address yet in a hospitality trade that had grown from Jessie Benton Evans’ adobe guest house at the Jokake Inn into the town’s whole cash economy.
The timing looked reckless and wasn’t. Seven years into the Depression, with the local bank three years dead and farm prices still dismal, a luxury resort was arguably the safest bet in the Valley: its customers were wealthy easterners, the one segment the crash had barely touched, and the guest ranches around town had spent half a decade proving they would keep coming. The Inn joined a roster — the Jokake, the Graves Guest Ranch, the Kiami Lodge and the dude ranches beyond town — that made selling winter Scottsdale’s most durable industry.
Its opening marked the moment the winter trade stopped being a sideline and became the town’s calling card, the raw material later polished into “The West’s Most Western Town.” The next year brought stranger news — snow on the saguaros and the world’s most famous architect buying raw desert in the foothills. That’s 1937.