What it means
A health seeker was someone who came to the desert to breathe. In the decades before antibiotics, tuberculosis killed more Americans than almost anything else, and the only treatment doctors could offer was climate: dry air, sunshine, rest. Arizona advertised all three. The people who answered the ads, by train from the 1890s on, were called health seekers in polite print and lungers everywhere else, and in Scottsdale they were the first industry, before cotton, before the dude ranches, before anyone had heard of a resort fee.
You will hear the term from docents at the Historical Society and in the site’s 1900s chapter, which explains why a settlement with no railroad and a failing citrus crop kept gaining people. The short answer is that the sick kept arriving, and the ones who got better stayed.
Where you’ll meet it
In the biographies of half the founders. Winfield Scott preached the cure. Marjorie Thomas came in 1909 because her brother had tuberculosis. John C. Lincoln moved to Sunnyslope in 1931 for his wife’s lungs and ended up founding a hospital. And in the sleeping porches of the oldest houses in town.
Where the word came from
“Health seeker” is nineteenth-century newspaper English, the respectable term for a traveler whose destination was chosen by a doctor. Nobody coined it; it was in use across the West wherever the air was dry, from Colorado Springs to Pasadena, by the time Winfield Scott arrived in 1888. Scott, a Civil War chaplain with his own battle injuries, believed the warm, dry desert made the valley “God’s Country” to the health seeker, and the early news accounts the city’s historic-context survey quotes promised relief from tuberculosis, asthma and consumption in a place “where rain seldom falls and there is no cold.” The Maricopa and Phoenix Railway reached the valley in 1887, which made the promise reachable.
The patients came in two classes. The wealthy took rooms at inns like the Ingleside, opened in 1909 in the citrus district south of Camelback. The rest, having spent what they had on the ticket, lived in tents and cabins, and Phoenix did not want them. In 1903 the city outlawed the tent and cabin camps where tuberculosis patients clustered, and the sick moved to the edges: Sunnyslope to the north, Cave Creek in the hills, and Scottsdale, which the survey describes as the gateway to Paradise Valley and the ranching country beyond. The Graves Guest Ranch at Scottsdale and Indian School roads was, in its first life, a tuberculosis recovery center, promising “all the comfort of a real home” in an unrivaled climate.
The health seekers who could afford to relocate were better off than the average settler, and the survey credits them with setting the settlement’s early culture: churches with large congregations, choirs, charity events, an audience for artists. By 1912 they had helped Arizona reach the population it needed for statehood.
What it is not
A health seeker was not a snowbird, though the one became the other. The snowbird comes for the winter and leaves healthy; the health seeker came to stay or to die. And Scottsdale was never a sanatorium town like Tucson or Sunnyslope. It had cottages and guest ranches, not wards.
The fine print
The numbers are the hole in this story. No census counted health seekers as such, and the figures that circulate for Arizona are estimates. What the record does hold is names. Marjorie Thomas, her mother and her tubercular brother each filed on 160 acres near Scottsdale in 1909, and her studio at Indian School and Scottsdale roads was the town’s first. Carlos Montezuma, the Yavapai physician, went home to Fort McDowell with tuberculosis in December 1922, refused a sanatorium, and died in a brush shelter on January 31, 1923. Helen Lincoln’s diagnosis in 1931 took her family to Sunnyslope, where the Desert Mission had been helping tuberculosis patients since 1927 and where her husband’s money built the hospital that became John C. Lincoln and, eventually, HonorHealth. In Cave Creek, the Desmount Sanitarium ran about sixteen two-person cabins from 1920 to 1929; one cabin reached the National Register in 2001.
The trade shaped buildings before it shaped a brand. The Kiami Lodge, built in 1937 by a Chicago nurse in a ten-acre citrus grove near Scottsdale and Chaparral roads, was a winter guest home and an “air cooled home for convalescents” in summer, which is the health seeker and the tourist in one sentence. By then promoters had decided the sick were bad for business. Phoenix sold itself as the place where “winter never comes” and the resorts of 1929, the Biltmore among them, pitched the same climate to the healthy. Antibiotics finished the job after the war. The patients stopped coming, the air stayed, and the city has been selling it ever since.