What it means
Rawhide was the western town every Scottsdale visitor got taken to for three decades: a dusty Main Street of false-front buildings in the open desert on Scottsdale Road, with staged gunfights, stagecoach and burro rides, gold panning, a little desert train, and a steakhouse that smelled of mesquite smoke from the parking lot. It was cheerfully fake and enormously popular, the theme-park version of the town’s own West’s Most Western Town slogan.
Locals use the name in two tenses. In the past tense it is a landmark that no longer exists: “out past where Rawhide was” still places a stretch of far north Scottsdale Road just south of Pinnacle Peak Road for anyone over forty. In the present tense it is an event venue near Chandler that kept the name, the buildings’ spirit and some of the shows.
The full history of the Scottsdale years is in the Rawhide Western Town guide, and the Rawhide Steakhouse has its own page.
Where you’ll meet it
Directions from longtime residents, nostalgia threads about old Scottsdale, the cowboy steakhouse story alongside the Pinnacle Peak Patio, and event listings for festivals and rodeos at Wild Horse Pass.
Where the word came from
Rawhide began as one man’s collection. Jim Paul had accumulated Old West artifacts and wanted somewhere to show them, so around 1970 he built a replica 1880s town on 160 acres along Scottsdale Road, then far out in the desert. The museum displays became famous in their own right; Roadside America lists Geronimo’s moccasins, Tom Mix’s boots and Billy the Kid’s mailbox among them. Why Paul chose the name Rawhide is not recorded in the sources we read. The word, for untanned cattle hide, was cowboy shorthand long before it was a town.
The business changed hands as it grew. Paul sold in 1984 to an investment group led by I. Jerome Hirsch, and in 1998 Pinnacle Sonoran Properties, headed by Jim Acridge, took a majority interest. By the mid-1990s Rawhide was drawing about 900,000 visitors a year and employing around 200 people year-round, 300 in winter.
Then the city caught up with it. The empty desert of 1970 had become north Scottsdale luxury country, and the land under Main Street was worth more than the show on top of it. In 2004 Hirsch announced a $46 million sale to developer Larry Van Tuyl’s group and said he was looking for a site that would let Rawhide “return to its rural roots.” Rawhide closed in Scottsdale in 2005 and reopened in 2006 at Wild Horse Pass, on Gila River Indian Community land near Chandler.
What it is not
It was never a city park or a real historic town; nothing there was older than the 1970s except the artifacts. It is not Old Town, whose western storefronts are real buildings, and no source we found ties the name to the 1959 television series.
The fine print
The 2004 sale announcement is the best snapshot of Rawhide at the turn. Attendance had slipped to about 600,000 a year from its peak, and the owners were weighing new sites as far apart as Buckeye and Apache Junction before settling on the Community’s Wild Horse Pass development off Interstate 10. Van Tuyl’s company said it was considering a master-planned community for the Scottsdale land and, pointedly, that it was “not the site of a future auto mall.”
The Chandler Rawhide is a different animal. Its official address is 5700 W. North Loop Road, and it now describes itself as the Valley’s “premier special event destination,” with 18 venues across more than 160 acres. Roadside America reports that it stopped offering regular public hours around 2017, so it opens for ticketed festivals, haunted attractions, rodeos, concerts and private parties rather than daily walk-in gunfights.
One gap: accounts differ on whether the Scottsdale town opened in 1970 or 1971. The 2004 newspaper account says Paul built it in 1970; many later retellings say 1971. Both are close enough to the start of the decade that turned Scottsdale from cow town to resort city.