What it means
The West’s Most Western Town is Scottsdale’s official motto, and the only one it has ever had. You will see it on the city seal, hear it from the announcer at the rodeo every March, and read it on the plaques in Old Town next to the hitching posts that the phrase, quite literally, put there. Residents use it in two voices. On a float in the Parada del Sol it is said straight. Anywhere near a glass condo tower or a $30 cocktail it is said with an eyebrow, usually by someone pointing out the gap between the slogan and the city.
The slogan is older than the city. It belongs to the Chamber of Commerce boosters of the late 1940s, and above all to Malcolm White, who became the first mayor and turned the pitch into policy. The Chamber guide tells how a merchants’ club wrote a town’s identity; this page is about the six words.
Where you’ll meet it
The city seal and letterhead. Western Week in late January and February, when the parade, the rodeo and the hat sales line up. Old Town’s board sidewalks and storefront signs. The site’s own history, where the Boomtown era chapter, 1946 to 1960, carries the slogan as its title.
Where the word came from
In 1947 Scottsdale was an unincorporated farm village of about 2,000 people with a cotton gin, a general store, a few dude ranches and no government. On March 6 of that year a group of merchants incorporated the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce, with Wesley Segner as its first board president, and within months the Chamber had formed a Community Chest, lobbied for streetlights and a fire department, adopted a Western design theme for the business district and proclaimed the town “The West’s Most Western Town.” The Historical Society puts it plainly: the Chamber’s leaders “made a conscious effort to promote a special identity, linked to the Old West.” The dude ranches had been selling cowboy fantasy to easterners since the 1920s; the Chamber decided the whole town should.
The face of the campaign was Malcolm White. He had bought a service station at Main Street and Scottsdale Road in 1941, turned it into Whitey’s Cafe and Bar, built the town’s first movie theater and fed the cadets from Thunderbird Field II during the war. White dressed his cafe and himself for the Western part first, and when the Chamber’s members circulated incorporation petitions in 1951 he was on the council the county appointed on June 25, which promptly chose him mayor. The new town made the marketing official: the slogan went onto the seal and letterhead, and in 1952 the year-old council wrote Western storefront requirements, hitching posts and board sidewalks into its downtown ordinances. The Chamber planted a wooden cowboy at Scottsdale Road and Main Street welcoming visitors to The West’s Most Western Town, and in November 1951 it staged the first Sunshine Festival, which the Jaycees renamed Parada del Sol in 1953.
What it is not
The slogan is not a description of frontier history. Scottsdale was founded in 1888 as a farm colony by an Army chaplain, not a cattle town, and its Western look dates from a 1947 marketing decision and a 1952 ordinance. The genuine 1920s buildings on Brown Avenue, the bank, the blacksmith shop and the adobe mission, predate the slogan and are more Western than anything built to match it.
The fine print
No source names the individual who wrote the six words. The Chamber proclaimed the slogan as an organization in 1947, and local histories give Malcolm White the personal credit for promoting it, which is a different thing. Anyone who tells you White coined it is repeating a reasonable guess.
The slogan’s legal life began in 1951 and was reinforced through the charter era. The 1952 storefront rules were the first design regulation in the town’s history; the home-rule charter of 1961 gave the council the power to ban billboards and write the sign and design-review codes that still govern Old Town’s height and look. In that sense the phrase is not decoration but the founding document of Scottsdale’s planning culture, which has argued about building heights downtown ever since.
Its status is stuck, with an asterisk. The city has never dropped the motto, the rodeo took the slogan’s name, and the Charros still ride under it. But the city’s own marketing moved on decades ago to resorts, golf and galleries, and in 2018 it rebranded all of downtown as “Old Town,” a move the Old Town vs. Downtown entry covers. The newcomers in the glass condos along the canal have no idea why there are hitching posts on Main Street, and the people who say Snottsdale consider the two slogans one joke. Both camps can be right. The town that called itself the most Western in the West had about 2,000 residents; the city of 243,000 still prints the phrase, which is either loyalty or the best deadpan in Arizona.