What was Stoneman’s Military Road?
The first American use of the land that is now Scottsdale’s Preserve wasn’t a homestead or a ranch. It was a road for soldiers.
In the summer of 1870, George Stoneman, then commanding the Army’s Department of Arizona, ordered a shorter route between Camp McDowell on the Verde River and Fort Whipple near Prescott. Until then, the trip from the post to headquarters ran about 175 miles by way of the Salt River, Phoenix, Wickenburg and Skull Valley. The new road cut it to about 95. On October 1, 1870, Stoneman rode out of Camp McDowell at 4 p.m. to inspect it himself, with about a dozen troops, a wagon and a journalist. That night the party camped near what is now Dynamite Boulevard and 136th Street, and the next day they reached Cave Creek.
The road crossed what is now McDowell Mountain Regional Park from southeast to northwest, then the north end of the McDowell Sonoran Preserve. For twenty years it carried supplies and couriers. When the Army left Fort McDowell in 1890, most of it went back to the desert. The State Historic Preservation Office recognizes it as the Historic Stoneman Trail. The county calls it a ghost trail, because there’s so little to see.
What makes it a Scottsdale story is a correction. For decades the most-cited surviving stretch was a segment recorded in 1987 inside the Brown’s Ranch site, on the trail hikers still use to reach the old homestead. In 2011 an evaluation of that trail found the stretch was actually a dirt road E.O. Brown built to connect the upper and lower parts of his cattle operation. The Army road is out there, crossing the north Preserve. The city’s own 2015 plan says the job of finding exactly where isn’t finished.
How to visit a road you can’t see
Go to Brown’s Ranch, and set your expectations. The Brown’s Ranch Trailhead, 30301 N. Alma School Pkwy., is the right country: flat, granite-studded and full of saguaros, with the Preserve’s history spread across it. Walk out Brown’s Ranch Road, the old two-track, to the ranch site’s interpretive loop. That walk is ranch history, and the 2011 study is a reminder that some of the “old road” in this part of the Preserve is Brown’s, not the Army’s. The E.O. Brown page tells the ranch’s side.
Look for the pass, not the ruts. The McDowell Sonoran Conservancy says the 1870 road ran through the pass between Brown’s Mountain and the low butte north of it. The Brown’s Mountain trails on the city’s north-area map circle the mountain, so you can see that gap from official tread and picture a wagon working through it. The city’s plan says the road’s two alignments in the Preserve range from moderately preserved to severely eroded, and one of them is in use today as a recreation trail. The plan doesn’t name it, and neither will we until someone publishes the evidence.
Don’t go hunting. Preserve rules require you to stay on designated trails, and off-trail searching for wheel ruts is exactly what the rules exist to stop. The city’s plan says traces of historic roads in the Preserve typically look like two-track ruts, grooves worn in rock, a strip of different vegetation, low berms and scattered metal. Faint, in other words. They’re archaeological resources, and the city treats them that way, for the same reasons we don’t give directions to rock art.
Leave the cans. Conservancy PastFinder volunteers have documented artifacts along portions of the route in the northeast Preserve: tin cans, hammered metal, a tobacco tin and a barrel hoop. To a passing hiker that’s trash. To the people trying to pin down the road, it’s evidence. Photograph it, note the nearest emergency marker on the sign posts, and tell the Conservancy or Preserve staff. Don’t move it.
On the county side. The county’s plan says the road runs northwest to southeast across McDowell Mountain Regional Park, which charges an entry fee and keeps its own hours. Its trails cross the corridor, but nothing on the ground marks the route, and the plan we’ve read doesn’t say where the DAR’s 1997 commemoration stands. The park has a nature center and an interpretive ranger; they’re the people to ask, and asking is the legal way to learn more.
Name echoes. The city’s trail map has a Stoneman Wash Trail near the county-park line. Nothing we’ve found says it follows the Army road, and we wouldn’t assume it does.
Ninety-five miles of shortcut
The road existed because of a war. Camp McDowell was founded on the Verde in 1865 and became the Army’s base for its campaigns against the Yavapai and Apache peoples of central Arizona. Our 1450–1887 chapter tells that history and its cost. The post’s headquarters were at Fort Whipple, near Prescott, and the only practical way there was the long way around: southwest along the Salt, through the new farm town of Phoenix, out to Wickenburg and north through Skull Valley, about 175 miles.
The county’s master plan for McDowell Mountain Regional Park traces a shorter line back to the post’s beginnings. Around 1863, a volunteer company under King S. Woolsey, pursuing Tonto Apache raiders who had taken stock south of Prescott, marched down the Hassayampa and east toward the Verde. They crossed what is now the county park and made a temporary camp at the place that became Camp McDowell about eighteen months later. The trail they blazed, the plan says, “would eventually become a secondary supply route known as Stoneman Trail.”
George Stoneman made it official. He was a West Point graduate and a Civil War cavalry commander who, after the war, reverted to his regular rank of colonel; his brevet rank was major general. That’s why the city’s 2015 plan calls him “Colonel” in one section and “General” in another. He commanded the District of Arizona in 1869–70 and the Department of Arizona in 1870–71. According to the Conservancy’s account, in the summer of 1870 he ordered a 95-mile route between Camp McDowell and Fort Whipple. On October 1, while inspecting troops at the camp, he decided to see the new trail for himself. He left at 4 p.m. heading northwest with about a dozen men, a wagon and John H. Marion, a Prescott newspaperman. They camped that night near the present intersection of Dynamite Boulevard and 136th Street and reached Cave Creek the next day. Marion found the ride rough and the desert that is now the Preserve “poor country.”
Stoneman’s tenure didn’t last. He was relieved in 1871 amid controversy over his handling of Arizona’s Native nations, including the Camp Grant massacre, and he later became governor of California (1883–1887). His road lasted longer than his command. The county plan describes it as a supply and courier route between Camp McDowell and Fort Whipple from 1870 to 1890. The Conservancy says the military presence it brought let mining spread along its route from Cave Creek into the Bradshaw Mountains, and calls it one of the region’s first major commercial roads. When the Army left Fort McDowell in April 1890, much of the road fell out of use. In 1903 the old reserve became the Fort McDowell reservation, home today of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, descendants of the people the post was built to fight.
The segment that wasn’t
The modern search for the road started with a mistake that took a quarter-century to catch. In 1987, a reconnaissance survey recorded the Brown’s Ranch site and, inside it, a segment identified as Stoneman’s Military Road. That record shaped two decades of interpretation, including, until this fall, a line in this site’s own history chapter saying the road’s traces survive at Brown’s Ranch.
In 2011 an evaluation of the trail to Brown’s Ranch (Stein 2011) found that “a portion of the trail, previously recorded as a segment of Stoneman’s Military Road, was actually a dirt road constructed by Brown to provide access between the upper and lower portions of the ranch.” The road was still historic, and it was recommended eligible for the National Register, but for its association with Brown’s Ranch, not the Army. E.O. Brown ran cattle here from 1916 on an Upper Ranch and a Lower Ranch, and he needed a way between them. Some of that road is what hikers walk today.
That doesn’t erase the Army road from the Preserve. The city’s 2015 draft Cultural Resource Master Plan says portions of Stoneman’s route pass through the northeast Preserve and have been inventoried by the PastFinders. It also says the road has two alignments, one in use as a recreation trail, and that outside the Brown’s Ranch boundary its preservation ranges from moderate to severely eroded. A 2014 Conservancy Field Institute survey set out to examine the most likely location. The plan’s recommendation is blunt: continue “efforts to identify the location of Stoneman’s Military Road,” then interpret it for the public. As of this writing (fall 2026), no published map shows a confirmed alignment, and we won’t draw one.
Where the sources disagree, and where the answers live
- The far end. The county plan and the Conservancy run the road to Fort Whipple at Prescott by way of Cave Creek and Black Canyon. The city’s plan calls it a route between Camp Verde and Camp McDowell. The Conservancy’s account is the most detailed and names Fort Whipple as headquarters, so we follow it and note the other.
- Federal survey plats. The General Land Office plats filed in 1921 for the township around Brown’s Ranch show roads “to Camp Creek, Cave Creek, Phoenix, Verde Valley, and Scottsdale.” Whether any of them follows the 1870 line is exactly the question. The 1870s plats for the same townships, on the BLM’s GLO Records site, are the next place to look.
- The eyewitness. John H. Marion’s 1870 dispatches in the Prescott Arizona Miner (digitized through Chronicling America) are the closest thing to a field description of the route.
- The reports. Stein 2011 is held by the City of Scottsdale’s historic preservation office. The 2014 Field Institute survey report is with the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy.
Why it matters
Stoneman’s road is the oldest American thing in the Preserve, and almost none of it is left. That’s what makes it worth a page. Its history comes from written sources, not anything you can see. It starts with an Army supply line for a war against the people who lived here, passes through a journalist’s sneer at “poor country,” and ends with a correction showing that the well-known stretch was a cattleman’s road. The ghost trail is still out there, in a pass north of Brown’s Mountain and across the county park, waiting for someone with old plats and patience to finish the job. The rest of us can help by staying on the trail and leaving the tin cans alone.