The White Mountain Apache Tribe
The White Mountain Apache have lived in this region since long before Arizona was a territory, and the tribe's presence here is not history in the past tense — it's the tribe's ongoing homeland today. The U.S. Army established a post on White Mountain Apache land in 1870, at the tribal leadership's own suggestion according to the tribe's account, originally known as Camp Ord and then Fort Apache. In 1871, General George Crook enlisted White Mountain Apache scouts to serve with the Army, a relationship that continued through the Apache Wars, which ended with Geronimo's surrender in 1886.
The Fort Apache Indian Reservation was formally established by executive order in 1891, and an 1897 act of Congress separated it from the San Carlos Apache Reservation to the south. Today the White Mountain Apache Tribe governs roughly 1.6 to 1.7 million acres of reservation land in east-central Arizona, and Fort Apache itself — including General Crook's 1871 cabin, the oldest building on the site — is preserved as a tribally operated historic park, with the nearby Kinishba Ruins included on the same admission.
Show Low and the Founding Card Game
Show Low's name comes from a story that's become regional legend. In 1876, ranch partners Corydon E. Cooley and Marion Clark decided their shared 100,000-acre spread wasn't big enough for both of them, and settled the question with a card game — Seven-up, in which low card wins. As the story goes, Clark told Cooley, "If you can show low, you win," and Cooley turned up the deuce of clubs and replied, "Show Low it is." Cooley kept the ranch, named it Show Low, and the town's main street is still called Deuce of Clubs today. Cooley went on to hire Mormon settlers as ranch hands, an early thread of the Mormon settlement pattern that shaped much of the surrounding area. For more on the town itself, see the Show Low guide.
Pinetop and the Mormon Settlement of the High Country
Pinetop's name has a similarly local origin. Around 1890, a saloon keeper named Walt Rigney — nicknamed "Pinetop" by the soldiers from nearby Fort Apache who drank there, supposedly for hair that stuck out like a pine bough — ran a bar on the Mogollon Rim that became a gathering point as the Apache Wars wound down. Cabins grew up around the saloon, and the community took the nickname as its name when the post office was established in 1895; before that, the settlement had briefly been called Penrod, after an early sawmill operator.
Lakeside grew up alongside Pinetop as a separate Mormon settlement, founded by families drawn to the meadows and water sources near several natural and constructed lakes. Families such as the Hansens, Wests, Fishes, and Webbs combined ranching with small-scale sawmilling through the late 1800s and early 1900s, laying the groundwork for the timber economy that would follow at a much larger scale.
The Logging-Railroad Era
Timber turned the White Mountains from scattered ranching and sawmill settlements into a genuine industrial region. The Apache Railway was incorporated in 1917 to connect Holbrook with the White Mountains' timber reserves, reaching Snowflake by 1918 and McNary by 1920, and it hauled logs and milled lumber out of the forest for decades — by the 1980s it was Arizona's last remaining logging railroad still in operation.
The company town of McNary is the clearest single example of how large that industry got. What began as a small operation called Cooley, on land leased from the White Mountain Apache Tribe, was transformed in 1924 when Louisiana lumbermen relocated their entire milling operation west, bringing roughly 800 employees — including around 500 skilled Black workers and their families — from McNary, Louisiana to a renamed McNary, Arizona. At its peak, McNary had a population approaching 3,000, with its own church, school, hospital, and theater, before a second devastating mill fire and the expiration of its reservation land lease led to its decline in the mid-20th century.
What's Left to See
Traces of every layer of this history are still visible if you know where to look. Fort Apache Historic Park preserves the military and tribal history directly, including General Crook's original 1871 cabin, while Kinishba Ruins nearby predates all of it by centuries as an ancestral pueblo site. In town, Show Low's Deuce of Clubs still carries the name of the winning card from the 1876 game that founded the ranch, and Pinetop's core streets still trace roughly to the cabins that grew up around Walt Rigney's saloon. McNary's decline left less standing than the boom years might suggest — much of the company-town infrastructure is gone — but the Apache Railway's route and the pattern of small mill communities strung along it are still legible in how towns like Snowflake, Pinetop-Lakeside, and Show Low sit relative to each other along the modern highway corridor.
From Mill Towns to Summer Retreat
As the large-scale timber operations wound down through the mid-to-late 20th century, the same features that had drawn loggers and railroads — high elevation, ponderosa pine forest, and summer temperatures far cooler than the Phoenix and Tucson desert — started drawing vacationers instead. Cabins that had housed mill families or ranch hands gave way to vacation homes, and small-town main streets built around sawmills and rail depots reoriented around tourism, fishing, and, eventually, golf and second homes.
That shift is why Pinetop-Lakeside and Show Low look the way they do today: town layouts and names that trace back to 19th-century ranching and sawmilling, a highway corridor that follows the old railroad's logic, and an economy now built substantially around visitors escaping the summer heat rather than around lumber. If you want to see how that history shows up on the ground, the Springerville-Eagar area and the town of Greer both carry their own versions of the same Mormon-settlement-to-summer-town arc.