For Cusa Grande and Tucson See Page 95
STOUT’S HOTEL
0	GILA	BEND.	ARIZONA	5
2 2
0	o
o	Most Modern Hotel on the Desert	5
«	Baths and Showers....Steam Heat	•
5	Running Water in Every Room	2
2	Where the Tourist Feels at Home	o
2	o
2	Rates $1.50 per day and up	2
0 0 «0»S»0«0«0»0>0«OtO«Q«0«00»0(0«0«0«040>0»0»0*
The inaccessibility, the character of the country itself, and its savage inhabitants kept Arizona for decades the most backward of all our territories. Buying Arizona was folly, eastern people said; its arid wastes were useless. Yet for twenty years after the Gadsden Purchase Arizona communicated with the outside world largely by water. A semi-monthly mail and passenger stage line was started in 1S57 from San Antonio to San Diego; but at times it cost the government $65.00 to carry each letter! A year later the historic Butterfield stages began running and an early writer says, “This was one of the grand achievements of the age, to span the continent by a semi-weekly line of stages, under bond to perform, by sole power of horseflesh, a trip of nearly 2,500 miles within the schedule of twenty-five days.” It was the trek of people from the South to the West after the Civil War that began to give Arizona population. Previous to that white men saw little of it, except the regions about Tucson, Gila Bend and Yuma which lay along the forty-niners’ trails.
70