When visiting Pipe Spring, your first stop will be the Pipe Spring National Monument-Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians Visitor Center and Museum.
This joint center was cooperatively funded and built, and is operated by the National Park Service and the Kaibab Paiute. The center serves as the entry to Pipe Spring National Monument, and provides exhibits about the people and cultures who have lived in this region for centuries.
In 1870, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) began construction of a fortified ranch house at Pipe Spring. The ranch house/fort was designed as both a headquarters for a tithing cattle ranch and as protection from Indian attacks. The Mormon settlers did not particularly fear the Paiute tribe, which at that time inhabited much of the Arizona Strip, but the Navajo, who would cross the Colorado River at low water and raid both the Paiutes and the settlers.
The fortified ranch house was constructed directly over Pipe Spring. The Mormons were only the latest group to be drawn to Pipe Spring, which had attracted people for centuries. The Ancient Puebloans (Anasazi) inhabited the area from approximately 1 A.D. to 1200 A.D. The Paiute tribe followed the Anasazi, and had lived in the Pipe Spring region for nearly three centuries by the time the European settlers began moving into this area.
Winsor Castle was the site of the first telegraph station in the state of Arizona. The transcontinental telegraph wire came through Salt Lake City in 1861, and immediately revolutionized communications. Information from Washington, D.C., or San Francisco that once took weeks or months to reach Utah now arrived in only a few minutes.
However, the majority of the Utah settlements were north and south of Salt Lake City.
Thus the transcontinental line, running generally east-west, initially did little to improve communications within the territory.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints decided to build its own adjunct line, dubbed the Deseret Telegraph, linking communities to the north and south of Salt Lake. Construction on this line started in 1866.
Brigham Young asked that each community with a telegraph station train one or more young person in the art of telegraphy.
