The Old West was still pretty new in 1877 when Carl Hayden was born. His birthplace was a mud adobe house on the south bank of the Salt River that is now Monti’s La Casa Vieja. The railroad linking Phoenix with the Southern Pacific transcontinen­tal line at Maricopa and the rest of the civilized world was still ten years away. Morris Goldwater had recently installed the region’s first telegrapher’s office in the family store in Phoenix. Young Carl’s father, Charles Trumbull Hayden, operated a flour mill and ferryboat business along the usually placid Salt River. The elder Hayden arrived in Arizona in 1858 on the first Butterfield-Overland stage to Tucson. Earlier, he had been a trader on the fabled Santa Fe Trail. By the time of Carl’s birth, he was one of the territory’s most prominent citizens. Two years after Carl was born, the small sun-baked Mexican village of San Pablo combined with Hayden’s Ferry to officially change the name to Tempe.