The Palatki site is a set of ancient cliff dwellings in the red sandstone cliffs, built from 1100 to 1400 CE by the Sinagua people of the Ancestral Puebloans. The cliff dwellings were built under south-facing overhangs for shelter and winter sun. There are pictographs and petroglyphs at the Palatki site, including some that predate the cliff dwellings and may be as much as 6,000 years old.

The first Anglo settler was John James Thompson in 1876. He had the good fortune of finding an abandoned Yavapai garden, still bearing crops. Three years later, the family of Abraham James arrived. James had been an acquaintance of Thompson in Utah and he married Thompson's daughter, Margaret. By the turn of the century, about 15 homesteading families called the area home.

In the mid-1950s, the first telephone directory listed 155 names.