A permanent settlement near Quartzsite began in 1856 when Charles Tyson discovered reliable water and built a non-military fort to protect his water supply from attacks by Mohave Indians. The first gold rush to then Yuma County began the same year. The Arizona Territory was separated from the New Mexico Territory in 1863, and a historical marker purports the date of 1864 as when Tyson likely hand dug his well.
Fort Tyson soon became a stopover on the Ehrenburg-to-Prescott stagecoach route (a.k.a., the La Paz Road), which was a main supply route to Prescott and Fort Whipple, serving both military and civilians. The La Paz Road was about 150 miles long, over rough, unsettled Indian country. In addition to carrying freight, these toll roads were used by individuals and groups of travelers, and eventually commercial stage coaches.
The Quartzsite Historical Society asserts that Tyson built the still extant adobe stage station in 1866, the same year that the California & Arizona Stage Company began transporting passengers, mail, and Wells Fargo express from the end of the southern Pacific railroad in California to Ehrenberg and Wickenburg. The Ehrenburg-to-Prescott stagecoach route was used to transport supplies that were shipped from San Francisco and Los Angeles around the tip of the Baja Peninsula, up the Gulf of California, to the mouth of the Colorado River, and then upstream by paddle steamers to Ehrenberg. The towns of Ehrenberg, Olive City, and La Paz served miners during the 1860s gold rush around Wickenburg and in the mountains south of Prescott. The stage road forked at Wickenburg, heading north to the territorial capital at Prescott and south to Phoenix and Florence.
Tyson's Wells offered primitive lodgings and refreshments for travelers and freight drivers. One account of the journey along the road and through Tyson's Wells comes from Martha Summerhayes, the wife of an Army officer who was stationed in Arizona. On route from Camp Verde to Ehrenberg, Mrs. Summerhayes describes the way stations as primitive but welcoming. Her entry about her stay in a tent at Desert Station in Bouse Wash, however, describes Tyson's Wells as "the most melancholy and uninviting" poorly kept ranch in Arizona. She continued to exclaim that the place reeked "of everything unclean, morally and physically".
The stage stopped running when the railroad was built through the area in the 1880s, and Tyson's Wells became a ghost town. A small mining boom revitalized the town in 1897, as mining in the surrounding hills picked up in response to the introduction of more efficient gold mining methods. A post office was established as Tyson's Wells in the summer of 1893, but was closed in 1895.
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