It was formed in 1884 and incorporated in early 1885 as a cattle ranching operation that purchased 1,000,000 acres in northern Arizona from the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad.

By 1885, the beef industry had collapsed because thousands of cattle in west Texas, held off the market for better prices, were either dead or starving on barren plains.

Some were involved in Arizona's Pleasant Valley War in the late 1880s and early 1890s, a decade-long feud between cattlemen and sheep herders over rangeland and resources that took place, in part, on Aztec land.

[1][4] Another former employee, and son of an Aztec stockholder, Henry M. Atkinson, later founded Georgia Power in Atlanta in 1902, which is now a subsidiary of the Southern Company, an electrical utility in the southeast U.S.[5]

When traveling between Winslow and Flagstaff on I-40, if one looks south some forty or fifty miles, the thin blue line of the [Mogollon] Rim, still the southern boundary of Aztec's vast acreage, can be seen."

The Apache Railway serves much of Aztec's land, providing access to both national and international markets, and has operated continuously since its incorporation in 1917.