Exodus Day: The Forced March of the Yavapai and Apache
Near Sedona, Arizona
This is a hard chapter in the land's story. Long before it was a tourist town, the Verde Valley was home to the Yavapai and the Dilzhe'e, or Tonto Apache. In eighteen seventy-one the government set aside the Rio Verde Reserve for them near Camp Verde, and within a few years the people there had become nearly self sufficient, farming dozens of acres and even selling their surplus.
That success was their undoing. A ring of Tucson merchants and contractors made money supplying army rations, and when the Verde people no longer needed feeding, those profits dried up. The contractors lobbied to move everyone to the distant San Carlos reservation, where the ration business would resume.
On the twenty-seventh of February, eighteen seventy-five, roughly fifteen hundred people were forced to march about a hundred eighty miles through winter, over the snow covered Mazatzal Mountains and across the icy Salt River. When a safer wagon route was proposed, the official in charge is remembered as saying, they are Indians, let them walk. At least a hundred people died along the way, though the exact toll can never be known.
General George Crook, who opposed the removal, refused to force it at gunpoint and was soon reassigned. The Yavapai and Apache remember that march as Exodus Day, and each year they walk part of the route again.
