Fort Verde State Historic Park
Near Jerome, Arizona
The buildings you are passing in the town of Camp Verde are some of the most intact surviving structures from the United States Army's Indian Wars campaigns in the Southwest. Fort Verde was operational from eighteen seventy-one to eighteen ninety-one, and in that twenty-year span it sat at the center of a brutal effort to remove the Yavapai and Tonto Apache from lands they had occupied for centuries.
The trouble began in the early eighteen sixties when Anglo and Mexican settlers moved into the Verde Valley to farm and mine. As their numbers grew, they disrupted the hunting and foraging that the Dilzhe'e Apache and Yavapai depended on. Conflict escalated, and by eighteen sixty-five the Army had arrived to protect the settlers. The post moved several times as disease and logistics demanded, settling into its current site in eighteen seventy-one.
The fort's defining moment came in eighteen seventy-two when General George Crook launched what he called the Tonto Basin Campaign, a methodical winter offensive across the rugged plateau country east of here. Crook's innovation was the use of Apache scouts, captured warriors who agreed to help track and fight other Apache bands. He believed, correctly, that Indigenous men who knew the terrain and the tactics of their own people were more effective than any number of cavalry soldiers. Over the winter of eighteen seventy-two and seventy-three, Crook's forces fought a series of sharp engagements across the Tonto Basin. The worst came at Salt River Canyon in December, where troops killed more than seventy Yavapai and Tonto Apache sheltering in a cave, many of them women and children. By spring of eighteen seventy-three, approximately twenty-three hundred people had surrendered at Fort Verde.
Those who surrendered were resettled on the Rio Verde Reservation nearby. Then in eighteen seventy-five the Army forcibly marched fourteen hundred of them one hundred eighty miles to the San Carlos Agency in a winter removal that killed roughly one hundred. Fort Verde today preserves four original officers' quarters and a headquarters building as Arizona's best-surviving example of an Indian Wars period post.
