Hualapai War: The History Under the Hackberry Road

The stretch of old Route Sixty-Six between Seligman and Kingman is the quietest surviving section of the highway in Arizona, long and straight across the Hualapai Valley, passing through Hackberry and Peach Springs with almost no commercial development. It is the Route Sixty-Six that looks closest to how the highway must have felt in its early decades: a road through a big country.

The Hualapai people occupied this canyon and plateau country for centuries. When American settlement expanded into northwestern Arizona in the eighteen sixties, the conflicts that followed were brief, violent, and consequential in ways that Route Sixty-Six tourism has never much acknowledged.

In eighteen sixty-six, American settlers killed Hualapai Chief Wauba Yuma during a meeting the Hualapai understood as a betrayal of a negotiating truce. The war that followed lasted until eighteen sixty-nine. The Hualapai were outgunned and eventually overwhelmed. In eighteen seventy-four, the federal government ordered the surviving Hualapai marched to La Paz, a settlement on the Colorado River far from their plateau homeland. Within two years of that removal, an estimated one-third of the Hualapai people had died from disease, exposure, and the collapse of their traditional subsistence economy.

In eighteen seventy-five, the Hualapai walked home. They returned to the plateau without federal authorization. The government eventually accepted this return and established the Hualapai Reservation in eighteen eighty-two.

The Hualapai Nation today includes the Grand Canyon West area and the Skywalk, where tourists from around the world stand on glass over the canyon. The plateau those tourists look out from is the same plateau the Hualapai were marched away from in eighteen seventy-four and walked back to in eighteen seventy-five. They are still here.