The Cerbat Mountains and the Hualapai

The jagged range rising to the east is the Cerbat Mountains, and the name is a gift from the people who lived here first. Cerbat comes from a Hualapai word for bighorn sheep, animals that once ranged freely across these slopes. The Hualapai, whose name means people of the tall pines, had made their home across this corner of northwest Arizona for well over a thousand years, hunting, gathering, and farming the canyons and plateaus.

When silver was struck at Chloride in the eighteen sixties, miners and soldiers poured onto Hualapai land, and the two peoples collided. The fighting that followed, sometimes called the Hualapai War, ground on through the late eighteen sixties. It was brutal and one sided.

One of the principal Hualapai leaders, a man remembered as Sherum or Cherum, led resistance from the Cerbat band, but disease and the United States Army broke the nation. Hundreds of Hualapai died, and many survivors were forced on a long, deadly march to a reservation on the Colorado River, an ordeal their descendants remember with grief. Only after that defeat, around eighteen seventy, did mining at Chloride truly boom.

It is worth pausing on that fact. The prosperity celebrated in this town was built on the dispossession of the Hualapai, whose tribe endures today on its own reservation to the northeast.