The Wickenburg Massacre

On November fifth, eighteen seventy-one, a stagecoach traveling on the road near Wickenburg was attacked and most of its passengers were killed. The event became known as the Wickenburg Massacre and was one of the most widely reported violent incidents of the Arizona Territory's early years. The coach was carrying eight passengers, including Frederick Wadsworth Loring, a young journalist from Boston who had been traveling with a government survey expedition and was on his way home.

Fifteen Yavapai warriors from the Date Creek Reservation ambushed the coach at a place in the desert about five miles from town. Six of the eight passengers were killed. Two survived, a woman named Mollie Sheppard and a man named William Kruger, both of whom were badly wounded.

Loring's death drew national attention because of his connections to the Eastern press, and the massacre intensified already extreme tensions between Anglo settlers and the Yavapai people in the Arizona Territory. The attack occurred against a backdrop of broken treaties, land seizures, and violence running in both directions across the territory. The United States Army used the massacre as justification for military campaigns against the Yavapai that culminated the following year in the Skeleton Cave Massacre, in which soldiers killed approximately seventy-six Yavapai sheltering in a canyon cave east of Phoenix.

The violence of this period in central Arizona is part of the ground that Wickenburg stands on.