The Yavapai: Removed and Returned

The Yavapai people have lived in the central Arizona highlands for thousands of years. Their territory ranged across the area where Prescott now sits, through the Bradshaw Mountains and Verde Valley and into the desert lowlands below. Gold was discovered in Lynx Creek near the future site of Prescott in the early months of eighteen sixty-three, and the settler rush that followed accelerated a dispossession that had already been underway.

The United States Army, under General George Crook, mounted a sustained campaign against the Yavapai from eighteen seventy-two into eighteen seventy-three. On December twenty-eighth, eighteen seventy-two, soldiers pursued a group of Yavapai sheltering in a canyon cave in the Salt River Canyon east of Phoenix and opened fire, killing approximately seventy-six people in what became known as the Skeleton Cave Massacre. Survivors were taken to the Camp Verde Reservation, where disease killed roughly a third of the Yavapai population in the following years.

On February twenty-seventh, eighteen seventy-five, without formal warning or preparation, the United States government forced the Yavapai and Western Apache at Camp Verde to march roughly one hundred eighty miles across the mountains to the San Carlos Reservation in winter. More than one hundred died on the march. The Yavapai began returning to their Verde Valley homeland over the following decades, despite having no legal right to do so.

The Prescott Indian Reservation was established in nineteen thirty-five on seventy-five acres of former Fort Whipple land, a fraction of the original territory. The Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe today governs that land. The town that displaced them carries a historian's name.

The people it displaced carried their own history in their feet as they walked home.