The Yavapai
Since ancient times, they called themselves 'the people of the red rock country'. The region they roamed on their hunting and plant gathering forays remains among the most lush and magnificent in the Southwest. Before white contact, the Yavapai were a wealthy people in terms of their environment. Unfortunately, the land that sustained them for centuries would be coveted by a more powerful and war-like tribe from the East...the English-speaking Americans. But Americans were not the first white people the Yavapai encountered. Two hundred years before American contact, Spanish white men from Mexico entered the Verde Valley (the area located in the center of the state, Camp Verde) in search of fabled 'lakes of gold,' and a route to the South Seas. The Spanish had no difficulty in recognizing the differences in language between the Yavapai and Western Apache, whom they also encountered. Following on the heels of the gold-hungry prospectors were the settlers. By 1864, the U.S. Army was building forts throughout Yavapai and Apache ancestral lands. In less than 10 years, white efforts to destroy the well-ordered lifeways of the Yavapai and the Apache, and exterminate them a
Of the 1500 Indians who left the Verde Valley six weeks before, approximately375 either escaped, or did not survive the journey. For 25 years the Yavapai and Apaches were not allowed to return to their homeland, but in 1900 they simply walked away from San Carlos. Not on soldier was killed or hurt during this event. There was plenty of game, according the doctor, but the Indians were not 'allowed' to hunt. " At this point in time, both Yavapai and Apaches were considered (by the whites) one and the same. "Many sensational stories have been written about Skeleton Cave, where a ban of 'bloodthirsty Apache' had been killed. But white people call it a 'battle'. These people who got killed were no Apache. His orders: "I believe the hostile Indians of Arizona should be destroyed, and I encourage troops to capture and route out Indians by every means, and hunt them down as wild animals. Some babies made the trip naked, and many of them froze to death. The 1500 Yavapai-Apache holds 653 of land, which includes a 150 acre farming cooperative. A court settlement awarded them fifty cents per acre for the 10 million acres that had once been their home.
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