As you drive deeper into these mountains, it's right to know whose homeland this is — because long before the gold-seekers and the road crews, this was, and is, the country of the Yavapai and the Western Apache people, sometimes called the Tonto Apache. For centuries they lived across this whole rugged region, moving with the seasons, hunting and gathering the mesquite and the agave and the cactus fruit, knowing every spring and canyon in a landscape that looks impossibly harsh to outside eyes.
And their story here took a hard turn. In the early eighteen-seventies, as settlers and miners pushed in, the U.S. Army waged a brutal campaign through these very mountains — the Tonto Basin campaign — to force the Yavapai and Apache off their land. Camps were destroyed, people were killed, and the survivors were marched away to reservations like San Carlos, far from home; many died on the way, and many never came back. It's a painful history, and it sits under all the romance of lost gold and frontier ghost towns, so I don't want to drive you past it without a word. The descendants of those people are very much still here, in the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, the San Carlos and Tonto Apache tribes, keeping their languages and their ways alive. This is their ancestral ground you're the guest on today. Carry that quietly with you as you go. Roll on up the trail.
Photo: National Park Service Digital Image Archives · Public domain
