Encyclopedia of Native American Tribes

326 YAVAPAI
reached their domain. Juan de Oñate met with them in
1604. Father Francisco Garcés lived among them in
1776, after which contacts with non-Indian traders and
trappers became common.
The Yavapai were ruggedly independent, resisting
missionary work and settlement. Some bands, especially
the Kawevikopaya, joined with the Apache in
raids on whites and on other Indians. Following the
Mexican Cession in 1848 and the United States
takeover of the region, the territory of the Yavapai
came to be traveled and mined by increasing numbers
of non-Indian prospectors, causing sporadic violence
by Yavapai bands.
Their resistance reached a climax in 1872 during
General George Crook’s Tonto Basin Campaign against
Tonto Apache and Yavapai. Crook’s scouts located a war
party in Salt River Canyon of the Mazatzal Mountains.
In the ensuing Battle of Skull Cave, his soldiers pumped
bullets into a cave high on the canyon wall. Some fired
from below on the canyon floor, others from above on
the rim of the canyon. Bullets ricocheted inside the cave,
striking many of the Yavapai warriors. Some managed to
escape from the cave and fight back from behind rocks.
But soldiers on the escarpment rolled boulders down on
top of them. About 75 Yavapai lost their lives at Skull
Cave.
Reservation Period
U.S. officials settled the Yavapai with Apache at Camp
Verde and on the San Carlos Reservation. By 1900, most
of the Yavapai had left San Carlos to settle at the former
army posts of Fort McDowell, Camp Verde, and Fort
Whipple. The Fort McDowell Reservation, shared by
Mojave, Apache, and Yavapai, was established in 1903.
The Camp Verde Reservation was established in 1910.
In 1935, the Yavapai Reservation was created north of
Prescott at the former Fort Whipple.
The present Yavapai economy consists of gaming,
raising livestock, farming, and wage work. Some tribal
members generate additional income by selling coiled
baskets. Yavapai from the three reservations take turns
hosting Ba’ja days, which celebrate traditional tribal culture.
The Yavapai-Apache Nation at Camp Verde publishes
a monthly newspaper, Gah’nahvah Ya Ti’, about
tribal events and issues.
Wassaja
A well-known Yavapai named Carlos Montezuma, or
Wassaja, furthered the cause of Native Americans in the
late 19th and early 20th century. Wassaja was born in
1867, in the Superstition Mountains of Arizona. When
four years old, he was captured by the AKIMEL O’ODHAM
(PIMA), who eventually sold him to a photographerprospector
by the name of Carlos Gentile. Meanwhile,
his mother, who had left the reservation to search for her
son, was shot by an Indian scout. Gentile took the boy—
whom he renamed Carlos after himself, and Montezuma
after ruins in the region—to Santa Fe, New Mexico,
then east to Illinois and New York. On Gentile’s death in
1877, a family by the name of Baldwin cared for Wassaja
for a short period until George W. Ingalls, a Baptist missionary,
placed him with W. H. Stedman, a minister in
Urbana, Illinois.
Wassaja was tutored privately for two years, then
was enrolled in a preparatory program for the University
of Illinois, which he entered as a freshman the next
year. He graduated with a bachelor of science degree in
1884. While working part time for a pharmacist, he
attended the Chicago Medical College, graduating in
1889.
After having attempted a private practice for a short
time in Chicago, Wassaja accepted an appointment in
the Indian Service as physician-surgeon at the Fort
Stevenson Indian School in North Dakota. After a year,
he was transferred to the Western Shoshone Agency in
Nevada. Three years later, he worked at the Colville
Agency in Washington. Frustrated by the conditions on
the western reservation, he began work in 1894 at the
Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. In 1896, Wassaja
returned to Chicago to open a private practice. A specialist
in stomach and intestinal diseases, he eventually
was offered a teaching position at the College of Physicians
and Surgeons and in the Postgraduate Medical
School.
Wassaja became active in Indian affairs and gave lectures
in which he criticized the Office of Indian Affairs
(later the Bureau of Indian Affairs) and the reservation
system and advocated citizenship for Indians. Although
a proponent of Assimilation, he also called for pride in
Indianness. He wrote three books, including Let My People
Go, published in 1914, and founded the Indian magazine
Wassaja in 1916. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt
and Woodrow Wilson both offered him the position of
commissioner of Indian affairs, but he refused and continued
calling for the abolition of the Office of Indian
Affairs. He spent much of his time in his later years
among his people on the Fort McDowell reservation,
where he died.