Date November 5, 1871 Deaths 6 Victim American citizens | Attack type Mass murder Non-fatal injuries 2 Perpetrator Yavapai warriors | |
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Location Wickenburg, Arizona, United States | ||
The Wickenburg Massacre was the 5 November 1871 mass murder of six stagecoach passengers en route from Wickenburg, Arizona Territory, westbound for San Bernardino, California, on the La Paz road.
Massacre
Around mid-morning, about six miles from Wickenburg, the stagecoach was attacked by 15 Yavapai warriors, who were sometimes mistakenly called Apache-Mohaves, from the Date Creek Reservation. Six men, including the driver, were shot and killed. Among them was Frederick Wadsworth Loring, a young writer from Boston who had been sent as a correspondent for Appleton's Journal. One male passenger and the only female passenger, though wounded, managed to escape.
Over the next two years, General George Crook conducted an investigation into the attack, eventually resulting in the identification of all of the perpetrators. After trying and failing to personally arrest the ringleaders, Crook sent Captain J. W. Mason to Burro Creek, where he encountered those responsible for the massacre as well as innocent Yavapai natives in three rancherias. Many were killed in the battle that followed.
Seven months prior to the Wickenburg incident, 144 Apaches were killed in the Camp Grant Massacre near Tucson, and Eastern sentiment was with the victims. However, the death in Wickenburg of Loring, one of Boston's most promising young writers, turned the tide against the Yavapai. In February 1875, after being promised reservation land near Prescott "forever and forever", the Yavapai tribe was uprooted and driven 180 miles south to the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, where they were forced to live beside their enemies from centuries past, the Chiricahua Apaches.
