What is Orme Dam Victory Days?
Most civic celebrations mark something that happened. This one marks something that did not. Every November the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, on the Verde River past Fountain Hills, holds Orme Dam Victory Days: a parade, an all-Indian rodeo, an intertribal powwow, a carnival and a Yavapai village of cultural performances, all of it on the river bottom that a federal reservoir would have put under water.
The dam was authorized with the Central Arizona Project in 1968, for the confluence of the Salt and Verde about twenty miles northeast of Phoenix. Its lake would have covered roughly 15,000 acres, more than half the reservation, including homes, churches, the cemetery and the largest stand of nesting bald eagles in the Southwest. The Bureau of Reclamation assumed a tribe of 600 would sell. In 1976 the Nation voted 144 to 57 not to. Five years of lawsuits, hearings and a three-day walk to the state Capitol followed, and on November 12, 1981 Interior Secretary James Watt announced that Orme Dam would not be built. The Nation held its first Victory Days the next year and has not missed one since; the 44th ran November 14–16, 2025.
It is free and the Nation says plainly that everyone is invited. The parade rolls down Fort McDowell Road Saturday morning, the rodeo goes at 2 p.m. at the Fort McDowell Rodeo Grounds, the powwow runs through the weekend with grand entries, and the carnival lights up after dark. Parking has been charged, $10 as last reported. For a visitor in Scottsdale, this is the nearest thing to a national holiday on sovereign land: about 35 minutes east by Shea and the Beeline, on a perfect November weekend, with a story behind it that our Yavapai entry and the Fort McDowell name page tell in full.
How to go, and how to behave
Timing. Saturday is the day that holds everything. The 2025 parade stepped off at 9 a.m. from Fort Loop and Fort McDowell Road; be parked by 8:30 and stand anywhere along the road, which is lined with families, not barricades. The rodeo at 2 p.m. is the all-Indian circuit, roughstock and roping with contestants from reservations across the Southwest, and it is a real rodeo, not a demonstration. The powwow runs alongside and into the evening, and the grand entry under the lights is the one to stay for. Sunday is quieter: powwow finals, the last of the carnival, tournament championships.
The drive. Shea Boulevard east through Fountain Hills to the Beeline Highway, north a few minutes to Fort McDowell Road, then follow the signs; the rodeo grounds are at 9500 S Rodeo Drive, past the We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort. Count on 35 to 40 minutes from Old Town without traffic. Parking is a field with attendants and a cash fee.
Bring. A folding chair, cash in small bills, sunscreen for the afternoon, a real layer for after dark, when the Verde bottom cools fast. The food stands sell frybread, stews, Navajo tacos and whatever the vendors from other reservations have brought; eat early, because the popular stands run out.
Etiquette, in order. Stand and take your hat off for grand entry, the flag song, veterans songs and any honor song the emcee announces. Do not photograph an individual dancer without asking, and put the camera down when the emcee says so; some songs are not to be recorded at all. Regalia is sacred and often heirloom. Do not touch it, and do not call it a costume. The benches around the arena are for dancers and their families; sit behind them. When the emcee calls an intertribal and invites everyone, you may join; otherwise stay out of the circle. The emcee is running the day, and listening to him answers most questions.
Shopping. The arts-and-crafts rows are a direct line to makers from many nations. Read how to buy Native American art first; the short version is to ask who made it and pay the maker.
Before or after. The River of Time Museum in Fountain Hills has the best exhibit anywhere on the Orme Dam fight, and it is on the way. The reservation’s own history, from Skeleton Cave to the 1903 executive order to Carlos Montezuma’s fight to keep the Yavapai on the Verde, is why a tribe of a few hundred refused a federal check in 1976.
The dam, the vote and the walk
Orme Dam was the piece of the Central Arizona Project that Arizona’s politicians wanted most, because it was about floods as well as water. The Salt comes down hard in wet winters, and a reservoir at the confluence would have protected Phoenix from the kind of flooding that closed bridges in 1978 and 1980. It would also have drowned Fort McDowell, the 24,680-acre reservation Theodore Roosevelt set aside in 1903 for Yavapai who had walked back from San Carlos after the Army’s forced march of 1875. The Bureau offered money and new land. In 1976 the Nation voted it down, 144 to 57. “We refuse to sell our lands,” tribal president Hiawatha Hood said on television the next year.
The fight ran five more years. The Carter administration dropped Orme from its budget; Arizona’s delegation put it back. A Scottsdale homemaker named Carolina Butler organized much of the non-Native opposition. Bald-eagle biologists and environmental groups joined. A federal study was set up in 1979 to find an alternative. And in 1981 about a hundred Yavapai, elders among them, walked three days from the reservation to the Capitol in Phoenix to say no in person.
On November 6, 1981, Watt recommended Plan 6: no Orme, but a new dam on the Agua Fria and a raised Roosevelt Dam. Six days later, after meeting the Fort McDowell council, he made it official. New Waddell and the modified Roosevelt are the reason the Valley’s later floods stayed in the river. The Verde below the fort still runs free, with the cottonwoods and the eagles, and Fountain Hills, which the reservoir would have lapped, kept its view. Eleven years later the same Nation parked its gravel trucks across the road when federal agents came for its slot machines, and won that one too.
Why the party matters
Victory Days started in 1982 as a tribal gathering and has grown into one of the Valley’s larger Native events, with the all-Indian rodeo drawing contestants from across the region and the powwow drawing dancers from well beyond it. Structurally it is the same kind of event as the Red Mountain Eagle Powwow across Pima Road from south Scottsdale: a community celebrating on its own land, for itself, with the public welcome to watch. The difference is the occasion. Red Mountain is a gathering; Victory Days is an anniversary, and the parade down Fort McDowell Road is a small nation reminding itself, and anyone watching, that it beat the Bureau of Reclamation.
Scottsdale’s connection is closer than the 35-minute drive suggests. The city’s water runs through the CAP that Plan 6 reshaped. Its northeastern desert and the McDowell Mountain park look out over the river Orme would have flooded. And the woman who organized the opposition lived here. Go in November, stand when the emcee asks, and remember that the most cheerful event in the Valley about a dam is cheerful because the dam lost.