The walk home
The Kwevkepaya Yavapai had been marched out of this country on Exodus Day, February 27, 1875 — some 1,400 people driven 180 miles over the winter mountains to the San Carlos Apache reservation. Through the 1880s and 1890s families walked back a few at a time, to the Verde bottoms below the fort where they had been hunted twenty years before. The Army left Fort McDowell in 1890; the government assigned the old post lands to the returning Yavapai in November 1901; and on September 15, 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt signed the executive order that made it a reservation — about 24,680 acres, forty square miles, along the lower Verde. Five to six hundred people lived there.
The neighbor Scottsdale keeps meeting
Nothing about the 1903 order mentioned a farm village fifteen miles to the southwest, but the two places have been tangled ever since. Within a decade the Indian Bureau and the Salt River Valley Water Users’ Association — the same association that had just built Roosevelt Dam — were pressing the Yavapai to give up the Verde and take allotments on the Salt River reservation, where their water rights would be weaker and their land in someone else’s way. A Yavapai physician in Chicago, born a few miles from the fort and captured as a child, spent the last thirteen years of his life fighting the removal in print and in Washington: Carlos Montezuma. The Yavapai stayed.
They stayed again in the 1970s, when the Central Arizona Project’s Orme Dam — a storage dam at the Salt–Verde confluence — would have flooded more than half the reservation, homes and cemetery included. The tribe voted 144 to 57 in 1976 against selling, marched three days to the Capitol in 1981, and on November 12, 1981 Interior Secretary James Watt announced the dam would not be built. The gravel trucks from the Verde bottom that Orme would have drowned were the ones that blockaded the FBI on May 12, 1992, the standoff that produced Arizona’s first Indian gaming compacts.
On the map
The reservation lies northeast of Scottsdale beyond Fountain Hills and the McDowell Mountain Regional Park; it does not touch the city, but the McDowells are the view from both. Every drive up the Beeline to the Verde crosses it; the We-Ko-Pa casino resort and the tribe’s November Orme Dam Victory Days are its most visible institutions. The year Roosevelt signed the order was also the year Scottsdale’s own farmers pledged their land for the dam — two water stories, started the same year, on the same river system, that would collide seven decades later. The 1900s chapter has the town’s side.