What it means
Fort McDowell is three things, and locals slide between them without noticing. It is the name of an Army post that stood on the Verde River from 1865 to 1890. It is the name of the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, the sovereign tribal nation that has held the post’s land since 1903. And it is shorthand for a place on the drive out the Beeline Highway past Fountain Hills: the casino, the golf courses, the river bottom.
Ask a Scottsdale resident where the McDowell Mountains got their name and most will guess a pioneer family. The answer is a general who never lived here, by way of the fort. The same name runs along McDowell Road through south Scottsdale and up the ridgeline of the McDowells that frames the city.
The Yavapai people, their history and the Orme Dam fight have their own page at Yavapai. This page is about the name and the place it labels.
Where you’ll meet it
On highway signs along the Beeline (State Route 87), on news of the Nation’s government and businesses, at Orme Dam Victory Days each November, and in the regional park and the Preserve, whose mountains share the name.
Where the word came from
The post came first. In September 1865, with the Civil War just over, the California Volunteers built a camp on the west bank of the Verde River, a few miles above its junction with the Salt, to control the country of the Yavapai and Apache peoples. They first called it Camp Verde, then renamed it Camp McDowell after Maj. Gen. Irvin McDowell, the Union commander remembered for losing the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861, who commanded the Army’s Department of the Pacific in 1864 and 1865. In time it became Fort McDowell, and the general’s name spread to the mountain range west of it and the road that later led toward it from Phoenix.
The fort was a base for the campaigns of the early 1870s, including George Crook’s Tonto Basin operations and the December 1872 killing of more than seventy Yavapai at Skeleton Cave above the Salt. In 1875 the Yavapai were marched to the San Carlos reservation. The Army abandoned Fort McDowell in 1890.
Then the name changed hands. Yavapai families drifted back to the Verde in the 1890s and were living on the old post lands by about 1901. On September 15, 1903, Theodore Roosevelt’s executive order set aside about 24,680 acres of the former military reservation for them. The Yavapai doctor and activist Carlos Montezuma spent his last years fighting to keep them there.
What it is not
It is not Camp Verde, the town up the river, though the post briefly shared that name. It is not part of Fountain Hills, Scottsdale or the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community; it is its own nation. And its people are Yavapai, not Apache, whatever older maps say.
The fine print
The modern Nation has about 950 enrolled citizens, about 600 of whom live on the reservation, governed by an elected tribal council. Its land is the reason the lower Verde still runs free: in 1976 members voted 144 to 57 against selling it for Orme Dam, and on November 12, 1981 the Interior Secretary announced the dam would not be built.
Gaming made the name famous a second time. The Nation opened a bingo hall in the early 1980s and added slot machines. On May 12, 1992, federal agents raided the Fort McDowell casino and seized 349 machines. Tribal members blocked the only access road with cars, trucks, heavy equipment and their own bodies, and the standoff lasted three weeks. Governor Fife Symington arrived hours into it to negotiate with Nation President Clinton Pattea, and the agents left without the machines. On November 25, 1992, Symington signed Arizona’s first tribal gaming compacts. The old Fort McDowell Casino closed in October 2020, replaced that month by the new We-Ko-Pa Casino Resort.
As for the post itself, little survives beyond ruins and mounds near the Nation’s agency. One detail the record leaves fuzzy is when Camp McDowell officially became Fort McDowell; sources disagree, and this page does not pick a year.