What it means
Yavapai is the name of a people and, in Scottsdale, the name of the neighbor you drive past on the way to the river. The Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation sits on the Verde just east of Fountain Hills, about 25 miles from Old Town, and its casino billboards are how most visitors meet the word. It also names a county, a college, a dozen streets and, for anyone who hikes the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, the people who used those rock shelters last before the ranchers came.
The site’s ancient desert era chapter puts the Yavapai into the long sequence of the McDowells, after the Archaic hunters and the Hohokam, and the November 12, 1981 day page tells the Orme Dam story in detail. This page is about the name, what it covers and what it is routinely confused with.
Where you’ll meet it
On the Beeline Highway signs for Fort McDowell. At the We-Ko-Pa casino and golf courses. In the biography of Carlos Montezuma, the Yavapai physician who died at Fort McDowell in 1923. And every November at Orme Dam Victory Days, the Nation’s rodeo and powwow.
Where the word came from
The name is borrowed. Yavapai comes from the Mojave words Enyaeva Pai, usually translated “people of the sun,” and the people’s own language is Upland Yuman, kin to Hualapai and Havasupai, not to Apache. Their homeland ran across central Arizona from the Colorado River to the Mazatzals, held by four autonomous bands: the Tolkepaya in the west, the Yavepe in the northwest around Prescott, the Wipukepa in the Verde Valley, and the Kwevkepaya in the southeast, whose country included the McDowells, Four Peaks and the Superstitions. The Kwevkepaya are the Yavapai of this site’s pages.
Settlers and soldiers got the name wrong from the start, calling them Mohave-Apache or Tonto-Apache, and the Army fought them under those labels in the Yavapai Wars, which culminated in George Crook’s campaigns of 1871 to 1875. The worst single day was December 28, 1872, when troops of the 5th Cavalry trapped a band in a cave high above the Salt River canyon, in what is now the Salt River Canyon Wilderness above Canyon Lake, and killed more than seventy people. The bodies were left where they fell. A rancher named Jack Adams found the bones in January 1908, which is how the place got the name Skeleton Cave; the Yavapai brought the remains home to Fort McDowell and reburied them in 1933.
In 1875 the survivors of all four bands were marched to the San Carlos Apache reservation in winter, more than a hundred dying on the way. Families drifted back over the following decades, and on September 15, 1903, an executive order of President Theodore Roosevelt set aside 24,680 acres of the abandoned Fort McDowell military reserve on the Verde as a reservation. Camp McDowell had been built in 1865 to fight them.
What it is not
Yavapai is not a kind of Apache, and the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation is not the Yavapai-Apache Nation at Camp Verde or the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe; those are the other two Yavapai nations. Nor is Yavapai a synonym for the O’odham and Piipaash of the Salt River Community, the Yavapai’s southern neighbors and, historically, their rivals.
The fine print
The Nation’s defining modern fight was about water. Orme Dam, authorized by Congress in 1968 as part of the Central Arizona Project, would have stood at the confluence of the Salt and Verde rivers 18 miles northeast of Phoenix and flooded about 15,000 acres, half the reservation, including most of its farmland and the river bottom that holds the community’s cemeteries. In 1976 the community voted 144 to 57 against selling. President Carter tried to drop the project in 1977, Arizona’s delegation fought back, and the Central Arizona Water Control Study of 1979 put alternatives on paper. Opponents, the Yavapai with Scottsdale activist Carolina Butler among them, used the environmental impact statement to document the dam’s effect on the lower Verde’s bald eagles and cottonwood forest. On November 6, 1981, Interior Secretary James Watt recommended Plan 6, which raised Roosevelt Dam and built New Waddell Dam on the Agua Fria instead, and on November 12 he announced that Orme would not be built. Orme Dam Victory Days has been held every November since.
The Nation today has about 950 enrolled citizens, roughly 600 on the reservation, with its government in Fountain Hills. It opened Arizona’s first tribal bingo hall in 1983 and a 166,341-square-foot casino in 2020, and runs a farm, a gravel operation and the We-Ko-Pa resort. The confluence the dam would have drowned is where the Salt River tubing runs end and the bottomland McDowell Mountain Regional Park looks out on.
The record’s gaps are in the counting. The Skeleton Cave dead are “more than seventy” in careful accounts and “one hundred” in others; the 1875 march’s toll is “more than a hundred.” The Army did not count carefully. Beyond dispute is the sequence: cave, march, return, reservation, dam, and the dam losing.