Ancestral Northeastern Pai ("people") bands inhabited the lowland desert area immediately east of the Colorado River by a.d. 700, judging from excavated pieces of ceramic pots of the kind Pai later made. These Yuman speakers gardened along the riverbanks and on spring-irrigated plots in the nearby mountains. Men hunted game, both big and small; women collected a variety of edible wild plants, seeds, and fruits. The Pai especially relished the edible fruits of one yucca species.
Sometime after a.d. 1300, the Pai expanded eastward onto the Colorado Plateau. The easternmost band (Havasua Pa'a, "Blue Water People") exploited the Grand Canyon south of the Colorado River. Large agave plants flourished on the canyon benches, where huge "mescal pits" attest to centuries of Pai pit-roasting of the sugar-rich plant hearts. The place name Indian Gardens at a spring below present-day Grand Canyon Village reflects the Pai practice of irrigated gardening; this band crossed the Little Colorado River frontier of Hopi territory to garden at Moenkopi Springs. Members of this and other Pai bands traded sun-dried mescal, flawless buckskins (from deer run to death), and red hematite to Oraibi Pueblo Hopis for ceramic vessels, textiles, foods, and, in historic times, metal tools and leather goods.
Oral tradition and linguistic evidence alike indicate that the Yavapai tribe separated from the other Pai around 1750. They spread south along the Verde River and the Agua Fría and Hassayampa tributaries of the Gila-Salt River to the frontier defended by Gila River Pimas. Pai myth attributes the split to a mud ball fight between children that spread to their parents. The Yavapai fought their bitterest battles against the Pai to their north. Warriors on both sides shouted mutually intelligible taunts in the heat of conflict. Once hostilities began, exacting vengeance for losses perpetuated lethal encounters. East of the Verde River, the Yavapai encountered Western Apache bands migrating westward. The two peoples, who spoke very different languages, mingled more than they fought, generating a border population never really understood by Euro-Americans.
The Franciscan missionary Francisco Garcés traversed northern Pai territory in 1776, from the Mojave frontier to Oraibi Pueblo and back. He noted that western Pai bands were obtaining leather and metal from Hispanic New Mexico via western Pueblo traders. New Mexican slave raiders captured a few Pai during the 1840s. U.S. Army explorers contacted the Northern Pai and Yavapai in 1853 and 1854, and members of the Western Yavapai band began seeing steamboats on the lower Colorado River during that decade.
Euro-American prospectors discovered placer gold on upper Hassayampa Creek in 1863, and the Union congress promptly created Arizona Territory. The Union dispatched troops to protect territorial officials and gold miners from the Yavapai, whose core territory the miners had invaded. Seeking to defend their economic resources, the Yavapai fought a series of skirmishes for nine years until 1872. A hundred Northern Pai scouts guided U.S. cavalrymen to the last resisting Northern Yavapai band camps in the canyon of the Santa María River. Pima-Maricopa Confederation scouts guided U.S. troops to a rock shelter in the canyon of the San River, where the last resisting Southeastern Yavapai fought to the death.
The western Pai bands had already fought and lost the "Walapai War" in 1866-69. Euro-Americans labeled all western Pai bands "Walapai," "Hualapai," or "Hualpai," versions of the native name of the western band, Whala Pa'a, "Pine Tree Mountain People." That conflict centered on a toll road between Fort Mohave (established in 1859) and Fort Whipple (established in 1864), which stood at the edge of Prescott, then the capital of Arizona Territory. A Prescott teamster triggered hostilities when he murdered sub-tribal chief Wauba Yuma, who carried a written pass from an army officer attesting to his good character and friendship toward Euro-Americans, along with two of his sons. Cavalry units stationed at Fort Mohave carried out most of the search-and-destroy missions that characterized the conflict. Forces from Fort Whipple conducted a few campaigns, surprising women gathering wild grass seed in the Hualapai Valley and processing agave hearts near Trout Creek. Cherum, chief of the "Walapai" Cerbat Mountain band, had stockpiled firearms and ammunition before hostilities began. Protected by rocks, his warriors twice forced cavalry contingents to retreat from his home canyon located several miles north and east of the toll road. Cherum also mobilized some two hundred fifty "Walapai" belonging to several bands plus refugee Southern Paiute warriors to attack Camp Beale's Springs, on the toll road.
Once army officers forced "Walapai" chiefs formally to capitulate, they concentrated the Walapai at Camp Beale's Springs under army supervision until Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials in 1874 demanded that they be removed from their homeland to the Colorado River Indian Reservation. Members of the easternmost band—the previously mentioned Havasua Pa'a—evaded both concentration and removal, staying in the Grand Canyon and on the adjacent plateau. Consequently, Euro-Americans increasingly referred to these still semi-autonomous "Havasupai" as separate from the "Walapai." In 1875, the surviving Walapai fled from the unhealthy Colorado River flood plain back to their aboriginal territory. They avoided another removal by making themselves indispensable at Euro-American mining camps and ranches, which desperately needed unskilled laborers.
Meanwhile, the army had concentrated the Yavapai at Camp Verde following their defeat; there they excavated irrigation canals and began growing food crops. In 1875, the BIA had the army remove the Yavapai from their homeland to the San Carlos (Apache) Indian Reservation. Though some western band Yavapai avoided removal by working for Euro-American miners on the desert north of the Gila River, most Yavapai remained interned at San Carlos until about 1900, when the BIA allowed them to return to the Verde River valley. There they found low-paying jobs at Prescott, the smelter town of Clarkdale, and nearby abandoned Fort Verde. Some gardened once lands were reserved for them. The president created the largest Yavapai reservation in 1903 at abandoned Fort McDowell, near the confluence of the Verde and Salt rivers.
BIA policy also administratively separated the Walapai from the Havasupai. In 1882, the army officer who had led cavalry offensives during the Walapai War surveyed boundaries for a Walapai reservation on the Colorado Plateau that included five major canyons on the south rim of the western Grand Canyon. The government reserved for the Havasupai but three hundred twelve acres at Havasupai Village, at the bottom of Cataract Canyon, disregarding the fact that the Havasupai traditionally spent the winter on the plateau, where deer and firewood abounded. Not until 1975 did Congress relieve this situation, when it approved the transfer of 175,000 acres of forested plateau land from the U.S. Forest Service to the BIA for Havasupai use.
After 1934 residents of most Pai reservations organized local governments. Female chiefs from one lineage led the Prescott Yavapai group from 1940 until 1994. The Prescott and Fort McDowell governments have led Arizona tribes in establishing gambling facilities that currently finance many local reservation programs.
Henry F. Dobyns and Robert C. Euler, The Havasupai People (Phoenix, Ariz.: Indian Tribal Series, 1971); Henry F. Dobyns and Robert C. Euler, The Walapai People (Phoenix, Ariz.: Indian Tribal Series, 1976).
Henry F. Dobyns
Tucson, Arizona
