Camp Grant Massacre

In early 1871 several hundred Aravaipa and Pinal Apache came in to Camp Grant, surrendered to Lieutenant Royal Whitman, and were permitted to settle along Aravaipa Creek under the Army's protection. They were counted, fed and put to work cutting hay. Tucson's newspapers and business interests, who profited from the Apache wars, insisted the camp was a base for raiding.

Before dawn on 30 April 1871 a party of about 150 - six Anglo-Americans, roughly forty-eight Mexican Americans and nearly a hundred Tohono O'odham, who had their own long history of war with the Apache - attacked the sleeping camp. They killed more than a hundred people, by most counts around 144. Almost all were women and children, because the men were away hunting. Something near thirty children were carried off and either kept in Tucson households or sold into slavery in Mexico.

President Grant called it murder and threatened to put Arizona under martial law unless there was a trial. More than a hundred defendants were tried in Tucson that December. The jury acquitted all of them after nineteen minutes. The massacre did help push the federal government toward Grant's Peace Policy and the creation of the San Carlos Reservation in 1872 - a reservation that became its own long confinement.