Relocation Authority, of which the largest was the Poston War Relocation Center in Yuma County (now La Paz County) in southwestern Arizona. Most of the Japanese Americans living in California, 110,000 of them, were moved to Poston and other centers, including the Gila River War Relocation Center 30 miles southeast of Phoenix. Del Webb built Poston on the Colorado River Indian Reservation over the objections of the tribal council (just as the Gila River Center, located on the Gila River Indian Reservation near Sacaton, Arizona, was built over the strong objections of that reservation’s American Indian government). It is a sad irony of western history that Indians, who themselves had been rounded up 80 or so years ago to be relocated and imprisoned on unfamiliar and hostile terrain, would now be forcibly hosting a new generation of Japanese American prisoners.3
Relocation policy was not only targeted at Japanese Americans and Indian communities, tribes, and bands, but at nuclear families and individual family heads. The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 encouraged Native Americans as individuals to leave the reservation and assimilate into the general population, i.e., urbanization of the indigenous person. The law provided for moving expenses, vocational training, four weeks of subsistence per diem, and other grants as long as the recipient went to a government designated city. By 1960 over 31,000 indigenous individuals had moved to cities. Alas, the long term effects were devastating with individuals and their families suffering from isolation, racial discrimination, and segregation. However, an unintended result was the formation of the American Indian Movement in 1968, a group that was directed by “urbanized” Indians.4 But, of course, the removal and relocation of 1863 is the concern of this work.
Obviously, to understand that year the reader should study events that occurred both before and after 1863, and that is what this study does. But there can be no denying the importance of that year. For example, 1863 was the date of the Emancipation Proclamation; when Lincoln, attempting to foster patriotism during the Civil War, declared Thanksgiving a national holiday; the beginning of the Long Walk of the Navajo; the year of the Numa (Paiute) Path of Tears; the death of Mangas Coloradas and an acceleration of the Apache wars; the Bear River Massacre of Shoshone men, women, and children; when the Comanche leader Quanah Parker became a warrior; and when precious mineral seekers encroached upon Yavapai, Mojave, Apache, and Yaqui lands. It was also when Anglo farmers near the Gila first began to appropriate water from the O’odham communities.
That year also saw the Territory of Arizona established (divided from New Mexico Territory), and the founding of the city of Prescott (gold had been discovered at Lynx Creek outside of Prescott), and the building of Fort Whipple, near Prescott. Even before the arrival of federal officials in Arizona 20 Indians had been killed outside of Fort Whipple in spite of the peace treaty that had been signed by the federal government and the Yavapai. After 1863 Arizona’s Yavapai would lose their lives, their freedom, and their land. As an aside, I should mention that Mormon settlers and authorities were in the center of many of these events that took place in Utah, southern Idaho, Arizona, southern California, western Nevada, Sonora, and Chihuahua.
The year 1863 is a mid-century marker between the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the enforcement of which led to the removal of several Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw from their eastern homelands to Indian Territory in eastern Oklahoma, and the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890. The latter symbolizes the end of the Indian wars when the US Army killed as many as 150 men, women, and children at the Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.5
Finally 1863 is a time of civil war in the United States when northern Union soldiers fought their southern Confederate brothers in the bloodiest of conflicts. The inhabitants of the Southwest were not unaffected by events in the East. Many troops were reassigned to either northern or southern armies, and fighting between non-Indians and Native Americans stopped in some places, while elsewhere inter-tribal warfare ensued6 and volunteer forces initiated the massacre of many indigenous groups.
The Civil War marked the end of that phase of Indian removal between 1830 and 1860 when land was expropriated from the native inhabitants of the lower South, stretching from South Carolina to east Texas (the “Cotton Kingdom”) and the original proprietors were sent west of the Mississippi. Millions of acres of conquered land were surveyed and put up for sale by the United States, a privatization of the public domain that created one of the greatest economic booms up to that time. The expansion of cotton and the movement of slaves and slavery south and west continued the general trend of western expansion (and westernization) in general.7 Surprisingly, the year 1834 also saw the passage by the US Congress of the Intercourse Act in which most of the land west of the Mississippi, excluding Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana, was declared to be Indian country.8 The Civil War years would witness a diminishment of that promise.
With the discovery of gold in California in 1848, “argonauts” travelled across southern Arizona through the Yuma crossing at the Colorado River headed for the gold fields of California. They soon backtracked through Nevada and Arizona, and by 1863 were encroaching on the lands of the Paiute, Mojave, Yavapai, Apache, and O’odham nations. Lust for precious minerals, arable lands, and water would soon lead to the almost inevitable confrontations between industrialized and non-industrialized peoples.
Until the nineteenth century most of the world boundaries between states were not fixed. Most treaties were accords designed to prevent conflict or solidify alliances. Until the Treaty of Greenville (1795) in which annuities were institutionalized, treaties with the Indians of North America were primarily used to maintain a balance of power between France and England. After Greenville, the Louisiana Purchase (1803), the discovery of gold in Georgia (1828), and the initiation of Andrew Jackson’s policy of forced ethnic cleansing (1829), treaties were negotiated between the US and the indigenous population in order to acquire the land of the latter. In 1871 Congress stopped negotiating treaties, and by 1924 extended citizenship to American Indians.
Throughout all of this, because the Commerce Clause (Section 8) of the US Constitution reserved to the federal government the right to regulate commercial relationships and land ownership “… with the Indian Tribes,” questions and issues concerning the use and ownership of the lands of the native peoples was left up to the bureaucrats and politicians in Washington, D.C. to decide. This has been the situation from 1790 onward to today.1
By the nineteenth century Europeans and Americans began to arrange treaties between themselves or with local rulers, and from the early to mid-nineteenth century mapmaking and the map were essential to this process. The survey maps of the General Land Office made relevant the shape of the territory, and that shape would eventually gain tremendous political importance.
Akin to the Cotton Kingdom, the Greater Southwest was surveyed and mapped before the conquering troops arrived, only to be followed by gold seekers, farmers, entrepreneurs, Protestant missionaries, and Mormon settlers. And the US government was very busy negotiating treaties with Mexicans, Navajos, Shoshones and others. Treaty-making had taken on a new role, that of paving the way for settlement and development of indigenous lands, and the formalization of the subordination of tribal peoples. While the treaties may have failed from the indigenous perspective, these accords did meet the needs of the newcomers.9
The Indians, as obstacles to development, had to be removed. By mid-century the US government had already developed the concept of the reservation. Derived from English Indian policies, this treatment of segregating tribes in separate communities differed sharply from the Spanish and Mexican ideas of assimilation and incorporation of the Indian as a national citizen. In 1858, the commissioner of Indian Affairs described the reservation system this way: “concentrating the Indians on small reservations of land, and … sustaining them there for a limited period of time, until they can be induced to make the necessary exertions to support themselves.”10
As noted earlier, the geographical area under study is called the Greater Southwest, territory that is often referred to by geographers and ethnohistorians as the Gran Chichimeca. Anthropologist Charles Di Peso defined the Gran Chichimeca as comprehending
