The Wickenburg Massacre was the November 5, 1871, murder of six stagecoach passengers en route westbound from Wickenburg, Arizona Territory, headed for San Bernardino, California, on the La Paz road.
Massacre Around mid-morning, about six miles from Wickenburg, the stagecoach was attacked by 15 Yavapai warriors, who were sometimes mistakenly called Apache-Mohaves, from the Date Creek Reservation. Six men, including the driver, were shot and killed. Among them was Frederick Wadsworth Loring,July 29, 1876 The Arizona Citizen, front page a young writer from Boston working as a correspondent for Appleton's Journal and assigned to cover a cartographic expedition led by Lieutenant George Wheeler. One male passenger, William Kruger, and the only female passenger, Mollie Sheppard, managed to escape. According to Kruger, Sheppard eventually died of the wounds she received."What Really Happened to Mollie Sheppard?"; by: Jan MacKell Collins
Memorial plaques have been installed near the site several times, including in 1937 by the Arizona Highway Department and in 1948 and 1988 by the Wickenburg Saddle Club. The Wickenburg Massacre was featured on an April 12, 1996, episode of Unsolved Mysteries. And on November 6, 2025, YouTube.com's, The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered channel, an episode was posted "The Wickenburg Massacre: A Wild West Mystery".
See also
List of Indian massacres in North America
References
Further reading
Dan L. Thrapp: Al Sieber: Chief of Scouts. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman 1964, pp. 87–105 Another account of the massacre from University of Arizona Bill W. Smith. A Collection of Newspaper Articles, Letters, and Reports, Regarding the Wickenburg Massacre and Subsequent Camp Date Creek Incident. Phoenix: Privately Published, 1989. 68 pp. ,
External links a proposed archeological investigation