The Skeleton Cave massacre was the killing of Yavapai people by the US army on December 28th, 1872 in the Arizona Territory during the Yavapai wars.
Background
Massacre
On December 28, 1872, the US army men encountered the Yavapai hiding out at Skeleton Cave, located in the Salt River Canyon northeast of present-day Phoenix, Arizona. The US forces were composed of men from the 5th Cavalry Regiment led by Captain William H. Brown, and were accompanied by 30 Apache scouts. Captain James Burns also participated and led a force of 100 Pima people in the attack.
At least 76 Yavapai were killed in the attack including women and children.Braatz 2003, Surviving Conquest: A History of the Yavapai Peoples, p. 138, https://archive.org/details/survivingconques0000braa Women and children who survived the attack were taken as prisoners to Camp Grant.Braatz 2003, Surviving Conquest: A History of the Yavapai Peoples, p. 138, https://archive.org/details/survivingconques0000braa
Legacy and analysis
A Yavapai boy named Hoomothya, later named Mike Burns, who witnessed the massacre wrote that "over 225" Yavapai were killed in the attack.Burns, Mike (Hoomothya). All of My People Were Killed: The Memoir of Mike Burns (Hoomothya), A Captive Indian. Edited by Sandra Lynch, Sharlot Hall Museum Press, 2010Crandall, M. (2014). Wassaja Comes Home: A Yavapai Perspective on Carlos Montezuma’s Search for Identity. The Journal of Arizona History, 55(1), 1–26. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24459861
Historian Jeffrey P. Shepherd called the massacre a "genocidal act".Jeffrey P. Shepherd, Review of All of My People Were Killed: The Memoir of Mike Burns (Hoomothya), A Captive Indian, Western Historical Quarterly, Volume 42, Issue 3, Autumn 2011, Pages 389–390, https://doi.org/10.2307/westhistquar.42.3.0389
References