Wickenburg Massacre


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 supposedly 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, a young writer from Boston working as a correspondent for Appleton's Journal 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.
For a time the identity of the attackers was disputed. Over the next two years, General George Crook conducted an investigation into the attack, and eventually identified all the perpetrators. After trying to arrest the ringleaders without success, Crook sent Captain J. W. Mason to Burro Creek, where he encountered those responsible for the massacre as well as innocent Yavapai natives in three rancherias. Many were killed in the battle that followed.
Seven months prior to the Wickenburg incident, 144 Apaches were killed in the Camp Grant Massacre near Tucson, and Eastern sentiment was with the victims. However, Loring's death in Wickenburg turned public opinion against the Yavapai. In February 1875, though once promised reservation land near Prescott "forever and forever", the Yavapai tribe was uprooted and driven 180 miles south to the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, where they were forced to live beside their enemies from centuries past, the Chiricahua Apaches.
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 a April 12, 1996, episode of Unsolved Mysteries.