By Fred Veil
It was very dangerous to travel within many parts of the Arizona Territory in the early 1870s, as the Indians, especially the Apaches, remained hostile to the ever-increasing encroachment of the white settlers on their native lands. The newspapers of the day, and the memoirs and reminiscences of our pioneers, are replete with stories of men and women killed or captured by marauding Indians while traveling within the Territory.
In those days it was considered safer to travel at night and rest during the day at stopover points such as towns or intervening stage stations. For example, the usual stopover points for the three day trip between the Salt River Valley and Prescott via the Wickenburg Road were the town of Wickenburg and the village of Skull Valley. Travelers like Gus Swain, John McDonald and George Taylor, who chose to ignore this common practice, paid for their indiscretion with their lives.
On the night of March 10, 1873, Swain and McDonald set out from Phoenix with a wagonload of freight and a saddle horse bound for Wickenburg. The load in their wagon was heavy and their progress along the route was slow. Consequently, when daylight broke on the morning of the 11th, they were approximately 15 miles from their destination. As they entered the Hassayampa Wash they were overtaken by Major Charles Veil, a former Army officer who was then associated with the Hellings Mill in East Phoenix and was en route to Prescott on business. The men were acquainted with each other. Swain had been in the territory for about ten years and McDonald had been employed by Veil at the Mill. In fact, the saddle mounted on McDonald’s horse had once belonged to Veil, a fact that would ultimately prove to be of some consequence.
The three men traveled together for a short time. Veil, however, uneasy about traveling in daylight and anxious to get to his first stopover place in Wickenburg, moved on in his lighter and faster buggy. Shortly thereafter, not a quarter of a mile from where Veil left them, Swain and McDonald were ambushed and killed by Tonto Apaches, who stole their stock and the freight they were transporting. Reportedly, the bodies of both men were riddled with arrows and their heads had been smashed in with rocks. Meanwhile, Veil, unaware of the attack, continued on safely to Wickenburg.
While many warriors were armed with rifles, the bow and arrow remained an important weapon for the Apaches in the early 1870s (Photo Courtesy Sharlot Hall Museum, Call Number: IN-A-105pb).
Later that evening, not far from the site of the Swain-McDonald ambush, Taylor, the 21-year old son of the superintendent of the Vulture Mine, was captured by the Apaches while he was traveling on foot from a neighbor’s house to his home. He was stripped naked, tied up and subjected to a slow and agonizing death, as the Apaches shot arrows into non-vital parts of his body until he died.
These deaths coincided with an ongoing military campaign in the Tonto Basin initiated in late 1872 by General George Crook, the commanding officer of the Department of Arizona, and set in motion a punitive operation that ultimately brought an end to his winter offensive and closure to these incidents. Lieutenant William Rice, in command of a 5th Cavalry company from Camp Date Creek, followed the trail of the hostiles into the Tonto Basin, where his unit crossed paths with a command out of Camp McDowell led by Captain George Randall, who was on the same trail. Rice and his command continued on to Ft. Whipple. Randall, however, crossed to the western side of the Verde River into Bloody Basin and ultimately corralled the Apaches at Turret Mountain, where on March 24, 1873 his troopers fought and won a decisive victory in a battle that would be heralded as one of the major engagements of Crook’s 1872-1873 campaign. Reportedly, 47 Apaches were killed in the battle.
Prescott’s Weekly Arizona Miner of April 5, 1873 exalted in Randall’s “Glorious Victory,” and observed that “Never, since the settlement of Arizona, has retribution, so speedily and full, ever overtaken the Apaches as in this instance.”
The Miner was, of course, suggesting that the murderers of Swain, McDonald and Taylor had met their fate at Turret Mountain, and it may have been right. Veil’s saddle, which had been in the possession of McDonald when he was killed, was found among the Tonto Apaches who fought at Turret Mountain.
(Days Past is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners, International (www.prescottcorral.org). This and other Days Past articles are available at www.sharlothallmuseum.org/library-archives/days-past. Please contact SHM Library & Archives Reference Desk at 928-445-3122 Ext. 14 or via email at archivesrequest@sharlothallmuseum.org for information.)