1. Captain Jim to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, September 25, 1915, File 115, Havasupai Agency, Central Classified Files, 1907–39, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75, National Archives. (Hereafter CCF/BIA.) Since Captain Jim could not write, he dictated his letter to D. Clinton West, the Havasupais' Indian agent. The names by which native peoples are referred to in non-Indian documents are often problematic. It is likely, for instance, that “Captain Jim” was a nickname applied by outsiders to someone who was called something quite different by members of his own tribe. Thus, whenever the Indian name is known, I have used this instead of the individual's non-Indian nickname.

2. A number of recent studies have begun to analyze the links between conservation and Indian peoples. See Mark Spence, “Dispossessing the Wilderness: Yosemite Indians and the National Park Ideal, 1864–1930,” Pacific Historical Review 65 (February 1996): 27–59, and “Crown of the Continent, Backbone of the World: The American Wilderness Ideal and Blackfeet Exclusion from Glacier National Park,” Environmental History 1 (July 1996): 29–49; Warren, Hunter's Game, 71–105, 126–71; and Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). For preliminary sketches of the impact of the national forests on Indian peoples, see Richard White, “Indian Land Use and the National Forests,” in Harold K. Steen, Origins of the National Forests: A Centennial Symposium (Durham, N.C.: Forest History Society, 1992), 173–80; and Andrew H. Fisher, “The 1932 Handshake Agreement: Yakama Indian Treaty Rights and Forest Service Policy in the Pacific Northwest,” Western Historical Quarterly 28 (summer 1997): 187–217.

3. Petition of Lac du Flambeau Indians, September 7, 1897 (1897: Letter 37,648) LR/BIA; Bailey to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, May 20, 1903 (1903: Letter 32,694) LR/BIA (although his exact tribal affiliation is hard to determine, Bailey was likely a member of either the Chippewa or Ottawa nations);

4. For a discussion of Indian disempowerment during this time, see Richard White, “It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 439.

5. A memo from J. V. Lloyd to Superintendent Tillotson, November 29, 1937, refers, for example, to the “local Supai problem.” See also Tillotson's “The Problem of the Havasupai Camp near Grand Canyon Village,” June 18, 1936. Both are from Havasupai Indian Collection, File A9431, Grand Canyon National Park Museum Collection. (Hereafter GCNPMC.)

6. Frank Hamilton Cushing recorded this myth when he visited the Havasupai in 1881. See Frank H. Cushing, The Nation of the Willows (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1965), 73. (This book is a reprint of two articles that Cushing wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in 1882.) Other Havasupai myths can be found in Carma Lee Smithson and Robert C. Euler, Havasupai Legends: Religion and Mythology of the Havasupai Indians of the Grand Canyon (Salt Lake: University of Utah Press, 1994); and Juan Sinyella, “Havasupai Traditions,” ed. J. Donald Hughes, Southwest Folklore 1 (spring 1977): 35–52.

7. Useful discussions of Havasupai farming and land use practices can be found in Elman Service, “Recent Observations on Havasupai Land Tenure,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 3 (winter 1947): 360–66; and John F. Martin, “A Reconsideration of Havasupai Land Tenure,” Ethnology 7 (October 1968): 450–60.

8. Since the Walapai and the Havasupai spoke the same dialect of the Yuman language and often intermarried, some scholars consider the two groups branches of the same tribe that became distinct from one another only as a result of federal policies. Robert A. Manners, An Ethnological Report on the Hualapai (Walapai) Indians of Arizona (New York: Garland, 1974), 14–17, 37–39. For more on the relations between the Havasupai and their neighbors, see Steven A. Weber and P. David Seaman, eds., Havasupai Habitat: A. F. Whiting's Ethnography of a Traditional Indian Culture (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), 11; and Thomas A. Sheridan, Arizona: A History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 74–75.

9. Mark Hanna, Autobiography of Mark Hanna, as told to Richard Emerick, ed. Jon Reyhner (Billings, Mont.: Eastern Montana College, 1988), 19; J. Donald Hughes, In the House of Stone and Light: A Human History of the Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon, Ariz.: Grand Canyon Natural History Association, 1978), 12–14; and Leslie Spier, “Havasupai Ethnography,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 29 (1928): 244–46.

10. “Depositions of Big Jim, Billy Burro, Supai Mary and Allen Akaba,” 7–10, 20, 21, 53, Records of the Indian Claims Commission, Havasupai Tribe,

11. Weber and Seaman, Havasupai Habitat, 45–47; “Depositions, 1950,” 16. Useful descriptions of the Havasupai seasonal cycle can be found in Douglas W. Schwartz, On the Edge of Splendor: Exploring Grand Canyon's Human Past (Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research, 1988), 43–45; and Stephen Hirst, Havsuw 'Baaja: People of the Blue Green Water (Supai, Ariz.: Havasupai Tribe, 1985), 39–40.

12. Spier, “Havasupai Ethnography,” 246–48.

13. The Havasupai apparently had horses as early as 1775. See Francisco Garces, On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer: The Diary and Itinerary of Francisco Garces in His Travels through Sonora, Arizona, and California, 1775–1776, ed. Elliot Coues (New York: Francis P. Harper, 1900), 2:337–39. Garces suspected that many of the Havasupais' animals may have been stolen from settlers in New Mexico, since they sported Spanish brands. One additional advantage of having horses was that the Havasupai could kill and eat them during lean times. See Hanna, Autobiography of Mark Hanna, 23; and Weber and Seaman, Havasupai Habitat, 28–34.

14. Spier, “Havasupai Ethnography,” 362–68; Hirst, Havsuw 'Baaja, 45–46; “Depositions, 1950,” 35.

15. Hughes, In the House of Stone and Light, 47.

16. Flagstaff, Arizona, Champion, September 1886 and January 22, 1887. A useful account of early tourism can be found in Frederic Trautmann, trans. and ed., “Germans at the Grand Canyon: The Memoirs of Paul Lindau, 1883,” Journal of Arizona History 26 (winter 1985): 375–94.

17. Hughes, In the House of Stone and Light, 54; and Douglas H. Strong, “The Man Who ‘Owned’ Grand Canyon,” American West 6 (September 1969): 33–40. For more on the Hance and Cameron trails, see Thomas E. Way, Destination: Grand Canyon (Phoenix: Golden West Publishers, 1990), 83, 85–86, 88–90.

18. Henry F. Dobyns and Robert C. Euler, The Havasupai People (Phoenix: Indian Tribal Series, 1971), 34. A glimpse of the Havasupai oral tradition about this population loss can be found in Sinyella, “Havasupai Traditions,” 42–43.

19. Cushing, Nation of the Willows, 52; and U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1892 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1892), 650. Mark Hanna recalls searching for old clothing in the Williams dump. Hanna, Autobiography of Mark Hanna, 20. During this time, the Walapai also “clothe[d] themselves frequently with garments cast off by the whites.” William McConnell to Secretary of the Interior, August 9, 1899, Reports of Inspection of the Field Jurisdictions of the Office of Indian Affairs, 1873–1900, M1070, Roll 20, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, RG 75, National Archives.

20. Earl Henderson, The Havasupai Indian Agency, Arizona (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1928), 8; Frank Hamilton Cushing, “Navajo's Message,” July 7, 1881 (1881: Letter 17,434) LR/BIA. This letter was supposedly dictated by Chief Navajo to Cushing.

21. George Wharton James, Indians of the Painted Desert Region: Hopis, Navahoes, Wallapais, Havasupais (Boston: Little Brown, 1903), 232–33; Hanna, Autobiography of Mark Hanna, 51.

22. Frank E. Casanova, ed., “General Crook Visits the Supais as Reported by John G. Bourke,” Arizona and the West 10 (autumn 1968): 272–73; Prescott, Arizona, Journal-Miner, August 23, 1890; Daniel Dorchester, “Report of Matters Relating to the Supai,” March 28, 1892 (1892: Letter 12,588) LR/BIA; Testimony of John Davis, September 14, 1893 (1893: Letter 36,542) LR/BIA.

23. Casanova, “General Crook Visits the Supais,” 268; U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1892, 650; Cushing, Nation of the Willows, 57; Frank Hamilton Cushing, “Navajo's Message,” July 7, 1881 (1881: Letter 17,434) LR/BIA.

24. Symons to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, July 16, 1913, Havasupai Agency, File 307.4, CCF/BIA; Dobyns and Euler, Havasupai People, 33.

25. For copies of the original executive order, as well as its subsequent revisions, see the Phoenix Territorial Expositor, July 9, 1880; and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1882 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1892), 246–47.

26. Palfrey's report of July 20, 1881, can be found in the Records of the Adjutant General's Office, Letters Received, 1881–1889 (M689), 1528 AGO 1881, RG 94, National Archives. (Hereafter 1528 AGO 1881.)

27. Navajo's supposed recommendations can be found in Report of William Redwood Price, July 1, 1881 (1528 AGO 1881). For the Havasupais' later response to their reservation's monuments, see D. H. Dillon to Secretary of the Interior, January 17, 1891 (1891: Letter 3,266) LR/BIA.

28. Extract from a report of R. K. Evans, February 10, 1881 (1528 AGO 1881). Even in 1930, the chief of the Havasupai could produce documents from the 1880s demonstrating his tribe's right to the lands contained within the reservation. Caring for these documents appears, in fact, to have been a mark of leadership. As the chief Manakaja remarked through an interpreter, “Those letters is from officials; they are official letters. … before he is made a chief one of his relatives had those papers along with him. … He is supposed to keep them as long as this tribe lives.” U.S. Congress, Senate, Survey of Conditions of the Indians in the United States: Part 17: Arizona: Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Indian Affairs, 71^st Cong., 3^rd sess., 1911, 8749.

29. “Examiner's Report on Tribal Claims to Released Railroad Lands in Northwestern Arizona, May 1942,” Exhibit DD, Records of the Indian Claim Commission, Havasupai Tribe, Docket 91, RG 279, National Archives.

30. H. S. Welton to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, June 29, 1888 (1888: Letter 16,641) LR/BIA; G. M. Brayton to Assistant Adjutant General, January 26, 1888 (1888: Letter 4,739) LR/BIA; and H. S. Welton to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, June 29, 1888 (1888: Letter 16,641) LR/BIA.

31. W. W. Bass to T. J. Morgan, July 25, 1890 (1890: Letter 23,359) LR/BIA; McGowan to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, September 11, 1890 (1890: Letter 28,941) LR/BIA.

32. W. H. Holabird to Secretary of the Interior, May 26, 1890 (1890: Letter 17,065) LR/BIA.

33. George B. Duncan to Post Adjutant, February 21, 1890 (1890: Letter 20,227) LR/BIA.

34. “Depositions, 1950,” 57–58. Supai Mary gives a similar account of dispossession, 46.

35. A similar, if less planned, pattern unfolded in the canyon itself, where feral burros, having escaped from prospectors, competed with the mountain sheep that the tribe normally hunted.

36. Bean to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, December 12, 1885 (Letter 29759:1885) LR/BIA.

37. Bass to Miles, January 28, 1890 (1890: Letter 9,185) LR/BIA.

38. Powell to Belt, February 8, 1892 (1892: Letter 5,117) LR/BIA; W. H. Holabird to Secretary of the Interior, May 26, 1890 (1890: Letter 17,065) LR/BIA. Mark Hanna recollected that during his youth he ate rabbits and rats more often than antelope and mountain sheep. Hanna, Autobiography of Mark Hanna, 2.

39. For examples of calls to enlarge the Havasupai reservation, see Brayton to Adjutant General, January 26, 1888 (1888: Letter 4,739) LR/BIA; and Duncan to Post Adjutant, February 21, 1890 (1890: Letter 9,185) LR/BIA. The quotations on BIA efforts to improve Havasupai farming are from the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1892, 649–50; and Daniel Dorchester, “Report of Matters Relating to the Supai,” March 28, 1892 (1892: Letter 12,588) LR/BIA.

40. Gaddis to McCowan, April 30, 1892 (1892: Letter 18,326) LR/BIA; U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1893 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1893), 402; Gaddis to McCowan, May 6, 1893 (1893: Letter 17,893) LR/BIA.

41. U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1899 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1899), 156; Weber and Seaman, Havasupai Habitat, 44.

42. Putesoy quoted in Hirst, Havsuw 'Baaja, 91. The poaching of livestock seems to have been more common among the Havasupais' close relatives, the Walapai, who were forced to such desperate measures because of the meager resources on their reservation. See Henry F. Dobyns and Robert C. Euler, The Ghost Dance of 1889 among the Pai Indians of Northwestern Arizona (Prescott, Ariz.: Prescott College Press, 1967), 8; and Ewing to Taggart, April 30, 1899 (1899: Letter 21,339) LR/BIA.

43. U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1906 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1906), 179; Hanna, Autobiography of Mark Hanna, 30, 44–46. Arizona resident A. G. Oliver reported in 1890 that the Havasupai were “industrious and at all times willing to work having had a number of them in my employ, in the mines at several times.” Oliver to Russell, February 11, 1890 (1890: Letter 9,185) LR/BIA. For a discussion of the appeals of seasonal wage labor for marginal groups, see Sarah Deutsch, No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic

44. Bass to McGowan, March 2, 1891 (1891: Letter 9,602) LR/BIA.

45. This description of the dance, which comes from a Walapai informant, must have closely paralleled the Havasupai understanding of the ceremony. Quoted in Dobyns and Euler, Ghost Dance, 20. For a description of the official reaction to the Ghost Dance, see Ewing to Commissioner of Indian Affairs, March 29, 1898 (1898: Letter 15,139) LR/BIA.

46. Dobyns and Euler, Ghost Dance, 27; Hirst, Havsuw 'Baaja, 56–57; Spier, “Havasupai Ethnography,” 261–66. Most scholars, following Spier, have argued that the Ghost Dance movement died out after a year. There is some evidence, however, that certain elements of the dance were integrated into the Havasupais' ongoing ceremonial life. Smithson and Euler, Havasupai Legends, 28–30.

47. A copy of the order creating the Grand Cañon Forest Reserve can be found in Records of the Department of the Interior, Patents and Miscellaneous, Entry 168 (Records Relating to Forest Reserves), RG 48, National Archives. See also U.S. General Land Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1893 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1893), 77–79; and “List of the Western Forest Reserves,” Forest and Stream 52 (January 28, 1899): 67.

48. Henry S. Graves, The Principles of Handling Woodlands (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1911), v; U.S. General Land Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1902 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1902), 81–83. References to the import of forest conservation for irrigation can be found in Edward Braniff, “The Reserve Policy in Operation,” Forestry Quarterly 2 (May 1904): 142; and “Forest Reserves of North America,” in American Big Game in Its Haunts, ed. George Bird Grinnell (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1904), 455–60. Marsh's arguments are referred to in U.S. General Land Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1877 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1877), 25. For a discussion of national forests in the East, see William E. Shands, “The Lands Nobody Wanted: The Legacy of the Eastern National Forests,” in Origins of the National Forests: A Centennial Symposium, ed. Harold K. Steen (Durham, N.C.: Forest History Society, 1992), 19–44.

49. See, for example, the mentions of Indian incendiarism in Franklin B. Hough, Report upon Forestry, 1877, 155, Report upon Forestry, 1878–79 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1880), 12, and Report upon Forestry, 1882 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1882), 224; as well as Schotzka, American Forests, 11. Even as late as 1901, federal administrators would blame native peoples for setting 124 fires on national forest lands during the previous year. U.S. General Land Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1901 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1901), 135, 441.

50. Report of Edward Bender, January 31, 1898, Records of the General Land Office, Division R, National Forests, Grand Canyon, Box 59, RG 49, National Archives.

51. F. B. Hough, Report upon Forestry, 1877, 26–27.

52. F. B. Hough, Report upon Forestry, 1882, 129–30.

53. U.S. General Land Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1885 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1885), 81–82; U.S. General Land Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1886 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1886), 101; and Schotzka, American Forests, 11.

54. The report of the American Association for the Advancement of Science is reprinted in F. B. Hough, Report upon Forestry, 1882, 54; “Recent Forest Legislation,” Garden and Forest 4 (April 22, 1891): 181; F. B. Hough, Report upon Forestry, 1877, 15, n. 1. A concern for morality floated near the surface of much of the late nineteenth-century writing about conservation. Fernow, for example, spoke of “the wide bearing which a proper forestry policy has upon the material and moral development of a country,” arguing that it was “the moral aspect of our present condition in regard to our public timber lands” that necessitated the creation of governmentally protected forest preserves. Bernhard E. Fernow, “Report of the Forestry Division,” in U.S. Department of Agriculture, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture, 1887, 606. See also Samuel Hays's intriguing discussion of how the term conservation was applied to all sorts of crusades during the progressive era, in Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 175.

55. The quote about “unscrupulous companies” can be found in U.S. General Land Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1886, 102; see also U.S. General Land Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, 1880 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1881), 171; Gifford Pinchot, The Fight for Conservation (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1910), 43, 80. The argument that corporations favored conservation has been made most eloquently by Samuel Hays in Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 1–2, 50. Other scholars to reach similar conclusions include Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963); and Michael Williams, Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 407–9.

56. Breen to Commissioner of GLO, May 10, 1902 (1902: Letter 1,583) Records of the Department of the Interior, Lands and Railroad Division, Entry 550, RG 48, National Archives; and Hanna to Commissioner of GLO, March 9, 1901 (Letterbook of Isaac B. Hanna) Records of the Forest Service, Entry 13, RG 95, National Archives.

57. H. S. Betts, Possibilities of Western Pines as a Source of Naval Stores. Forest Service Bulletin No. 116 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912); Entry 64 (General Correspondence, Forest Supervision, Region 3), Records of the Forest Service, RG 95, National Archives. See also Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, 57–60; Robbins, American Forestry, 17; and J. H. Allison, “Silvical Report on the Coconino National Forest,” 1906, Box 65, Entry 115 (Forest Research Compilation Files) Records of the Forest Service, RG 95, National Archives; and George W. Kimball, “The Silvicultural and Commercial Future of the Woodland Type in Northern Arizona,” 1914, Box 27, Entry 115 (Forest Research