The Other Arizona, Redux

In 1871 an O’odham war party slipped north of the Salt River and attacked a group of Yavapais below Four Peaks in the Mazatzal Mountains. The Pimas killed most of the adults but took the children captive, including a little boy named Wassaja. They sold him to an Italian photographer named Carlos Gentile for thirty dollars, and Gentile renamed him Carlos Montezuma.

That name encompassed a world of changing meaning for Wassaja and Indian children like him. Gentile gave the boy his first name, but the second was generic Indian, harkening back to an Aztec past that had nothing to do with the Yavapais of central Arizona. Wassaja would never see his immediate family again. His mother was shot by army scouts while searching for her children. His father died on the San Carlos Reservation. His sisters were sold to a man who took them to Mexico. It was a time of diaspora and disintegration, when the Anglo world felt justified in taking Indian children away from their parents to “civilize” them. Wassaja grew up in Illinois and New York, far from his kinsmen and the sacred mountains of his people.

When he returned to Arizona thirty years later, Carlos Montezuma was a physician and a leader in the emerging pan-Indian movement. One of the first Native Americans to receive a medical degree, he spent seven years working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) on reservations across the West. His experiences gave him an abiding contempt for the BIA and its reservation system. Like Booker T. Washington and other reformers of the era, Montezuma believed that Native Americans had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and “press forward where the Indians ought to be—man among men.” He advocated hard work and off-reservation boarding schools. He thought that reservations turned Indians into “idlers, beggars, gamblers, and paupers.”

But Montezuma’s own homeland began stalking him during the last two decades of his life. He returned to Yavapai territory for the first time in 1901 and met relatives like his first cousins Charles and George Dickens. They drew him into the struggle to create a Yavapai reservation at abandoned Fort McDowell on the Verde River. That battle eventually pitted Montezuma against both the BIA and the Salt River Valley Water Users Association, who wanted Yavapai water rights and who tried to have the Yavapais transferred to the Salt River Reservation, where the O’odham and Pee Posh, their ancestral enemies, held sway.

Montezuma never accepted the reservation system and continued to practice medicine in Chicago, but he also fought tirelessly for Indian land and water rights, realizing that without a land base, Native American societies would wither and die. He hated the BIA’s power over Indian people, and he supported Indians who tried to preserve traditional ceremonies and political authority even though Montezuma, himself a devout Baptist, was profoundly ambivalent about “traditional” Native American culture. Ironically, his closest supporters among the Yavapais, Apaches, and O’odham were the traditionalists, who became known as “Montezumas” in the 1920s and 1930s.

By then, Montezuma himself was dead. In 1922 the combative “cast iron” doctor contracted tuberculosis. He published the last issue of his newsletter, Wassaja, in November, ending with an article called “The Indian Bureau—the Slaughter House of the Indian People.” Then, in December, he pulled himself onto a train in Chicago and made the long trip home. George Dickens and his family built a brush shelter for him at Fort McDowell, keeping a fire going while Montezuma lay on a mattress on the winter ground. But even though he told them, “I’m cold. I’m going to die of cold in here!” he refused his doctor’s request to move to a sanatorium. “I want to die like my ancestors did,” he said. And so he did, on January 23, 1923.

The Yavapais buried Montezuma in the Fort McDowell cemetery, where Four Peaks dominates the horizon and the Verde flows through an enormous mesquite bosque nearby. His tombstone reads:

• Wassaja

  Carlos Montezuma, M.D.

  Mohave Apache Indian

Those simple words...