Trevor Huxham

Commanding Officer’s Quarters Stand in the breezeway of a charming, 150-year-old home, complete with period furniture and decorations, and you’ll finally get a chance to cool off from the Arizona heat. But you’ll be chilled when you realize why there’s a fort standing in the middle of Arizona, hundreds of miles from the nearest border.  Fort Verde State Historic Park  is the remnant of a military outpost built during the final campaigns of the Indian Wars. Administration building As Anglo settlers began to pour into the fertile Verde Valley region, the U.S. Army was tasked with protecting them from raids by Yavapai and Western Apache people defending their ancestral land. So Camp Verde was set up in 1865, later becoming the permanent Fort Verde in 1871. Years of battles between U.S. troops and Yavapai and Apache fighters culminate...

Petroglyphs When I checked in at the Montezuma Well unit of Montezuma Castle National Monument , a volunteer ranger handed me a sparse, black-and-white paper map of the surrounding region and pointed out some places he recommended. One destination was an old ranch in central Arizona where he assured me I could find some petroglyphs out in the woods. Seems legit , I thought. I had already dragged my poor, formerly bright-white Toyota Corolla across one dirt road to get here, so what was one more?

Right off an interstate highway in central Arizona, a national monument protects prehistoric multi-story apartments nestled inside a limestone cliff, old canals that once fed water to crops in the desert, and even a pond where five unique species have evolved. But everything about the name of this park is just…totally, totally wrong. Montezuma Castle? More like Sinagua Cliff Dwellings When clueless Anglo settlers moved into the Verde Valley in the late 1800s and encountered these dwellings, they used the name of an Aztec ruler whose empire stretched across southern Mexico 1,300 miles away. Montezuma’s name, unfortunately, has stuck. “Sinagua” would be more accurate. It’s the term archaeologists apply to the Indigenous people who lived in central and northern Arizona between around 500 and 1500 CE. The Spanish words for “without water” or “waterless” have been used to refer to these people because they made do with little rainfall, diverting preci...