The Battle of Salt River Canyon, the Battle of Skeleton Cave, or the Skeleton Cave Massacre was the first principal engagement during the 1872 Tonto Basin Campaign under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George Crook. It was part of the Yavapai War from 1871 to 1875 against the Yavapai people, a Native American tribe in Arizona.
On December 28, 1872, Crook's men encountered the Yavapai stronghold at Skeleton Cave, located in the Salt River Canyon northeast of present-day Phoenix, Arizona. Crook's force was composed of 130 troopers from the 5th Cavalry Regiment led by Captain William H. Brown and another thirty Apache scouts.
The army took up a position around the mouth of Skeleton Cave and surprised a Yavapai band when they were dancing in celebration over a recent raid. Surrounding the cave, the soldiers opened fire. Some of Brown's men aimed for the roof of the cave, as the Yavapai band refused to surrender. Others, who were personally accompanied by Crook, rolled rocks and boulders down from the cliffs above. One warrior escaped the last volley by crawling on his belly. Realizing that he got out of the cave safely, he jumped on a large stone and let out a war cry, while firing at the soldiers' position. He was shot by a soldier from approx. 800 yards away, hitting the warrior in the chest and killing him. About 75 dead were found in the cave, including a number of women and children. No warriors survived the massacre. The women and children survivors were captured and taken to Camp Grant. Among the dead within the cave was Chief Nanni-chaddi, who had said that no soldier would ever find his stronghold there. This stronghold was only known to the Yavapai and Tonto Apache. Apache scouts led the Army to the stronghold, betraying their own people. Crook followed up this massacre, with another at Turret Peak several weeks later, both considered victories by the Government. The Yavapais soon made peace at Camp Verde in 1873 though some skirmishing continued into 1875.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
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