“War to the Death”

On the morning of June 1, 1864, a group of 100 volunteers gathered at King Woolsey’s fortified ranch house to form a raiding party to pursue Apaches in Tonto Basin. The Apaches had been harassing the isolated settlements of Big Bug, Lynx Creek and Agua Fria (present-day Humboldt) ever since Joseph Rutherford Walker and his party had first ventured into the area the prior summer. Most of the men lived in the recently-established Arizona territorial capital of Prescott, within the defensive r