Yavapai

The Yavapai are the Upland Yuman people of west-central Arizona. Archaeologists trace them to Patayan groups who moved east from the Colorado River and emerged as a distinct people around 1300; their name, given by the Mojave, means people of the sun.

They lived in four roaming bands, gathering wild foods and raiding in shifting alliances, often with the Western Apache against the Akimel O'odham and Maricopa. Hopi guides led the Spanish explorer Antonio de Espejo to their copper-bearing mountains in 1583, and Juan de Onate crossed their lands in 1598 and 1604.

Smallpox carried off perhaps a quarter of them in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Franciscan Francisco Garces lived among them in 1776, by which time horses, metal tools and cattle raiding had reshaped their old way of life.