Yumas encamped near the river at a spot where they had assaulted some women and a Pima had been killed while defending them. The Yumas had spent the night in singing their war songs. Now and again a medicine-man would come forward to puff whiffs of smoke in order that their cause might find favor with the gods. The Pima-Maricopa council ended about noon and it was decided to surround the Yumas and to make special effort to prevent them from reaching the river to obtain water. Formed in a semicircle, the Pimas and Maricopas shot down the Yumas upon three sides. Soon the Yumas began to waver and become exhausted from thirst in the heat of the day. They made several attempts to break through the line, but failed, and finally gathered in a compact body to make a last attempt to reach the river. At that moment the Pimas and Maricopas who were on horseback rushed in upon the enemy and rode them down. After a hand-to-hand combat the Yumas were all killed except one, who was stunned by the blow of a club and lay unconscious under a heap of dead. During the night he recovered his senses and escaped. This was the bloodiest fight known, and the Yumas came here to fight no more.[1]
Blackwater. During the year Pimas were killed in two places by the Apaches; three south of the river and one north.[2]
1858–59
Blackwater. The meteor of 1859 was observed by the Pimas, who called it pai-ikam ho-o. During a raid into the Apache country three of the enemy were killed and also one Pima.
- ↑ "In 1857, with Mohave, Cocopa, and Tonto allies, they [the Yumas] attacked the Pimas and Papagos up the river, and in a great battle were almost annihilated." Bancroft, Arizona and New Mexico, 501.
Cremony visited the Pimas as a captain in the California Column in 1862. In his Life Among the Apaches, 148, he mentions this conflict of the Pimas with their old enemies, saying: "The grazing ground to which we resorted during our stay near the Maricopa villages had been the scene of a desperate conflict between that tribe and the Pimos, on one side, and the Yumas, Chimehuevis, and Amohaves on the other. Victory rested with the Maricopas and Pimos, who slew over 400 of the allied tribes, and so humiliated them that no effort has ever been made on their part to renew hostilities. This battle occurred four years before our advent, and the ground was strewed with the skulls and bones of the slaughtered warriors."
For the Yuma side of the story see Lieutenant Ives's Report upon the Colorado River of the West, p. 45.
In a letter from an unnamed correspondent living among the Yumas or at Fort Yuma, to Sylvester Mowry, it is stated that the tribes engaging in this battle were the Yumas, Yampais, Mohaves, and Tonto Apaches, with one or two Dieganos [Diegueños], against the Pimas, Maricopas, and Papagos. One thousand five hundred men were engaged on each side. The Yumas "lost not less than 200 of the flower of their chivalry." See S. Ex. Doc. 11, 588, 35th Cong., 1st sess., 1858.
The Blackwater annalist could give but little information concerning the victory over the Yumas, but he had recorded it upon the calendar stick by a fringed line, in itself meaningless.
- ↑ The two men in the figure are not meant to represent two killed, but that the events occurred in two places.
