For the first time in Arizona's history, non-Indians came to the mountainous interior and stayed. After Ohio mining interests led by Samuel Heintzelman pushed the Arizona Organic Act through Congress in 1863, Fort Whipple even became the first capital of the new Arizona Territory. Then the following year, both fort and capital were moved south to a new town named after William Hickling Prescott, author of History of the Conquest of Mexico. A community of miners, merchants, and territorial officials sprang up in the middle of Yavapai and Apache country, and one bonanza generated ripples of exploration that led to other bonanzas. Soon mines tunneled into some of the driest country in North America, and names like Hassayampa, Haquahala, and Castle Dome entered the geography of the mining frontier. Like most features of that geography, Arizona's early mines rarely developed into permanent communities because the miners tended to leave after stripping away all of the gold.
The prospectors pioneered hundreds of miles of mule trails and wagon roads across the western Arizona desert. The first route embarked from La Paz, the second from Fort Mohave, the third from Hardyville over a toll road that enabled great high-wheeled freight wagons to carry loads as heavy as 15,000 pounds (7,000 kg). For six months of that year, temperatures could rise above 100 °F (38 °C) as the sun reflected off the desert pavement and the rocks of the low western mountains. The freighters had to double- or triple-team their wagons up inclines like Yarnell Hill to reach ore-bearing high-country of the interior. Steamships on the Colorado and freight wagons straining across the basins and ranges of the Harcuvar, Aquarius, and Vulture mountains made Prescott the most important center of settlement north of the Santa Cruz Valley. They also led to the escalation of Arizona's Indian wars.
Civilian militias and the Arizona Volunteers: The first round of hostilities involved civilian militias. Carleton's California Volunteers established Camp Lowell in Tucson in 1862 after Captain Sherod Hunter evacuated his Confederates. They also founded Fort Bowie near Apache Pass and Fort Whipple near Prescott. Even though Carleton and his confederate counterpart, John Baylor, ordered the extermination of all hostile Apache men in Arizona, the California Volunteers were spread too thin to conquer the Yavapais and Apaches or protect the settlers in outlying ranches and mines. Pioneers with time on their hands and a taste for blood therefore went Indian hunting, slaughtering men, women, and children wherever they found them, and Native Americans responded with brutalities of their own.
The most famous civilian fighter of the 1860s was King S. Woolsey, a man from Arizona who sold hay and other supplies to federal troops. He made money off the government, lost money in mining, and established two ranches, one of which was east of Prescott on the Agua Fria River. Woolsey hated the Yavapais and Apaches who ran off his stock, but he was a close friend of Juan Chivaria, a Maricopa war leader who fought alongside him. The old pattern of alliances forged by the Spaniards of the Santa Cruz Valley prevailed. During the 1860s and late 1870s, Maricopas and Pimas often joined Anglos and Mexicans in short, savage campaigns against their Apache and Yavapais enemies.
After a series of raids around Prescott in January 1864, Woolsey and 69 other Anglos, Maricopas, and Gila Pimas pursued the attackers across the Agua Fria and Verde drainages to Fish Creek Canyon in the Salt River country. There they encountered about 200 Apaches or Yavapais. Woolsey touched his left hand to his hat and his party opened fire. According to one eyewitness, 24 Indians died. Many Indians died, but not enough to change the balance of power in the territory. Atrocity bred atrocity as the body count on both sides climbed into the hundreds.
With the Civil War still going on and Carleton still fighting the Navejos, the U.S. War Department therefore authorized Governor John Goodwin of Arizona to raise five companies of Arizona Volunteers in 1864. Recruitment was delayed for a year, but by the fall of 1865, more than 350 men had been issued into service under the command of nine officers. The overwhelming majority were Mexicans, many of them from Sonora, or O'odham and Maricopas from the Gila River villages, who had grown up fighting Yavapais and Apaches, as had their fathers and grandfathers. Many never received shoes or warm clothing. They lived in hovels and marched for days on beef jerky and parched cornmeal. They carried .54-caliber (14 mm) rifles with plenty of ammunition, in addition to bows, arrows, and war clubs. For the next year, these frontiersmen guarded wagon trains between Prescott and La Paz and campaigned relentlessly across central Arizona.
Their officers permitted them a few freedoms that made enlistment more tolerable. At the largely Mexican company of Camp Lincoln on the Verde River, 16 women joined the men. These women created a sense of community at the outpost, marching in procession behind an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe to meet the volunteers whenever they returned from the field. According to the Third Arizona Territorial Legislature, the volunteers inflected "greater punishment on the Apaches than all other troops in the territory." Traveling "barefoot and upon half rations," they killed 150 to 173 Apaches and Yavapais while losing only ten men in combat themselves. If their enlistments had been extended, as many territorial officials and army officers requested, the centuries-old alliance of Hispanic, O'odham, and Maricopa frontierrsmen might have conquered the Apachería for the Anglo newcomers.