Today the Yuman-speaking Pai are divided into two "tribes," the Hualapai and Havasupai, but those divisions reflect U.S. policy rather than cultural or linguistic differences. When Anglos first moved into their territory, there were three major Pai subgroups: the Middle Mountain People (Witoov Mi'uka Pa'a), the Yavapai Fighters, and the Plateau People (Ko'audva Kopaya). The three subgroups were composed of 13 bands, each of which had 85 to 250 individuals and occupied distinct but overlapping ranges. During much of the year the band broke into smaller camps of three or four related familes. All these little scattered groups of kin considered themselves a people, The People, Pai, distinct from their linguistic relatives, the Yavapai, who were known as Jiwha', or The Enemy. All believed that their territory had been given to them by Tudjupa, their creator.
During the summer months they irrigated their crops from creeks and springs. During the other seasons they moved from one wild plant harvest to another. Pai territory stretched from the Grand Canyon to the Bill Williams River, an immense territory considering the small number of Pais. Long before Anglos came to Arizona, the Pais defended their huge expanse of desert and mountain as God-given land, so when prospectors fanned out across their desert territory in 1863, many Pais, like Sherum, chief of the Middle Mountain People, grew alarmed. Under his direction, Pais traded buckskins for Navajo blankets, which they traded to the Paiutes for Mormon guns.
Hostilities almost erupted in April 1865 when drunken Anglos murdered a Pai leader. In retaliation Pais severed transportation routes between Prescott and the Colorado River ports. The diplomacy of freighter W.H. Hardy reopened the toll road between Prescott and Hardyville and prevented the conflict from spreading. Hardy's peace lasted only about nine months. Chief Wauba Yuma of the Yavapai Fighters rode into Beale Springs to show a group of freighters a copy of the treaty with Hardy. A former member of the Walker party put a bullet through his lungs, and soon the Hualapai War was spread across northwestern Arizona.
Like most conflicts during this period, the war rarely consisted of pitched battles. The Pais swooped down on freighters or stoned miners to death in their shafts. Cavalry detachments from Fort Mohave responded by attacking Pai rancherías, burning wikiups and cornfields, and capturing women and children. Mohaves occasionally joined these campaigns or mounted ones of their own, using the Hualapai War as a pretext to avenge themselves on their traditional adversaries. The army exploited these antagonisms just as the Spaniards and Mexicans had done for nearly 200 years. Arizona's Indians were never able to forge intertribal alliances. Each group helped defeat each other in turn.
The Pais held out for more than two years against their better-armed foes. On one occasion Sherum mobilized several hundred Pais to attack soldiers at Beale's Springs. On several others he held off U.S. forces even though his warriors had only forty rifles and muskets among them. After one such engagement, a surprise attack on Sherum's own ranchería in the Cerbat Mountains, Captain Samuel Young and his men were forced to withdraw after one hour and twenty-five minutes.
Between June 1867 and December 1868, cavalry columns destroyed at least sixty-eight Pai racherías and killed about 175 Pais, nearly one-fourth of the tribe. During the last summer of the war, an epidemic of whooping cough or dysentery further devastated the resistance fighters. Under Chief Leve Leve of the Yavapai Fighters, the Pais therefore began to surrender at Fort Mohave and were temporarily interned along the Colorado River. Sherum laid down his arms after twice escaping from soldiers who were trying to deport him to Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. A year later, 50 Pais were scouting for army forces campaigning against the Yavapais, and the military was ready to penetrate the Apachería itself.