A Daring Sense Of Humor

Yuma Bill enjoyed a good joke while scouting for the U.S. Army.

- Doug Hocking

Yuma Bill’s broad smile suggests he engaged his cavalry comrades in more than one game of “grinning through a horse collar.” Colonel George Forsyth described Yuma

Bill as “our most reliable Apache scout... who spoke English very well, and was an unusually fine Indian....”

Yuma Bill was not Apache, but Tolkapaya Yavapai, then referred to as Yuma Apache, Yavapai Apache or just Apache. Their tribal customs were similar, but their language, very different.

Once Joseph R. Walker and his party discovered gold along Granite Creek in 1863, the new Arizona territorial government established its capital at Prescott in Yavapai country the following year.