This made running down or negotiating with more than one Yavapai group at a time extremely difficult for the United States Army.

Early in 1871, a 37-year-old first lieutenant named Royal Emerson Whitman assumed command of Camp Grant, Arizona Territory, about 50 miles (80 km) northeast of Tucson.

Whitman fed them and treated them kindly, so other Apaches from Aravaipa and Pinal bands soon came to the post to receive rations of beef and flour.

During the winter and spring, William S. Oury and Jesús María Elías formed a vigilante[1] group, the Committee of Public Safety, which blamed every depredation in southern Arizona on the Camp Grant Apaches.

[2] [1] Lieutenant Whitman searched for the wounded, found only one woman, buried the bodies, and dispatched interpreters into the mountains to find the Apache men and assure them his soldiers had not participated in the "vile transaction".

Many of the settlers in southern Arizona considered the attack justifiable homicide and agreed with Oury, but this was not the end of the story.

The trial, two months later, focused solely on Apache depredations; it took the jury just 19 minutes to pronounce a verdict of not guilty.

As pioneer families arrived and settled in the area, Apaches were never able to regain hold of much of their ancestral lands in the San Pedro River Valley.

In 1871, its location was on an upper terrace on the east bank of the San Pedro River, just north of the junction with Aravaipa Creek.

[4] Current authorities place the massacre site south of the Aravaipa Creek and about five miles upstream from Camp Grant.