The Wickenburg Project

The Wickenburg Massacre has been called "Arizona's Greatest Mystery."

On the morning of 5 November 1871, a Concord stage coach enroute from Wickenburg to La Paz, Arizona Territory, carrying seven passengers and the driver was ambushed about eight miles west of Wickenburg.  The driver and five passengers were killed in the ambush, while two passengers barely escaped with their lives.  Initial eyewitness accounts and physical evidence from the scene pointed to a war party of Apache-Mohave (Yavapai) Indians, but strange anomalies were found at the scene, the veracity of the witnesses was called into question, and conflicting stories of involvement by Whites and/or Mexicans began to spread.

A sizable treasure in the form of a military payroll was rumored to have been lost.

Finally, the bodies of the victims were reported to have been buried in town after a thorough inquest, but the burial site was "disturbed" in the mid-20th Century, and the graves vanished.  Why, then, are there grave sites at the supposed massacre site, roughly situated where the victims fell?  And why are there more graves than there were victims?  Were the newspaper accounts, which included official inquest results, fabricated to placate victims' relatives back East?  Or were the graves clandestinely moved by 20th Century developers so as not to "impede progress?"

Gary L. Griffiths, a retired Special Agent of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) and Fellow in the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, proposes to coordinate an archaeological exploration of the Wickenburg Massacre Site using modern 21st Century investigative and forensic technology to answer the questions surrounding "Arizona's Greatest Mystery."  The purpose of this web site is to coordinate efforts between the forensic, archaeological, anthropological, and historical communities in the pursuit of answers to these questions.