Read the map of the Verde Valley slowly, and it starts to tell on itself. The grandest ruin is named for an emperor who was never within a thousand miles of it. The territorial capital is named for a man who never set foot in Arizona and died before the town existed. The copper city carries the name of a New York financier who, by all accounts, never bothered to visit. Almost nothing in this valley is called what its builders called it — and the pattern is not an accident. It is a record of who ended up holding the pen.
Start with the most famous wrong name. Montezuma Castle, the five-story cliff dwelling tucked into a limestone wall above Beaver Creek, was built and lived in by the Sinagua people between about 1100 and 1425. They left it a full century before the Aztec ruler Montezuma was even born, and a good deal more than a thousand miles north of his empire. But settlers coming up the Verde in the 1860s had absorbed a popular book — William Hickling Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico — and, having read of Aztec splendor, they assumed anything this impressive on the frontier had to be Aztec too. The name stuck to the map and never came off. As the Park Service now points out at the overlook, it is a small monument to how easily the people who built a place can be written out of their own house.
The valley's other great Sinagua town, the hilltop pueblo at Tuzigoot, shows the erasure from the other side. Here the builders were not renamed for a foreign emperor; they were simply not named at all. When the ruin was dug out in the 1930s, its Sinagua name was long lost, so the excavators borrowed a word from a nearby Apache community — "Tuzigoot," crooked water, for a bend in the old river. Even the "Indian" name on the sign belongs to a different people than the one that laid the stones. The builders are left anonymous on their own hill.
To understand why the map reads this way, you have to know what happened to the valley's living peoples, because the names were applied over an emptied country. Two nations shared the Verde: the Yavapai, who spoke a Yuman language and held the red-rock west, and the Dilzhe'e — the Tonto Apache, Athabaskan speakers who called themselves "the hunters" — to the east. When gold and then copper drew miners onto their land in the 1860s, the Army came. By 1873 the survivors had been penned onto the Rio Verde Reservation near Camp Verde, some eight hundred square miles promised to them. It lasted two years. In February 1875, on an order from President Grant, the reservation was dissolved and roughly fifteen hundred Yavapai and Apache were marched 180 miles east to San Carlos — in winter, driven over the mountains on the harder trail rather than the easy wagon road, so that those who stumbled were left where they fell. At least a hundred died on what the Yavapai-Apache Nation now calls Exodus Day; by some counts, far more. They were held at San Carlos, which their elders remember as a concentration camp, for twenty-five years. When they were finally allowed to leave in 1900, only about two hundred made it home — to find the valley settled and their land gone.
That is the valley the names were laid over. Into the country the removal emptied came the copper men, and the map filled up with their names. The billion-dollar ore body under Cleopatra Hill became Jerome, named for Eugene Jerome, a New York financier of the mining company who is not known to have ever seen the place. The smelter town below took the name Clarkdale, for the Montana copper senator William Clark, who owned the mine. And the seat of government up over the mountain, Prescott, was named — by a New York territorial secretary who knew the West mostly from books — for that same historian, William Hickling Prescott, the Boston chronicler of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, who never came within a thousand miles of Arizona and had been dead five years when the town was founded. It is the tightest knot in the whole story: the same book that misnamed Montezuma Castle also named the capital, so that two of the valley's landmarks honor a Massachusetts author's account of Spain conquering a Mexican empire — pinned onto a valley whose own people were being conquered and marched away in exactly those years.
Even the gentlest name obeys the rule. Sedona, up in the red rocks, is not an old word and not a Native one; the town was named in 1902 for a settler's wife, Sedona Schnebly, because her first name fit neatly on a postmark. It is a kinder story than the others, and it is still a homesteader's name laid over Wipukupaya Yavapai ground.
None of this means the names should be scrubbed off the signs; they are the history too, and the history is the point. But the Verde Valley rewards a traveler who reads its map as what it is — not a neutral index of pretty towns, but a receipt, itemizing what was taken and by whom. The Yavapai-Apache Nation is back now, on a few scattered parcels around Camp Verde, and every February its runners carry the memory of the march home from San Carlos. The names on the map have not changed. But you can learn to read them.