A letter from First Lieutenant Royal E. Whitman, of the Third cavalry, United States Army, commanding Camp Grant, Arizona Territory, dated May 1, directed to Captain Thomas S. Dunn, Twenty-first infantry, United States Army, commanding Camp Lowell, Arizona Territory, gives an account of the massacre of Apache Indians on the Camp Grant Reservation by a body of armed citizens, assisted by a party of Papagoe Indians, on the 30th of April. The details of the massacre show that it was a more horrible affair than was at first imagined. Sixty-three dead bodies have been found, and more than one hundred are dead or missing. But the crowning horror of the massacre is contained in the following sentence:--"All save eight are women and children." A large number of Indian women were made captives.

It behooves the government to take immediate steps to ascertain, in the first place, how it happened that an armed body of citizens, with Indian allies, was allowed to be organized at a military post of the United States for the purpose of massacring Indian women and children; and in the second place, what urgent necessity demanded the absence of Captain Stanwood from his post with the cavalry at such a critical moment. The Indians were peaceable, and had claimed and were living under the protection of the government. We repeat that the whole affair demands the earnest investigation of the government. It is useless to attempt to civilize or make peace with the Indians when they find that the government not only fails to protect them upon their reservations, but allows indiscriminate massacres to occur and Indian women to be made captives, who may be used in a manner that even the refinement of savage cruelty can scarcely realize.

[NY Herald, June 1, 1871, p.6]