This is the engrossing story of the unsung heroes who did the day-to-day work of building Arizona's dams, focusing on the lives of laborers and their families who created temporary construction communities during the building of seven major dams in central Arizona. The book focuses primarily on the 1903-1911 Roosevelt Dam camps and the 1926-1927 Camp Pleasant at Waddell Dam, although other camps dating from the 1890s through the 1940s are discussed as well. The book is liberally illustrated with historic photographs of the camps and the people who occupied them while building the dams.

This volume takes stock of the empirical evidence, theoretical orientations, and historical reconstructions of archaeology of the American Southwest. Themed chapters on method and theory are accompanied by comprehensive overviews of all major cultural traditions in the region, from the Paleoindians, to Chaco Canyon, to the onset of Euro-American imperialism.

Winner Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award For thousands of years, humans have lived on the sprawling escarpment in Arizona known as the Mogollon Rim, a stretch that separates the valleys of central Arizona from the mountains of the north. A vast portion of this dramatic landscape is the traditional home of the Dilzhe’e (Tonto Apache) and the Yavapai. Now Daniel Herman offers a compelling narrative of how—from 1864 to 1934—the Dilzhe’e and the Yavapai came to central Arizona, how they were conquered, how they were exiled, how they returned to their homeland, and how, through these events, they found renewal. Herman examines the complex, contradictory, and very human relations between Indians, settlers, and Federal agents in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arizona—a time that included Arizona’s brutal Indian wars. But while most tribal histories stay within the borders of the reservation, Herman also chronicles how Indians who left the reservation helped build a modern state with dams, hydroelectricity, roads, and bridges. With thoughtful detail and incisive analysis, Herman discusses the complex web of interactions between Apache, Yavapai, and Anglos that surround every aspect of the story. Rim Country Exodus is part of a new movement in Western history emphasizing survival rather than disappearance. Just as important, this is one of the first in-depth studies of the West that examines race as it was lived. Race was formulated, Herman argues, not only through colonial and scientific discourses, but also through day-to-day interactions between Indians, agents, and settlers. Rim Country Exodus offers an important new perspective on the making of the West.