The attack on the Apache at Camp Grant occurred at a time of great ferment for U.S. journalism. The rise of mass literacy had generated a far larger readership than ever before, while immigration to the west spurred the founding of numerous new papers. Arizona was not isolated from either trend, receiving its first newspaper, The Weekly Arizonian (originally published in Tubac), in 1859, followed by Tucson’s Arizona Citizen in 1870.
More avowedly political than their twenty-first century counterparts, newspapers in the nineteenth century made little pretense to objective reporting. These tendencies manifested themselves in the coverage of the Camp Grant Massacre, which rapidly moved from a discussion of the particulars of the attack to a heated debate over contemporary Indian policy. Given that many in Arizona had supported the Confederacy during the Civil War and that the current federal administration contained many former Unionists (President Grant and Vincent Colyer, to cite but two of the most prominent examples), the debate also carried undertones of the recent sectional conflict.
In general, the press discussion of the Camp Grant Massacre was limited to those who could read English. Nonetheless, Army officers noted that Apaches made great efforts to secure copies of the most recent newspapers, which they would then have translated for them with the help of English-reading Mexicans or captives. Indeed, the Apache chief known as Eskiminzin would seem to demonstrate some knowledge of contemporary coverage of the attack on his people when he observed shortly after the Camp Grant Massacre that the Apache “believe these Tucson people write for the papers and tell their own story.”
The material available on the Shadows at Dawn website includes articles written shortly before and after the Camp Grant Massacre, both from Arizona newspapers and papers on the East and West Coasts. The articles are all reprinted in their entirety, with no alteration of their spelling or punctuation.