Camp Beale Springs was a U.S. Army post at a spring in the Cerbat foothills west of Kingman, and from 1871 to 1874 it was the place where the Army held the Hualapai people. The spring takes its name from Edward Fitzgerald Beale, whose wagon road along the 35th parallel crossed Hualapai country in 1857, and by 1865 it was a stop on the toll road between Prescott and Hardyville on the Colorado River. During the Hualapai War of 1865 to 1870 it served as a temporary outpost, and a peace agreement with the Hualapai was negotiated there before the fighting resumed. The official camp was established in 1871 by Company F of the 12th U.S. Infantry from Fort Whipple, to guard the road and to intern Hualapai who had surrendered, many of them after outbreaks of dysentery and whooping cough.
An Indian agency opened at the camp in January 1873. In April 1874 the Army closed it and forced the Hualapai to march south to the Colorado River Reservation near La Paz, a removal the Hualapai Nation remembers as the La Paz Trail of Tears and dates to 21 April 1874. Conditions there brought starvation and disease, and in 1875 some Hualapai escaped back to their own country, only to find it settled by others. A reservation was set aside for them in the early 1880s, and its headquarters is now at Peach Springs.
The spring later supplied water to early Kingman, whose first newspaper mention in June 1882 described a new town at or near Beale Springs. The Hualapai Nation placed a marker at the camp on 21 April 2006.
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35.2044, -114.0831
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