Wickenburg Arizona Tourism

Henry Wickenburg fled Austria in 1862 because the police were after him for selling coal from his father’s property instead of turning it over to the state.

In 1863 he arrived in Arizona. In 1864 he discovered the Vulture Mine, but sold it and became a rancher near what is now Wickenburg, a name first used while James A. Moor (that’s how he spelled it) was a guest there. In writing to Governor John N. Goodwin, Moor headed a letter with “Wickenburg Ranch”. Prior to that time the area was called Hassayampa Sink.

During the time Vulture Mine developed, so did the town at Wickenburg as a supply point. By 1870 474 people lived in Wickenburg. Indians repeatedly attacked the town. The most noted massacre was the Loring - Wickenburg massacre in which Henry Loring, who was with the 1871 Wheeler Survey, and his companions on a stagecoach were brutally murdered. Though the town of Wickenburg flourished, Henry Wickenburg did not. He failed as a rancher.

Dispirited and tired, he shot himself in 1905 in his little adobe house on the Hassayampa, fifty-one years to the day after the first ore from the Vulture Mine had been crushed.

Wickenburg Henry Home Site