The population of the silver camp had begun to urge Congress to provide a territory independent of New Mexico, immediately after the development of the Mowry mines. Delegates and petitions had been sent to Washington in the usual style. But congressional indifference to new territories had blocked progress. The new discoveries reopened the case in 1862 and 1863. Forgetful of his Indian wards and their rights, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs had told of the sad peril of the "unprotected miners" who had invaded Indian territory of clear title. They would offer to the "numerous and warlike tribes" an irresistible opportunity. The territorial act was finally passed on February 24, 1863, while the new capital was fixed in the heart of the new gold field, at Fort Whipple, near which the city of Prescott soon appeared. The Indian danger in Arizona was not ended by the erection of a territorial government. There never came in a population large enough to intimidate the tribes, while bad management from the start provoked needless wars. Most serious were the Apache troubles which began in 1861 and ceased only after Crook's campaigns in the early seventies. In this struggle occurred the massacre at Camp Grant in 1871, when citizens of Tucson, with careful premeditation, murdered in cold blood more than eighty Apache, men, women, and children. The degree of provocation is uncertain, but the disposition of Tucson, as Mowry has phrased it, was not such as to strengthen belief in the justice of the attack: "There is only one way to wage war against the Apache. A steady, persistent campaign must be made, following them to their haunts--hunting them to the 'fastnesses of the mountains.' They must be surrounded, starved into coming in, surprised or inveigled--by white flags, or any other method, human or divine--and then put to death. If these ideas shock any weak-minded individual who thinks himself a philanthropist, I can only say that I pity without respecting his mistaken sympathy. A man might as well have sympathy for a rattlesnake or a tiger." The mines of Arizona, though handicapped by climate and inaccessibility, brought life into the extreme Southwest. Those of Nevada worked the partition of Utah. Farther to the north the old Oregon country gave out its gold in these same years as miners opened up the valleys of the Snake and the head waters of the Missouri River. Right on the crest of the continental divide appeared the northern group of mining camps.