Captivity was endemic in Arizona from the end of the Mexican-American War until statehood in 1912. The practice crossed cultures: Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Mexicans, and whites kidnapped and held one another captive. Victoria Smith's narrative history of the practice of taking captives in early Arizona shows how this phenomenon held Arizonans of all races in uneasy bondage that chafed social relations during the era. It also maps the social complex that accompanied captivity, a complex that included orphans, childlessness, acculturation, racial constructions, redemption, reintegration, intermarriage, and issues of heredity and environment. This in-depth work offers an absorbing account of decades of seizure and kidnapping and of the different 'captivity systems' operating within Arizona. At the same time it examines the myriad causes behind the phenomenon: punishing enemies, augmenting a labour force, performing ceremonial sacrifice, pursuing wealth and trade advantages through the selling or bartering of slaves, expanding marriage pools, and extending families through adoption. By focusing on the stories of those taken captive - young women, children, the elderly, and the disabled, all of whom are often missing from south-western history - "Captive Arizona, 1851-1900" complicates and enriches the early social history of Arizona and of the American West.