MOHAVE.
That’s the answer to the crossword clue stumping solvers in the New York Times, Premier Sunday, and USA Today puzzles. Six letters for a people who’ve occupied the Colorado River valley since the last ice age.
The spelling trips up even longtime Southwest residents. Arizona uses Mohave. California prefers Mojave. Both work in crossword grids. Both refer to the same tribe whose ancestors numbered 4,000 strong when Spanish explorers arrived in the 1500s, making them the largest Indigenous population in the American Southwest.
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Two Reservations, One People
The Mohave people live on two federally recognized reservations today. The Colorado River Indian Reservation covers 300,000 acres in Arizona and California, established in 1865 for “Indians of the Colorado River and its tributaries.” About 4,277 tribal members share this land with Chemehuevi, Hopi, and Navajo peoples relocated there decades later.
The Fort Mojave Indian Reservation spans 42,000 acres across Arizona, California, and Nevada. Roughly 1,100 tribal members live there, with headquarters in Needles, California. Both reservations hold senior water rights to the Colorado River dating back over 150 years.
Archaeological evidence places Mohave ancestors along the river for more than 12,000 years. They developed irrigation agriculture 4,000 years ago, digging canals by hand to divert water onto fields growing corn, beans, squash, and mesquite. The river defined everything. Their name, Aha Makhav, means “The People by the River.”
The Spelling Explained
The Arizona Board on Geographic Names made a ruling years back that sorted the confusion. Arizona locations take the “h” spelling: Mohave County, Mohave Valley, Mohave Mountains. California locations use the “j”: Mojave Desert, Mojave River, City of Mojave.
Anthropologist A.L. Kroeber argued only the “h” should exist, since the word comes from Indigenous language, not Spanish. Early Spanish explorers wrote the soft “h” sound as “j,” following their own phonetic rules. English speakers later adopted the “h.” Historical records document over 50 spelling variations.
The Fort Mojave Indian Tribe officially uses Mojave. The Colorado River Indian Tribes documentation shows both spellings. Crossword editors pick one based on their style guide.
Other Tribes on the River
Mohave dominates crossword puzzles for practical reasons: six letters, widespread name recognition, historical prominence. But the Colorado River sustained multiple tribes for millennia.
The Quechan people control 45,000 acres near Yuma, where the Colorado meets the Gila River. Their name, Kwatsรกan, means “those who descended by way of the water.” They held the best river crossing for centuries, a strategic advantage that made them major players in regional trade networks. Current enrollment sits around 4,000 members.
The Chemehuevi, a Southern Paiute branch, occupy 32,000 acres with 30 miles of river frontage. Parker Dam construction in 1938 flooded nearly 7,000 acres of their prime bottomland, including cattle grazing areas. That lost land has never been recovered. The tribe numbers roughly 1,250 members today.
The Cocopah reservation sits 13 miles south of Yuma on 6,500 acres split into three parcels. They call themselves Kwapa, “the River People.” About 1,000 members live on or near tribal lands. The Colorado River once flowed all the way to the Gulf of California through Cocopah territory. Now it runs dry through much of that stretch, stopped by Morelos Dam.
The Water Problem
The tribes hold massive water rights on paper. The Colorado River Indian Tribes alone can claim 719,248 acre feet annually, nearly a third of Arizona’s total state allocation. The Quechan, Chemehuevi, Cocopah, and Fort Mojave reservations all secured rights through the 1963 Supreme Court case Arizona v. California.
Using that water presents different challenges. The Chemehuevi situation shows the gap between rights and reality. The tribe legally owns significant water allocations but uses only 3 percent. The remaining 97 percent stays in the river, flowing downstream to Southern California cities. The tribe lacks pumps, pipelines, and delivery infrastructure to move water onto reservation land. Neither federal nor state governments have funded the necessary systems.
A 2023 ProPublica and High Country News investigation calculated that unused tribal water across the Colorado River Basin totals at least 1 million acre feet per year. If sold outright, that water would be worth more than $5 billion. For the Chemehuevi specifically, their unused allocation carries a one-time value exceeding $55 million.
Meanwhile, the river itself keeps shrinking. Two decades of drought, the worst in 1,200 years, have dropped reservoir levels to historic lows. Fifteen dams and more than 1,300 diversions control every drop. The 30 federally recognized tribes in the basin watch non-tribal users tap the river while their own infrastructure needs go unmet.
Restoration Efforts
Several tribes are taking matters into their own hands through habitat restoration projects. The Quechan Environmental Department completed a 100-acre restoration site in 2024, removing invasive tamarisk and replanting native cottonwoods, willows, and mesquite. Frank Venegas, the tribe’s water technician, told Reasons to be Cheerful that the living river means more than water. It requires native plants and wildlife.
The Cocopah secured $5.5 million in federal grants and private funding to restore over 400 acres along the Colorado River floodplain. The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bonneville Environmental Foundation backed the project. The work started in early 2024, transforming degraded land choked with saltcedar back into functional habitat. The project also established a tribal youth corps to involve younger generations.
These restoration efforts serve dual purposes. They bring back ecologically important species and provide access to culturally significant plants the tribes have used for centuries. Mesquite beans ground into flour, willow branches woven into baskets, cottonwood bark for traditional medicine. The plants sustained tribal life long before dams and diversions altered the river.
What the Crossword Doesn’t Tell You
Every major crossword publication runs this clue multiple times per year. Solvers fill in six letters and move on. But those six letters represent living communities managing the same lands their ancestors farmed 4,000 years ago, fighting for water rights in federal court, replanting native forests one tree at a time, and keeping languages alive that fewer than 100 elders still speak fluently.
The Mohave, Quechan, Chemehuevi, and Cocopah tribes aren’t historical footnotes. They’re operating casinos, running farms, educating children in tribal schools, and negotiating with seven states over the future of an overtapped river. The Colorado River Indian Tribes harvest cotton, alfalfa, and sorghum on 84,500 acres, with another 50,000 acres available for development.
The answer to the crossword clue is MOHAVE. The answer to what that actually means requires considerably more than six letters.
