The far-flung Horseshoe Ranch of Bloody Basin is one of the largest and finest cattle ranches in central Arizona, and dates to the early 1880s when its cattle roamed all the way from the Bradshaw Mountains to the Verde River. As seen today, the ranch headquarters--fields, pond, trees, and buildings--appear as a valley oasis poised on the edge of the spectacular rugged semi-desert mesa country that surrounds it.

The beauty of this region coupled with an abundance of significant prehistoric sites caused the President of the United States, in January 2000, to set 71,000 acres of it aside as the Agua Fria National Monument, a unit of the Bureau of Land Management's National Landscape Conservation System.