The Apache War was marked by frequent skirmishes and battles from the early 1870s into the 1880s. Apache Indians first clashed with Spaniards during the colonial era, then with Mexico after Mexican independence, and finally with the United States after it won control of the Southwest from Mexico in 1848. After settlers began to mine copper ore, especially in Arizona, where many Apache lived, the situation deteriorated. To control it the federal government aimed to consolidate the disparate Apache bands at the San Carlos Reservation in eastern Arizona.
In 1871 citizens of Tucson, Arizona, reacted to repeated Chiricahua Apache raids by attacking Camp Grant, a federal government-sponsored settlement, and killing up to 150 Apache, including many women and children. President Ulysses S. Grant, appalled by the vigilantism, ordered General George Crook to stabilize the region. After Apache raids continued, Crook led western forces against the Apache, successfully using Indian “scouts” to fight other Native Americans. Crook led several bloody campaigns against the Apache until a tenuous peace was negotiated with the Chiricahua band in 1874. That same year President Grant put their copper-producing reservation lands in the public domain, opening them up to mining interests. This move led to the resettlement of Chiricahua Apache to the reservation at San Carlos in 1876. Roughly half the Chiricahua complied with the removal order while the remainder fled to Mexico.
Among the recalcitrant Chiricahua Apache, a warrior named Geronimo emerged as a war leader. Geronimo had fled to Mexico in 1876 and began to use the Ojo Cali-ente Reservation in New Mexico, where the Warm Springs Apache were located, as a base to organize raids. As a result, the Warm Springs Reservation was shut down by authorities in 1877, and officials began planning to remove 400 Warm Springs Apache and Geronimo’s band of Chiricahua Apache to the San Carlos Reservation. Fearing resistance, officials arrested Geronimo and several other leaders. Conditions at San Carlos were abysmal, and the displaced Warm Springs Apache, led by their war chief Vic-torio, broke away from the reservation in September 1877, eventually crossing the border into Mexico and beginning a three-year period during which the band raided settlements along the border in Mexico and the United States. The raids ended in 1880, when Victorio and his band were killed by Mexican soldiers.
The Warm Springs Apache who had been sent back to San Carlos joined with Geronimo, who had returned there in the interim. During this time officials became increasingly concerned about an Apache rebellion after tribal members began practicing the Ghost Dance religion, which involved communing with ancestors via a trancelike dance. Tension between the Apache and the U. S. Army led to an Apache attack on August 30, 1881. Geronimo again fled to Mexico with other Apache, engaging American troops at the border. Apache warriors reentered the United States in April 1882, attacking reservation policemen at
San Carlos on April 19, during which time Geronimo freed a group of Apache, fleeing to Mexico with the fugitives. Determined to bring peace to the territory, General Crook entered Mexico in 1883 with 200 scouts, and in February 1884 Geronimo surrendered, returning to San Carlos. In May 1885 Geronimo again left San Carlos, this time with 130 fugitives, which set off skirmishes along the border of the United States and Mexico as the two countries joined forces to fight the Apache. In September 1886 Geronimo again surrendered, accepting a deal to relocate the Apache to Florida for a period of two years before being allowed to return to the West. However, Geronimo was not allowed to return, and he died at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909.
Further reading: Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wo-unded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Henry Holt, 1970).
—Scott Sendrow
World History
