The Apache Wars and Geronimo

For roughly twenty-five years, from the early eighteen sixties to eighteen eighty-six, the U.S. Army and the various Apache peoples of southern Arizona and New Mexico fought a series of campaigns that historians call the Apache Wars. They were among the longest and most costly conflicts in the history of the American West.

The Apache were not a single nation but a confederacy of related bands, Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla, White Mountain, who had lived in the mountain ranges and river valleys of the Southwest for centuries. When American settlers and soldiers arrived in force after the Civil War, they came into conflict with a people who had been successfully resisting Spanish and Mexican expansion for generations.

Cochise, a Chiricahua leader, maintained a fragile peace until eighteen sixty-one, when a U.S. Army lieutenant named George Bascom falsely accused him of kidnapping and attacked his camp. Cochise escaped but his relatives were executed. The war that followed lasted a decade.

After Cochise's death in eighteen seventy-four, the resistance was led by Geronimo, whose Apache name was Goyaałé, meaning one who yawns. Geronimo was not a chief but a war leader, a man of extraordinary tactical skill and ferocity born of personal grief. Mexican soldiers had killed his mother, wife, and three children in a raid when he was a young man.

Through the late eighteen seventies and eighteen eighties, Geronimo's band broke repeatedly from the San Carlos Reservation, conducting raids across Arizona and Mexico. The Army deployed five thousand soldiers, about a quarter of its entire strength, to catch him. In September of eighteen eighty-six, with about three dozen followers, Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson Miles at Skeleton Canyon in the Peloncillo Mountains. He spent the rest of his life as a prisoner of war, never allowed to return to Arizona. He died in Oklahoma in nineteen oh nine.