The Apache Wars: Twenty-Five Years of Resistance

The landscape you are looking at was the theater of a twenty-five-year military campaign. The volcanic rock formations of the Chiricahua Mountains were not chosen for dramatic scenery. They were chosen because they were nearly impossible to move troops through, and the Chiricahua Apache had grown up in them.

The Apache Wars began in earnest in eighteen sixty-one, after a confrontation at Apache Pass in which United States Army Lieutenant George Bascom wrongly accused Cochise of raiding a settler's ranch and seized Cochise's relatives as hostages. Cochise escaped; the hostages on both sides were killed. The next decade saw sustained military conflict across the region that is now Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico.

Cochise, leader of the Chiricahua Apache, eventually negotiated a peace in eighteen seventy-two that established a reservation in his own Chiricahua homeland. He died in eighteen seventy-four. Two years later, the federal government dissolved the Chiricahua reservation and forced the people to the San Carlos reservation, which they had not agreed to and which they were not suited for. Geronimo and others resumed resistance.

After Geronimo's surrender in eighteen eighty-six, the entire Chiricahua Apache community, including those who had served as Army scouts and had not been in the field with Geronimo, was shipped by train to Florida as prisoners of war. People who had helped the Army defeat Geronimo were deported alongside the people they had helped defeat. This was not an oversight.

The Chiricahua Apache were eventually moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma. They were never given a reservation in Arizona. The Chiricahua National Monument bears the name of the people who lived in those formations, but it does not belong to them. The site interprets the geology and the history of the Apache Wars at the park's visitor center, where the documented record of what happened here is laid out in full.