The Apache, Geronimo's Last War

The Apache peoples had lived in the mountains and deserts of present-day New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora for centuries before the Spanish arrived. They were not one tribe but several: the Mescalero in the White and Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico; the Chiricahua in the Dragoon and Chiricahua ranges of Arizona and the Animas Mountains of New Mexico; the Jicarilla in the Sangre de Cristo foothills of the north. They lived by hunting, gathering, raiding, and trade, a mobile, adaptive existence suited to terrain that was hostile to almost everyone else.

The American period brought a series of broken promises, relocations, and massacres that reduced the Apache to desperate resistance. The Mescalero Apache were confined to a reservation in the Sacramento Mountains after the Civil War. The Chiricahua faced serial relocations that destroyed their way of life.

A leader named Geronimo, his Chiricahua name was Goyaałé, meaning One Who Yawns, conducted the last sustained Apache resistance against the United States Army across the mountains and deserts of New Mexico and Arizona from eighteen seventy-six to eighteen eighty-six. Geronimo was not a chief in the formal sense; he was a shaman and war leader who could inspire men to follow him into nearly impossible situations. At his peak he led a band of no more than a few dozen warriors who tied down thousands of American and Mexican soldiers for years.

He surrendered for the last time on September fourth, eighteen eighty-six, to General Nelson Miles in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona. He was never allowed to return to his homeland. He died a prisoner of war at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in nineteen nine, the last armed Native American combatant to formally surrender to the United States military.

The Mescalero Apache Reservation still exists in the Sacramento Mountains today, centered near the town of Ruidoso. The Jicarilla Apache Nation occupies a reservation in the Valles de los Pinos in northern New Mexico. Their survival and continued governance represent a persistence the Apache's nineteenth-century enemies did not expect.