Victorio's War — The Last Fight for the Warm Springs Country

In the eighteen seventies, the United States government made a series of decisions about where the Apache bands of the Southwest would be allowed to live. The Warm Springs Apaches, who had been promised a reservation at Ojo Caliente near their traditional territory, were repeatedly moved against their will. In eighteen seventy-seven they were forced to the San Carlos reservation in Arizona, a hot desert environment entirely foreign to them and where the land could not support their way of life.

Victorio, the war chief of the Chihenné, led a series of escapes. He returned repeatedly to the Warm Springs country, to the mountains and valleys around what is now Truth or Consequences, attempting to keep his people near the land they knew. The United States Army pursued him north of the border while the Mexican Army pursued him south of it.

In October of eighteen eighty, Victorio and most of his warriors were killed at a place called Tres Castillos in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, surrounded and attacked by Mexican forces and Tarahumara auxiliaries. His sister Lozen was absent at the time, escorting a pregnant woman to safety. With Victorio's death, the Chihenné as a distinct band ceased to exist as a free people.

The survivors were eventually confined to the Fort Sill reservation in Oklahoma, far from the springs and mountains that had been their home. The Sierra County landscape around Truth or Consequences carries no official monument to Victorio or the people who died defending this country.