Spanish colonial contact in outline
The Spanish crown claimed the lands north of Mexico long before it settled them in any numbers. Early expeditions in the 1500s passed through the region, and permanent colonization of New Mexico is generally dated to 1598. From that point, Apachean peoples, who by then lived on the Plains and across parts of the Southwest, were neighbours of a colonial government with soldiers, missions, ranches and a demand for labour.
Spanish colonial contact was not one event. It stretched over more than two centuries, differed from place to place, and involved different Apache groups in different ways. The Jicarilla and Mescalero in the east and north, the Chiricahua and Western Apache in the west, and the Lipan in Texas each dealt with Spanish officials under distinct conditions.
Trade, horses and a changing economy
Horses, brought by the Spanish, spread through Native communities during the 1600s and later. For many Apache groups they changed how people hunted, travelled, traded and fought. Mobility increased, and so did the value of livestock, which became both a trade good and a target of raiding.
Trade with colonial settlements and Pueblo communities continued and often thrived, with hides, meat and captives exchanged for cloth, metal goods, maize and other items. Much of this was informal. At the same time, it created dependency on goods that could be acquired only through peace or through raids, which affected how Apache leaders weighed their options. The longer story of early Apache trade relations goes back before the Spanish, and it was reshaped but not created by them.
Captivity, slavery and conflict
Historians document that Spanish colonists took Apache people captive, including women and children, and that captives were used as servants and labourers or sent far away, sometimes to the mines and households of northern Mexico. Apache groups also took captives from colonial settlements and from other Native nations. Captive-taking by all sides fed cycles of retaliation, and it left lasting bitterness and also many family connections that crossed communities.
Conflict was not constant. Periods of open warfare alternated with truces, treaties and trading. The word “raiding” is sometimes used as if it explained all Apache life, which it did not; it was one part of a wider economic and political world.
The presidio system
By the later 1700s the Spanish government tried to control the northern frontier through a line of military posts. The Spanish presidio frontier was reorganized in the 1770s with rules meant to bring order and regular patrols. In practice, the system combined campaigns with diplomacy.
In the late 1700s, Spanish officials in some areas also set up arrangements that offered rations to Apache groups who settled near presidios in return for peace. These arrangements are often called peace establishments. They reduced fighting in places for a time, and they also drew some Apache families into a closer dependence on Spanish supplies. Some historians read them as a form of assimilation pressure, others as a practical alliance, and the evidence supports both views in different cases.
Mexican independence and a harder frontier
Mexico won independence from Spain in 1821, and the new government inherited the northern frontier with fewer resources. Rations that had helped sustain the peace arrangements became harder to supply, and several of the peace establishments broke down. In Sonora and Chihuahua, state governments in the following decades encouraged campaigns against Apache groups, including payments for scalps. Sonora and Chihuahua raids and counter-raids were a feature of this period, and civilians on all sides suffered.
Mexican policy toward Apache peoples varied by state and by time, and there were also treaties and attempts at accommodation. It would be a mistake to treat “the Mexicans” as a single actor with a single plan.
What “assimilation” meant in this period
The idea of assimilation is more closely associated with later United States policy, including reservations and boarding schools, than with the Spanish and Mexican period. Spanish institutions did try to bring Native people into the church and colonial society, and some Apache individuals and families lived within or near colonial communities, took Spanish names, were baptized or married into settler families. Others refused any such arrangement and remained mobile and independent.
Assimilation, in short, was applied unevenly, and it was resisted, bargained over and adapted. Many Apache families kept their language, kinship ties and ceremonies while using the new goods and sometimes the new alliances that colonial contact brought.
Territory and long-term effects
The colonial era did not end Apache control of their homelands, but it changed the map. Pressure from Spanish settlement, and from other Native nations such as the Comanche on the Plains, pushed some groups into new areas. Disease also reached Native communities after European contact, though its effects on Apache groups are less well documented than on some Pueblo communities. The colonial period thus set up the conditions that United States expansion later met in the 1800s, a subject treated in other articles on this site.
For historical sources, researchers should be aware that most surviving written records from this period were made by Spanish and Mexican officials, clergy and soldiers, and they reflect those writers’ viewpoints. Apache histories, held by the nations themselves, add what these records leave out.