Migration and relocation are different things
The word “migration” is often attached to Apache history for two very different processes. The first is the long, gradual southward movement of Athabaskan-speaking ancestors that scholars date variously over several centuries and still debate. The second is a set of forced removals carried out by the United States government, mostly between the 1860s and the 1890s, in which specific communities were ordered to move, often under guard. This article is about the second kind.
The difference matters. Migration was a slow movement by people choosing where to live and hunt. Relocation was a policy, with orders, dates and consequences, and it was imposed on people who had lived in a given country for generations.
The reservation idea in the Southwest
By the 1860s and 1870s, United States officials were concentrating Native peoples on reservations across the West. In the Southwest, Apache groups were generally not consulted on where those reservations should be. Policies shifted repeatedly: reservations were created on or near homelands, then abolished or reduced, and groups were moved to new places. Lines on maps changed faster than families could adjust.
Several different Apache nations were affected, each by a different set of decisions. This is one more reason not to speak of a single Apache removal.
The Mescalero and Bosque Redondo
In the early 1860s, military campaigns in New Mexico led to the confinement of many Mescalero Apache, together with the Navajo, at Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River. Conditions there are widely described as very hard, and many Mescalero left in the mid-1860s. A reservation for the Mescalero in their mountain homeland was established in 1873. The Mescalero at Bosque Redondo experience is covered in more depth elsewhere on this site.
San Carlos and the 1875 concentration
The San Carlos Reservation in Arizona was established in the early 1870s. Under a policy of concentrating Apache groups at one agency, several communities were moved there from other reservations that were closed. The best-documented example is the Rio Verde removal of 1875, in which Yavapai and Tonto Apache people at the Camp Verde reservation were marched across country to San Carlos in the winter months. Sources describe the march as hard and costly in lives, though counts vary.
San Carlos then held people from several distinct groups, including Western Apache communities, Yavapai and, after reservations in other areas were closed, Chiricahua. These groups had different languages or dialects, leadership and territories, and living together under agency control produced tension as well as new alliances. Over the next decade and later, many Western Apache families were able to return to or settle in parts of their home country, and separate reservations such as the White Mountain (Fort Apache) Reservation took their modern shape.
The Chiricahua and the removal east
The Chiricahua reservation in southeastern Arizona was closed in 1876, and Chiricahua people were moved to San Carlos. The Warm Springs (Chihenne) people from New Mexico were moved to San Carlos in 1877. Leaders such as Victorio and later Geronimo left the reservation at various times, and the resulting campaigns are part of what is called the Apache Wars.
After Geronimo’s surrender in 1886, the army sent the Chiricahua as prisoners of war to Florida. This included Chiricahua men, women and children, many of whom had not taken part in any fighting, and Chiricahua scouts who had served the army. They were held at Fort Marion and Fort Pickens, then moved in 1887 to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, and in 1894 to Fort Sill in Oklahoma. They were released from prisoner-of-war status in 1913, when some chose to go to the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico and others stayed in Oklahoma. The descendants of those who stayed form the Fort Sill Apache Tribe. This sequence is dealt with in more detail in the articles on the prisoner-of-war era.
Other moves
The Jicarilla were pushed between several places in the 1800s before a reservation in northern New Mexico was set up by executive order, generally dated to 1887. Lipan Apache people were driven from much of Texas in the 1800s, and some went to Mexico while others joined the Mescalero in New Mexico. The Plains Apache, often called Kiowa Apache in older records, were assigned with the Kiowa and Comanche to a reservation in what is now Oklahoma, under the treaty at Medicine Lodge in 1867.
Dates and numbers differ across sources, and details sometimes vary between tribal accounts and government records, so anyone using this history for research should check primary sources and the nations’ own histories.
Why the distinction matters
Calling these forced removals “migration” can make them sound voluntary or mysterious. They were government actions with recorded orders. They also did not follow a single pattern: some groups were moved once, others many times, and a few were moved far from any homeland, while others were moved within their country.
Readers looking for current information on any of the modern nations descended from these communities should consult each nation’s official website.