Movement before and after settlement
Apache groups had always moved with the seasons, following game, gathering plants as they ripened, farming small plots in some regions, and visiting trading places. This kind of movement was not aimless. It followed routines tied to particular places, and it was often organized by family or local groups. What changed with European settlement was that movements which once followed seasons and kin began to follow settlements, forts, roads and the movements of armies.
The Apache peoples were not passive in this. They adapted, relocated, negotiated and sometimes fought. But settlement set new limits, and those limits can be traced across three phases.
Spanish settlement, from 1598
Spanish settlement of New Mexico began in 1598 and focused on river valleys that Pueblo communities already used. Farms, missions and towns took up water and land that others also depended on. Apache groups in the east and north, such as the Jicarilla and some Plains groups, often adapted by trading with the settlements and Pueblo communities, while also raiding for livestock when relations were poor. The Spanish presidio line of the late 1700s further shaped movements, since some Apache families chose to camp near posts under peace arrangements while others stayed away.
Colonial slaving and captive-taking also affected where families felt safe to camp, a subject covered in the article on Spanish and Mexican colonization.
Pressure from other nations
European settlement did not act alone. In the 1700s, Comanche groups expanded across the southern Plains and pressed on Apache groups that had been living there. Historians generally connect this pressure with the movement of Lipan Apache people south toward Texas and northern Mexico, and of other Apache groups into the mountains and valleys of New Mexico. The Spanish introduction of horses, and trade in guns and other goods, was part of the background to these shifts. As a result, a movement that looks like a “retreat” from the Plains was shaped by Native diplomacy and war as much as by Europeans, though the colonial presence raised the stakes.
The Mexican period
After Mexico’s independence in 1821, peace arrangements in some northern areas weakened. In Sonora and Chihuahua, Apache groups such as the Chiricahua lived in or moved between the mountain ranges of what is now the borderland, using country that settlers wanted for mines and ranches. Some groups moved south into the Sierra Madre and returned north for raids or trade. Their routes crossed what would later become an international border, and they paid little attention to it.
American settlement after 1846
The United States took control of New Mexico in 1846 during war with Mexico, and the border with Mexico was set in 1848 and adjusted in 1853. From this point, American settlers, soldiers, miners and merchants arrived in growing numbers. In the 1850s and 1860s, mining towns, mail routes and army posts appeared in Apache country. The Bascom affair of 1861, a confrontation at Apache Pass in Arizona involving the Chiricahua leader Cochise, is often cited as a turning point toward open warfare in that region, though historians disagree about how much weight to give it.
The effect of settler encroachment was practical. Springs and streams were claimed by ranchers and miners, and game became harder to find. Roads and forts divided old travel routes. Some Apache groups withdrew to remote mountain areas, others sought agreements with agents, and others kept up resistance. US expansion was not a single wave but a series of local pressures that varied by region.
The Texas and southern Plains story
In Texas, the pattern was somewhat different. Settlement by Anglo-Americans and Tejanos, along with Comanche pressure, left the Lipan Apache with fewer places to live. In the Texas and southern Plains region, many Lipan moved into northern Mexico or west into New Mexico over the 1800s. Plains Apache people, linked with the Kiowa, lived farther north, and their story of settlement and reservation is partly bound up with Kiowa and Comanche history.
Epidemic disease
Contact with outsiders brought illness, as it did across the Americas. How epidemic disease affected particular Apache groups is less thoroughly documented than for some Pueblo or eastern nations, and any specific figure should be treated with caution. It is reasonable to say that illness added to the pressures of war, hunger and displacement, but not to assign numbers.
Not one pattern
Because Apache groups differed, so did their responses. Some became closely involved with settler economies, as scouts, farmers, traders or labourers. Others avoided contact. Some families stayed on the move, while others settled on reservations earlier than their neighbours. The pattern is best understood group by group.
For more about the forced moves that followed from this pressure, see the separate article on removals and reservations. Readers looking for the present-day communities that grew out of this history should look to each nation’s own website for accurate and current information.