A policy story behind a war
The repeated word in the title is a slip. The subject is the Warm Springs Apache, the Chihenne band of the Chiricahua Apache, and a question that was at the center of events in the 1870s: where should they live? Victorio’s war of 1879 and 1880 has its own biography on this site. This article covers the decisions that came before it.
The Warm Springs reservation
In the early 1870s, Apache and American officials explored reserving land for the Chihenne in the country they knew, near the hot springs at Ojo Caliente in southwestern New Mexico. In 1874 the United States created a reservation there for the Warm Springs people and some related groups. For a short period, Victorio and his people lived on it, receiving rations and dealing with an agent.
Accounts suggest that this arrangement was not stable. Officials worried about its distance from supply routes, about the cost, and about whether the Chiricahua could be supervised. Settlers and officials in New Mexico also had interests in the land and the water.
Concentration at San Carlos
In the mid-1870s, the federal government was pursuing a policy of gathering many Apache groups onto fewer reservations, with San Carlos in Arizona as the main site. The policy was driven by cost, convenience and the aim of ending fighting, and it paid little attention to what the people themselves wanted. The Chiricahua reservation in southeastern Arizona was closed in 1876, and the Chokonen were moved to San Carlos.
In 1877, the Warm Springs reservation question was settled by removal. John Clum, the San Carlos agent, came to Ojo Caliente with Apache police and moved several hundred Chihenne to Arizona. Geronimo was arrested during that visit, a detail that shows how closely the Chiricahua bands were connected. Some Chihenne people hid and avoided the move.
Conditions at San Carlos
San Carlos was far from the Black Range homeland, and it was a place where Apache peoples of different bands and groups, with different customs and sometimes tense relations, were forced together. Sources describe low, hot land, illness, and conflict over rations. The experience was not the same for everyone, and some people, such as Loco, tried to endure it in hopes of keeping their families together.
Victorio and others left in September 1877. Their departure was not a sudden decision to make war. It was a refusal to stay in a place that they felt threatened their survival.
The back-and-forth
After leaving, Victorio’s group went through a series of steps that frustrated both sides. Officials allowed some to return to Warm Springs, then moved them again, and the Mescalero reservation became another uncertain stop. Orders changed, local officials disagreed, and fear of arrest or punishment deepened distrust. By 1879, Victorio had left for good, and the campaign that followed is told in the biography.
Historians often note that a stable Warm Springs reservation might have prevented some of the fighting that followed, though such judgments are speculative and sources differ on what was possible. What the record does show is that officials repeatedly changed a decision about where a group of people would live, and that those people responded.
Aftermath
The Warm Springs reservation was never restored. After Victorio’s death in 1880, other Chihenne leaders such as Nana and Loco remained at the center of events. Many Chihenne were among the Chiricahua who were later held as prisoners of war after 1886. Over generations, descendants have lived in Oklahoma and New Mexico, including in the Fort Sill Apache Tribe and the Mescalero Apache Tribe.
The broader subject of forced relocation is covered in the history of reservation relocations and in the account of the Rio Verde removal of 1875, a different but comparable removal of Western Apache and Yavapai people. Readers should rely on the nations’ official websites for how they describe this history today.