What “resilience” means in this story
Resilience is sometimes used as if it were a personal quality, as if people simply bounced back. The Chiricahua Apache story is better described as a long, collective effort to rebuild under conditions imposed by others. This article follows that path from the final years of imprisonment to the new communities of the early twentieth century. The earlier chapters, Florida and Alabama, are treated in more detail elsewhere on this site.
Captivity, in brief
After the surrender of Geronimo’s group in 1886, which is generally treated as the end of the major Apache Wars, the US Army sent the Chiricahua to the east as prisoners of war. This included many people who had not taken part in recent fighting, and even men who had served the Army as scouts. Families were held first in Florida, in places such as Fort Marion and Fort Pickens, and then at Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama. Illness, especially respiratory disease, was a serious problem for people moved from a dry upland climate, and children were sent to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, so the Chiricahua children at Carlisle were separated from their families for years.
Fort Sill
In 1894 the prisoners were moved to the Fort Sill military reservation in what is now Oklahoma. This was closer to the Southwest, though still far from their homelands. They were given land for villages, took up farming and raised cattle, and the Army supervised them. Over these years, a rebuilt community life began: households settled in clusters, children went to local schools, and some families adopted Christianity while others kept earlier beliefs. Many people continued to speak their language at home.
The prisoner of war status did not end with the move. It lasted until 1913, so the Chiricahua spent about 27 years in that legal condition, from 1886 to 1913. A generation grew up under it. Geronimo died at Fort Sill in 1909, still formally a prisoner.
The 1913 decision
By the early 1910s, officials in the War Department and the Interior Department agreed that the Chiricahua should be released. The question was where. The old Chiricahua homelands in Arizona and New Mexico were no longer available to them: they had been taken up by settlers, ranchers and the federal government. The Mescalero Apache Reservation in southern New Mexico, however, was able to take them, and Oklahoma land was also an option for those who preferred to stay.
Each family had to choose. The 1913 Chiricahua release split the community roughly as follows: a majority of people moved to Mescalero in 1913 and 1914, and a smaller group remained in Oklahoma on allotments of land. Reasons were practical and personal, and they included ties of work, marriage, health and memory. Neither choice was easy, and the community ended up in two places.
Rebuilding at Mescalero
At Mescalero, Chiricahua families joined people from the Mescalero and Lipan Apache communities who already lived there. The newcomers were not starting from nothing, because they were related by language and by older ties, but they arrived with few possessions and had to find housing and livelihoods. Over the following decades, the families took up ranching, farming and wage work, and over time they became part of what is now the Mescalero Apache Tribe. The tribe today is a single nation with Mescalero, Chiricahua and Lipan family lines.
Rebuilding in Oklahoma
The Chiricahua who stayed received individual land allotments near Fort Sill. Over the twentieth century they organized as a community, and the group is now the Fort Sill Apache Tribe, which has federal recognition and a government of its own. Its history has featured questions about land, because the tribe’s members had no reservation of their own for a long time. The tribe’s official sources are the best place to find current information about its lands and programs.
What rebuilding involved
Several threads run through the rebuilding that followed the release:
- Family: households and extended family networks were the main way people supported one another, passing on language and knowledge.
- Livelihood: cattle, farm work, wage labor and, later, tribal enterprises replaced the older seasonal economy.
- Memory: accounts of imprisonment were handed down within families, and the era is remembered today by descendants through commemorations and cemetery visits.
- Institutions: tribal governments, schools and cultural programs came with time, shaped by federal policy as well as by the communities’ own priorities.
None of this erased what had been lost. Many Chiricahua died in captivity, a generation was separated from the homelands, and the community was divided between two places. Resilience in this setting means that people continued, adapted and taught their children, while also carrying grief.
Reading about it responsibly
Primary sources on the imprisonment include Army reports, correspondence and photographs, and these were written by officers and officials, which affects what they emphasize. Accounts by Chiricahua authors and descendants are an essential counterweight. Numbers for deaths and population at each stage vary by source, and a careful reader should treat precise figures with caution.