A note on the title
The title refers to “early medical practices,” which could be read as describing what Apache communities did to treat illness before contact. This article is about something narrower and more documented: what happened to Apache health after confinement on reservations, mainly between the 1860s and the early twentieth century. Traditional healing is covered in a separate article. The word “Apache” is also repeated in the title in error, and the story here involves several different nations whose experiences were not the same.
Confinement changed how people lived
Before reservations, Apache groups lived in small local communities and moved with the seasons to farm, gather and hunt. That mobility shaped diet, housing and exposure to illness. The reservation system ended much of it. Groups were often confined to assigned areas, restricted from leaving, and counted at ration stations. Some nations, such as the Mescalero and Jicarilla, were eventually settled on lands within or near their homelands, while others, including Western Apache groups and Chiricahua, were placed in or moved to places they had not chosen. The Apache people who lived at San Carlos came from several distinct groups, sometimes with long-standing tensions between them, and had to share a crowded and unfamiliar setting.
Rations, crowding and water
Under the ration system, the government promised food and supplies in place of the economy that had been disrupted. Contemporary reports and later histories describe rations as frequently late, insufficient or of poor quality, so that people depended on whatever else they could farm, hunt or gather where allowed. When food is scarce, people grow more vulnerable to infection. Crowded camps made it easier for contagious disease to spread. Poor sanitation and unreliable water supplies added further risk.
The place itself mattered. Agents and officers at San Carlos, which sits in a low, hot river valley, wrote about malaria and other fevers, and later accounts continued to describe it as an unhealthy place. At Bosque Redondo, in eastern New Mexico, where the Army held Mescalero Apache and Navajo people in the 1860s, the Pecos River water, shortage of firewood and failing crops brought serious hardship, and the Mescalero left in 1865. The Mescalero at Bosque Redondo experience is told more fully in a separate article.
New diseases and imprisonment
Apache people had already encountered diseases brought by colonization before the reservation era, as discussed in the article on epidemic disease. On reservations, illnesses such as tuberculosis, respiratory infections, measles and others found people living in conditions that made them more dangerous. Records are uneven, and historians are cautious about specific death totals for many communities.
The Chiricahua prisoners of war, held from 1886, faced another set of conditions. They were moved to Fort Marion in Florida, then to Alabama and eventually to Oklahoma. Accounts of Fort Marion imprisonment and Mount Vernon Barracks describe damp, crowded quarters, illness and deaths, with tuberculosis frequently cited. Chiricahua children at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania were also exposed to infectious disease, and some died there. These matters are told in detail in the articles on the Chiricahua prisoner of war era.
The limits of federal medical care
In the nineteenth century, medical care on reservations came from Army surgeons and agency physicians, whose numbers and supplies were small compared with the needs. Some doctors worked in good faith, but many agencies had no physician for long stretches, and the local population was often reluctant to rely on a stranger whose methods and motives were unfamiliar. Hospitals and sanatoria were added in the early twentieth century, though the Meriam Report of 1928 found health services for Native people inadequate across the country.
Policy also worked against traditional care. From 1883, federal regulations created courts on many reservations that treated the practices of so-called “medicine men” as offenses. Enforcement varied, but the effect was to push healing knowledge out of public view and to place families in a difficult spot when someone was ill. Knowledge was nevertheless preserved by those who carried it.
How communities endured
The sources agree on hardship, and also on endurance. Family and kin networks cared for the sick, shared scarce food and raised children who had lost parents. Elders continued to pass on what they knew, usually quietly. People kept gardens and fields where they were allowed, hunted and gathered when permitted, and used what they knew of plants. Communities adapted to cash, wage work and new crops over time. Numbers in many nations fell during the nineteenth century and then rose again in the twentieth, a recovery described under Apache population recovery, though census figures from the period are not fully reliable.
The experience of removal, confinement and loss also left emotional and social marks that families still talk about, and that scholars study under headings such as historical trauma. Describing this in careful, humane terms matters: the history is one of harm done to people by policy, not of weakness in them. Later federal change, including the creation of the Indian Health Service, is covered in the cluster’s other articles.
For current information on health services in Apache communities, consult the official websites of the nations and of the Indian Health Service.