The reservation era in brief
The decades after the 1870s changed daily life for every Apache nation. Movement was restricted, rations and agents replaced older ways of getting food and making decisions, and children were sent to schools far from home. At the same time, people kept families, languages and ceremonies going under heavy pressure, and by the 1930s many nations were building new forms of government. This timeline marks the main milestones, with notes on why they mattered. It is a general guide, not a full record, and the groups did not experience these years in the same way.
Earlier events such as the colonial period and the Apache Wars are covered elsewhere, and a separate timeline covers the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
1870s: reservations take shape
Several reservations for Apache peoples were created in the early and middle 1870s, mostly by executive order, which meant they could be changed without a treaty process.
- Fort Apache and San Carlos (about 1871 to 1872). Western Apache groups and some others were placed on or near reservations in eastern Arizona. Groups that had been separate were sometimes combined, which caused friction.
- Mescalero (1873). A reservation was set aside in the mountains of southern New Mexico, after the earlier ordeal at Bosque Redondo.
- Chiricahua reservation (1872 to 1876). A reservation in southeastern Arizona followed an agreement with Cochise. It was closed in 1876, and its people were pressed to move to San Carlos. The dispute over this closure helped set the stage for later conflicts.
Executive orders and later changes altered boundaries many times, so any single acreage or date should be checked against the nation’s own sources.
1879 to 1890s: schools, land and the end of the wars
1879. The Carlisle Indian School opened in Pennsylvania, one of the first of the off-reservation boarding schools. The policy behind such schools was assimilation, meaning the replacement of Native languages and customs. The Apache boarding school history that followed was painful for many families, and its effects are still discussed.
1886. After Geronimo’s surrender in September, the Chiricahua, including people who had not fought and the Army scouts who had served, were sent east as prisoners of war. This is widely treated as the close of the main period of armed conflict in the Southwest, although it did not end the effects on the people involved.
1887. Two events with long consequences. The Dawes Act, passed by Congress, aimed to divide reservations into individual allotments and open the remainder to outsiders. It was applied unevenly: it reshaped Plains Apache land in Oklahoma, while several southwestern reservations were affected little or not at all. Apache land loss in these years came through several routes, not only allotment. In the same year the Jicarilla reservation was established by executive order in northern New Mexico.
1890s. The Chiricahua prisoners were moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894. Western Apache and Mescalero communities faced ration shortages, limited farmland and pressure to send children to school.
1900 to 1914: new arrangements
Early 1900s. Reservation economies relied on farming, ranching, wage labor, and, depending on the place, forestry. Missionary and government schools were common. Some Lipan people joined the Mescalero reservation, and the Plains Apache land in Oklahoma was allotted and opened to non-Native settlement.
1909. Geronimo died at Fort Sill, still a prisoner of war.
1913 to 1914. The Chiricahua were released from prisoner-of-war status. Those who chose to go to New Mexico joined the Mescalero reservation, and those who stayed in Oklahoma formed what is now known as the Fort Sill Apache community. Release came after nearly three decades of captivity, and it left many families split between two places.
1920s to 1930s: citizenship and constitutions
1924. Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, extending U.S. citizenship to Native Americans born in the country. It did not end other legal restrictions on tribes or all state barriers to voting.
1930s. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 ended further allotment and encouraged tribes to adopt constitutions. Several Apache nations did so during the decade, including the Mescalero and Jicarilla. The process created the elected councils that many nations still use, though some critics have long argued that the model was imposed from outside and did not reflect older forms of Apache leadership.
1930s to 1940s. Apache health after reservations was often poor in these decades, with limited medical care and economic hardship in many communities. Apache people served in the U.S. military during the Second World War, and some returned to push for better services and rights.
What this period set up
The reservation era closed some doors and opened others. The reservation system confined people, but it also became the base on which present-day governments and land bases were built. Communities moved toward the later developments of self-determination, discussed in the companion timeline of modern milestones.
Reading the dates carefully
Many dates in this period come from executive orders, agency reports and Army records, which can differ from the dates communities themselves remember, and some sources give a slightly different year for the same decision. Where a date matters, consult the nation’s official history and primary documents.