Place as a way into the story
Apache nations are named for peoples, but their histories are also tied to land. The territory used by Apache groups at various times stretched from the southern Plains across New Mexico and Arizona and into northern Mexico. Moving across it, one passes through very different settings, and each shaped what people hunted and grew, who their neighbors were, and how colonial powers and later the United States approached them. This article follows the landscape in rough order from east to west. The groups are named where it helps, but the focus is on how place influenced each period. Group-by-group accounts are told elsewhere on the site.
A caution: boundaries on a map suggest more certainty than the evidence allows. Groups moved, territories overlapped, and historical sources describe regions in the terms outsiders used.
The southern Plains
The southern Plains, today parts of Texas, Oklahoma and eastern New Mexico, are open grassland with large herds of bison. They were home to Lipan and Plains Apache ancestors and used by others, such as some Jicarilla and Mescalero groups, for hunting. Before horses, hunting on foot and trading with farming peoples shaped life there. The arrival of horses in the 1600s and 1700s changed that, and the Southern Plains horse era brought greater range, new trade and new rivalries. The expansion of Comanche power in the 1700s put heavy pressure on Apache groups of the Plains, and Lipan communities moved south and west.
In the nineteenth century, Texas and the southern Plains saw settlement, treaties and removals that affected Lipan and Plains Apache people in different ways. The Plains Apache, allied for a long time with the Kiowa, ended up on a shared reservation in what became Oklahoma. Fort Sill, in the same area, later became the place where the Chiricahua prisoners were held. The southern Plains therefore connects two quite different Apache histories.
The Rio Grande and the northern mountains
Northern New Mexico and southern Colorado combine mountain valleys, mesas and plains. The Jicarilla lived in this zone, close to Pueblo towns such as Taos, where they traded bison products for farm goods. Because the region lay on Spanish and Mexican routes, it was one of the first places where Apache peoples dealt with Spanish authorities. Later, the area became an important setting for U.S. military action and for the creation of the Jicarilla reservation in the 1880s.
The southern New Mexico ranges
South of the Rio Grande’s upper reaches are desert basins and tall ranges such as the Sacramento Mountains, Guadalupe Mountains and Organ Mountains. These are the heartland of the Mescalero, who used mountain slopes for hunting and gathering and the desert for plants such as agave. The Sacramento Mountains homeland is central to Mescalero identity. Mescal roasting, an annual harvest tradition tied to the agave, shows how closely the seasons were tied to place. After the U.S. takeover, forts, roads and ranching changed the region, and the Mescalero were confined at Bosque Redondo before returning to a reservation in the mountains in 1873.
The borderland deserts and the Sierra Madre
Farther southwest lie the desert valleys, isolated mountain “sky islands” and the rugged Sierra Madre that cross into Mexico. This was the range of the Chiricahua groups, who moved through the border country and used its mountains for refuge, water and resources. For them the border was not a natural boundary but a line drawn by outside governments in 1848 and 1853. Mexican bounty policies, American military campaigns and the rights of passage across the line shaped the second half of the nineteenth century. The landscape made guerrilla-style movement possible, and it also meant that people were exposed to attack from both sides of the border.
The Arizona mountains and the Mogollon Rim
Central and eastern Arizona have high forested country, river valleys and canyons, rising to the Mogollon Rim and the White Mountains. This was the homeland of the Western Apache groups. Seasonal movement between higher and lower elevations allowed hunting, gathering, and farming along streams, and Western Apache irrigation in some valleys is well documented. When the U.S. government created reservations in the early 1870s, it did so in this country, at Fort Apache and San Carlos, often combining groups from different valleys.
Here, forests and rangelands later became the base for tribal timber and cattle operations. The region still carries Apache place names, and some areas, such as certain mountains and springs, are of ongoing spiritual importance to Western Apache communities. Details about sacred places are not always shared publicly.
Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama: places of exile
Not all Apache history happened on home ground. Chiricahua prisoners were taken to Florida, Alabama and Oklahoma, landscapes far removed from their homelands. The distance mattered as much as the confinement itself. After the 1913 and 1914 release, some Chiricahua chose to return to the Southwest, to the Mescalero reservation, while others stayed near Fort Sill. The Fort Sill Apache community, with roots in Oklahoma, shows how a forced move can create a new homeland over time.
Landscape and the present
Today Apache nations hold land bases of very different size and character, from forest and rangeland in Arizona to mountains in New Mexico to smaller parcels in Oklahoma. Questions about water, mining, grazing and access to sacred places remain part of current life for many nations. These concerns are best followed on the nations’ own websites.
Seen by region, Apache history is a story of adaptation to many environments, and also of pressure from outsiders who wanted the same land, and of continuing ties to place.