The Journey East
In the first days of September 1886, Army trains carried Chiricahua Apache people away from Arizona. Some had surrendered after months of pursuit, but many others had been living quietly at Fort Apache and were rounded up as well. They traveled across the country under guard and reached Florida in the autumn, a place very unlike the dry mountains and desert valleys they knew.
The Army split them between two military posts roughly three hundred miles apart. This article covers the Florida months and the move out of Florida in 1887 and 1888. The wider picture of the confinement is in the overview of the Chiricahua prisoners of war.
Two Forts, Two Groups
Fort Marion is the old Spanish stone fortress in St. Augustine, on the Atlantic coast. Today it is known as the Castillo de San Marcos. The Army used it to hold a large group of Chiricahua that included women, children, older people and many of the men who had been scouts or farmers near Fort Apache.
Fort Pickens stands on Santa Rosa Island, off Pensacola on the Gulf coast. The men of Geronimo’s party were confined there and kept separate from the rest. The reason was military caution: officials viewed them as the most dangerous prisoners. The consequence was that wives, children and husbands were held in different places, and for months or longer, families could not live together.
Conditions
Records and later accounts describe crowded quarters, damp air, and illness at both sites. At Fort Marion the number of people held was large compared with the space available. Tents were set up inside the walls, and sources describe visitors coming to look at the prisoners, which added indignity to confinement. The prisoners were guarded constantly.
Many people became sick in Florida. Respiratory illness, including tuberculosis, is frequently mentioned in the sources, and the humid coastal climate is generally thought to have made things worse. Precise death counts are not given here because the figures in the literature differ. What can be said is that the losses were serious and that officers themselves recorded their concern.
Work and Daily Life
At Fort Pickens the men were put to work on tasks around the fort. At Fort Marion, some people had tasks assigned by the Army, and children were of school age. Families tried to keep ordinary routines going, cooking, caring for children and caring for the sick, under the conditions they had.
The children are a central part of the story. In late 1886, a group of Chiricahua children was taken from Fort Marion and sent to a boarding school in Pennsylvania. That episode is told separately in the article on children at Carlisle, but it belongs in any account of the Florida period, because it deepened the separation of families already divided between two forts.
Why Florida Was a Poor Fit
Officials in the Army and in Washington soon realized the arrangement was not working. Illness was spreading, and there was little for the prisoners to do. Several people, including Army officers and some members of the public who took an interest, argued that the Chiricahua should be placed somewhere with a healthier climate and with land to farm. Plans to move them got underway in 1887.
The Fort Marion group was sent to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama in the spring of 1887. The men at Fort Pickens, and the families that had been separated from them, joined them there in 1888. In Alabama, families were finally able to live in one place again, though not free. That chapter is covered in the article on Mount Vernon Barracks.
What to Keep in Mind
It is easy to read this period as a series of transfers on a map, but the people involved were individuals with their own families, histories and opinions. Many of those held in Florida had never fought the United States. Some had served alongside the Army as scouts, and the longer Apache scout history shows how much that service had mattered to the officers who later sent them east. The removal also fits the wider pattern of forced relocation that shaped many Apache communities, and the later reservation relocations of the Western Apache look very different from this one.
The sources for this period are mostly Army records, newspaper reports and later recollections. They need to be read with their authors in mind. Descendants, including those in the Fort Sill Apache Tribe and the Mescalero Apache Tribe, hold their own knowledge of these years, and this independent site does not speak for them. Visitors to the Castillo de San Marcos today can learn about its many layers of history through the park’s own materials.