Why Alabama
By 1887 it was clear to Army officers that holding the Chiricahua prisoners in two Florida forts was not working. Illness was spreading, families were divided, and there was little useful work for anyone to do. The Army chose Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, a former arsenal on high ground roughly thirty miles north of Mobile, as the new place of confinement.
The group at Fort Marion was moved there in the spring of 1887. The men who had been at Fort Pickens, including Geronimo, followed in 1888. For the first time since 1886, most of the Chiricahua prisoners were in one place, though they were not free to leave.
Reunion and New Housing
The arrival of the Fort Pickens group meant some families came together after long separations. Husbands, wives and children who had been held in different forts could live under one roof again, and that was a significant change for many people.
Housing at first was basic, and the prisoners were put to work building log cabins, clearing land and cutting timber. The Army’s plan, as with later years at Fort Sill, was to make the prisoners useful and self-supporting. Plots were laid out in a village arrangement rather than barracks, and families cared for their own households.
Work, School and Daily Life
Men were assigned labor tasks on the post, and many worked at cutting wood and similar jobs. Women kept households, cooked, and looked after children and the sick. A school was set up at Mount Vernon for children, and instruction was in English. This was part of the federal assimilation policy, which aimed to replace Native languages and customs with English and Euro-American habits. Children who had been sent earlier to the boarding school in Pennsylvania were an additional strain on families.
Some prisoners kept up family routines and speech as best they could. Our knowledge of those private aspects of life comes mostly from later recollections rather than official records, which tended to focus on counts, rations and conduct.
The Toll of Illness
The most striking feature of the Alabama years is illness. The climate was warm and humid, unlike the dry country the Chiricahua came from, and records from the time describe many deaths, particularly among children and young people. Tuberculosis is often named, and officers’ reports show growing alarm about the death rate.
Exact figures vary by source and by the way they are counted, so it is safer to say that the losses were severe and that people were buried at Mount Vernon throughout the period. The suffering of these years became part of how descendants and historians later remember the imprisonment. It is a subject that calls for care, because the people lost were individuals with families who grieved. The broader history of Apache health after reservations, and of Apache mourning customs, is the context in which outside readers should place such losses, with the understanding that mourning practices are private and not for outsiders to describe.
The Campaign to Move
By the early 1890s, officers, some visitors and some citizens were urging the government to relocate the prisoners. They argued for a healthier climate and for land that could be farmed. Several different places were discussed. Arizona and New Mexico were ruled out because of local opposition, and the Chiricahua were not consulted in any formal way, though their wishes were reported by officers.
An agreement was reached with the Kiowa, Comanche and Apache nations in Indian Territory to share part of their reservation land at Fort Sill. In October 1894 the prisoners were moved west, which ended the Alabama chapter. Their time in Oklahoma is covered in its own article.
What Remained
Those who died in Alabama were buried near the post, and the cemetery there remains a place of remembrance. Not everything about the burial ground is documented, and the location and care of such sites are matters for the families and nations concerned. Over time, some remains were moved to Fort Sill, but sources differ on the details, so this article does not make firm claims about it.
The whole episode is one of the clearest examples of forced relocation in Apache history, carried out over a distance of more than a thousand miles. The Alabama years are sometimes treated as a footnote between Florida and Oklahoma, but they were years in which an entire community lived through grief and uncertainty. Descendants, including those in the Fort Sill Apache Tribe and the Mescalero Apache Tribe, hold their own memories of this time. This independent site does not speak for them, and readers seeking current information should consult the nations’ official websites.