What Is Being Mapped
Apache peoples never held land as a single block, and their territories did not have fixed borders drawn on paper. Different nations and local groups ranged over areas that overlapped with the territories of neighbors, and use of an area could depend on season, family and alliance. For that reason, this article describes the process of loss in words rather than with acreages, and it does not give figures that cannot be checked.
What can be said is that the lands where Apache nations lived and moved, which stretched across much of Arizona and New Mexico and into Texas, Oklahoma and northern Mexico, were reduced over roughly a century to a small number of reservations and trust lands. The details differ between nations.
Spanish and Mexican Frontiers
Before United States rule, Spain and later Mexico claimed the region but controlled only parts of it. Settlements, missions and presidios lay along the frontier, and relations with Apache groups shifted between raiding, trade and periods of negotiated peace. Spanish presidio frontier policy sometimes included rations for peaceful groups, but this system broke down in the early nineteenth century. Mexico’s northern settlements suffered from conflict, and Mexican authorities and states later offered bounties that added to the violence. In these centuries Apache land use was pressured but largely continued.
The United States Takes Over
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War in 1848 and transferred much of the present Southwest to the United States, and the Gadsden Purchase of 1853-1854 added the southern parts of Arizona and New Mexico. Apache nations were not parties to these agreements and had not agreed to any change in their land status. Soon afterward, miners, ranchers, stage lines and farmers began to settle in areas that Apache groups had used, and competition for water and grazing land grew. Resulting violence on both sides led to the extended conflict covered in the Apache Wars chronology.
Reservations and Concentration
From the early 1870s, the federal government set aside reservations in Apache country, and policy often aimed to gather scattered groups in a few places where they could be supervised. Reservation lines drawn in this period included areas around Fort Apache and San Carlos in Arizona and, to the east, the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico, established in 1873. Other reservations were created and then abandoned or changed, among them the Chiricahua reservation in southeastern Arizona (early 1870s to 1876) and the Warm Springs reservation in New Mexico (1870s). The reservation system was also a way of opening the former lands to outside settlement.
Concentration often meant forced relocation. Ojo Caliente’s Chihenne were moved to San Carlos in 1877, and the Rio Verde removal of 1875 sent Yavapai and Tonto Apache people on a long march to San Carlos. People of different groups, some historically unfriendly to one another, were crowded together on unfamiliar land. Many left, were pursued, or returned to their home country when they could.
Shrinking Reservations and Imprisonment
Even reservation land was not secure. The boundaries of the San Carlos and Fort Apache reservations were reduced in the late nineteenth century after discoveries of minerals and pressure from outside interests, and similar pressures affected other reserves. The Jicarilla Apache people, who had no stable land for years, were given reservation land in northern New Mexico beginning in the 1880s, after a long period of uncertainty.
After 1886, the Chiricahua, including those who had served as scouts and those who had never fought, were sent as Chiricahua prisoners of war to Florida, Alabama and then Oklahoma. They did not recover their homelands, and when they were released in 1913 they could choose between going to the Mescalero reservation or remaining in Oklahoma.
Allotment and the Twentieth Century
In the late nineteenth century, federal policy turned to breaking up some reservation land into individual parcels, a policy associated with the Dawes Act allotment. Allotment was applied unevenly. The Plains Apache people in Oklahoma saw their land allotted in the early twentieth century, and surplus land was opened to non-Native settlement. The Lipan Apache lost their Texas lands much earlier and, for most of the twentieth century, had no reservation of their own.
Claims, Rights and the Present
In the twentieth century, Apache nations pursued claims in court and before the Indian Claims Commission, which awarded money in some cases but did not return land. Questions of Apache land rights, water rights and access to sacred places continue today in various forms. Because these matters are legal and current, readers should consult each nation’s official website for accurate information, and nothing here is legal advice.
What the sequence shows is that no single event removed Apache land. A series of treaties made without Apache consent, military campaigns, removals, shrinking boundaries and policy changes accumulated, and the result is the pattern of reservations seen on maps today.