Four kinds of names on one map
A road atlas of Arizona, New Mexico and west Texas is full of names that seem to point to Apache peoples. They do not all mean the same thing. It helps to sort them into four groups before asking where any single name comes from.
- Names that use the word “Apache” itself, such as Apache County, Apache Junction, Apache Pass and Fort Apache.
- Names taken from a particular Apache nation or band, or from a named person, such as Mescalero, Jicarilla, Lipan, Chiricahua and Cochise County.
- Names that Spanish, Mexican or English speakers gave to Apache groups or to places, often a translation or a nickname, such as Tonto or Dragoon.
- Names that began as words in an Apache language and were written down by outsiders in an approximate spelling.
The fourth group is the smallest and the hardest to prove. Most “Apache place names” on current maps belong to the first three groups, which tell us more about who was writing the map than about how Apache people named their own country.
The word “Apache” is an outside name
The word “Apache” on a sign is not the name Apache peoples use for themselves. Many Apache groups use a word usually written Ndee, Nde, Inde or similar, meaning roughly “the people”. The origin of the outside name is debated. A frequently repeated explanation connects it to a word used by Pueblo neighbours, sometimes cited as Zuni, meaning something like “enemy”, while other proposals exist, and sources differ. Whatever the final answer to the origin of the word Apache, it is enough here to say that place names built on “Apache” record how newcomers labelled people, not how those people described themselves.
Nor does a place called Apache tell us that a single Apache group lived there. “Apache” has long covered many nations with distinct histories: Western Apache groups such as the White Mountain and San Carlos Apache, the Chiricahua, the Mescalero, the Jicarilla, the Lipan and the Plains Apache, who were long labelled with the outside term Kiowa Apache, a Kiowa Apache name that is now usually replaced by Plains Apache.
Names from groups and people
Group names that became place names are easier to trace, because the documents survive. Several are Spanish words. Mescalero, which became the name of a New Mexico community, comes from the Spanish word for people associated with mescal, the roasted agave that was an important food. Jicarilla comes from a Spanish word usually translated “little basket” or “little gourd cup”, and is often linked to the Jicarilla basket and vessel tradition, though the exact reason Spanish speakers chose it is not documented with certainty. Tonto, as in Tonto Basin and the Tonto Apache, is a Spanish word and was applied by outsiders.
Other names preserve a person. Cochise County in Arizona was named for the Chiricahua leader Cochise, and the town of Geronimo, Oklahoma, near Fort Sill, carries the name of Geronimo, a leader of the Chiricahua who ended his life as a prisoner of war at that fort. These names say something about how the region’s history was remembered by later settlers, and they now sit on the land beside the names that Apache communities themselves use.
Mountains, rivers and passes
Many of the best-known landforms in Apache country have Spanish or English names even though Apache people knew the same ground intimately. The Chiricahua and Dragoon ranges in southeastern Arizona are an example. Chiricahua is the name of an Apache group and also of the mountains; where the word itself comes from is disputed, with some sources tracing it to a word from a neighbouring language rather than Apache. Dragoon refers to the mounted soldiers of the nineteenth century, not to anything Apache.
Further north, Mogollon Rim country takes its name from a Spanish colonial governor of New Mexico, Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollón, who served in the early eighteenth century. The Gila and Salt rivers carry names whose origins are less certain: Gila is generally treated as a Spanish form of a word from another language, and explanations differ. None of these is usually counted as an Apache name, though the rivers and the rim are central to Apache history.
Some names are tied directly to events. Apache Pass, in the Chiricahua country of Arizona, and the nearby fort recall the nineteenth-century conflicts there, and Apache Pass and Fort Bowie are remembered as a landscape of nineteenth-century conflict. Fort Apache and the Fort Apache historic site on the White Mountain Apache reservation likewise name a military post that became a school and then a cultural site.
Names that sound Apache but are not
Several familiar names are sometimes assumed to be Apache without good reason.
- Arizona. Proposed origins include an O’odham phrase and a Basque phrase; none is Apache, and the question remains unsettled.
- Navajo. The Navajo are a separate nation closely related by language. The name is generally thought to come through Spanish from a Tewa word, though sources differ. Navajo people call themselves Diné.
- Tucson, Sonoita and similar names. These are generally traced to O’odham.
- Canyon de Chelly. The name combines Spanish with a Navajo word; the canyon lies in Navajo country.
A good rule is that a name that looks Spanish, English or O’odham probably is, and that Apache-language derivations should be accepted only when a linguist or a community source supports them.
Apache names for Apache places
The most important point about place names in the Southwest is easy to miss on a standard map: Apache communities named their landscape long before the current labels were fixed, and many of those names remain in use in Apache languages. Western Apache names, for example, tend to describe a place in a short phrase, noting its shape, water, vegetation or position, rather than honouring a person. They are often attached to stories that explain why a place matters, which is one reason places are described as holding knowledge. Scholars have written about Western Apache place-names in particular, and the same idea runs through Apache sacred places, some of which are not discussed publicly at all.
The Sacramento Mountains homeland of the Mescalero, and the Jicarilla country of northern New Mexico, have their own named features, and writers should not assume that a name used by a ranger or a mapmaker is the name used by the nation whose homeland it is. Anyone who wants correct names and spellings should consult the nations’ own official sources and language programs, since spellings differ between communities and over time.
Reading a place name with care
A few habits help when looking at any name:
- Check whether it is a translation, a nickname given by outsiders, or a recorded Apache word.
- Treat folk etymologies on tourist signs cautiously, since they are often repeated without a source.
- Expect spelling variation: early writers used Spanish or English letters for sounds those alphabets do not have.
- Remember that the people being named are living nations, and that many place names are still used and taught today.
Where a derivation is uncertain, the honest answer is often “sources differ”, and that is the answer this site gives throughout this cluster.