Apache Wars
Based on Wikipedia: Apache Wars
The General Who Wanted a Skull
In January 1863, an elderly Apache leader named Mangas Coloradas arrived at Fort McLane in southwestern New Mexico to surrender. He came in peace, hoping to end years of bloodshed. By morning, he was dead—stabbed with red-hot bayonets, shot, and then beheaded so his skull could be shipped to a phrenologist in New York City for study.
Brigadier General Joseph Rodman West had given the order the night before: "Men, that old murderer has got away from every soldier command and has left a trail of blood for 500 miles on the old stage line. I want him dead tomorrow morning. Do you understand? I want him dead."
This wasn't an isolated atrocity. It was the Apache Wars.
A Conflict Born from Broken Promises
The Apache Wars stretched from 1849 to 1886—nearly four decades of violence across what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas. Some historians extend the timeline even further, noting that minor hostilities continued until 1924. At their core, these conflicts represented a collision between two incompatible visions of the same land.
The Apache peoples had lived in the American Southwest for centuries. They were not a single unified nation but rather a collection of related groups—the Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla, Western Apache, and others—each with their own territories, leaders, and traditions. They were raiders by culture, conducting small-scale attacks on enemy tribes for livestock, food, and sometimes captives. This was how they had survived in a harsh landscape.
Then came the Mexican-American War of 1846.
When the United States claimed Mexico's northern territories in 1848, the Apache suddenly found themselves living under a new flag. Many tribal leaders, including the formidable Mangas Coloradas, initially welcomed this change. They signed peace treaties with the Americans, seeing them as fellow enemies of Mexico. Coloradas even respected the Americans as "the conquerors of the Mexicans' land."
But the treaties meant nothing. The United States Congress never ratified the agreement signed at Santa Fe in 1851. The Apache were expected to comply immediately with terms that the Americans never intended to honor.
How Gold Miners Ignited a War
An uneasy peace held for a few years. Then gold miners flooded into the Santa Rita Mountains.
In 1851, near the Pinos Altos mining camp, a group of miners seized Mangas Coloradas—one of the most respected leaders among the Apache peoples—tied him to a tree, and beat him severely. He was in his sixties at the time. This was not an isolated incident. Miners attacked Apache camps, stole livestock, and killed without consequence.
December 1860 brought a particularly brutal assault. Thirty miners launched a surprise attack on a peaceful Apache encampment along the Mimbres River. They killed four people, wounded others, and captured thirteen women and children. The Apache retaliated. How could they not?
Then came the Bascom Affair.
The Incident That Launched Eleven Years of Open War
In February 1861, a group of Coyotero Apaches stole cattle and kidnapped a rancher's stepson near Sonoita, Arizona. The rancher, John Ward, demanded that the Army do something. Lieutenant George Bascom was dispatched to meet with Cochise, a Chiricahua leader who had maintained relatively peaceful relations with Americans.
There was just one problem: Cochise had nothing to do with the raid.
When Cochise came to meet Bascom at Apache Pass, he explained that another group was responsible and offered to help locate them. Bascom didn't believe him. Instead, he arrested Cochise and his family members, including his wife and children.
Cochise slashed his way out of the Army tent and escaped. His family did not.
What followed was an escalating nightmare. Cochise took hostages of his own. Negotiations failed. Cochise's warriors attacked a passing Mexican wagon train, killing and scalping nine people and capturing three Americans whom they later murdered. Bascom refused to exchange prisoners. Finally, on the advice of a military surgeon, Bascom hanged the Apache hostages in his custody—Cochise's own relatives.
Eleven years of open warfare had begun.
An Alliance of Desperation
After the American Civil War erupted in April 1861, Cochise and his father-in-law Mangas Coloradas formed an alliance. Their goal was simple: drive every American and Mexican out of Apache territory.
They had help. Chief Juh joined them, along with a warrior named Geronimo—a name that would become synonymous with Apache resistance. When the Butterfield Overland Stagecoach shut down and Army troops departed the region, the Apache believed they were winning. In reality, the Americans had simply shifted their attention to fighting each other in the Civil War.
The reprieve was brief.
In 1862, Colonel James Henry Carleton led a column of California volunteers eastward along the old Butterfield Trail, heading to confront Confederate forces in Arizona. At Apache Pass, they encountered Mangas Coloradas and Cochise's followers. In the battle that followed, soldiers shot Coloradas in the chest.
He survived. But his luck would not hold.
The Murder That Extended the War by a Decade
While recovering from his wound, Mangas Coloradas sent an intermediary to discuss surrender. In January 1863, he agreed to come to Fort McLane in person.
He arrived expecting to negotiate peace. Instead, General West ordered his execution. Soldiers stabbed the elderly leader with heated bayonets throughout the night, then shot him when he stirred. They cut off his head and sent it east for scientific study—phrenology, the now-discredited belief that skull measurements revealed character and intelligence, was still taken seriously in the 1860s.
The war that might have ended dragged on for another nine years. The Apache fought harder than ever to avenge Coloradas's memory.
The Long Walk and the Reservation System
Colonel Carleton had a vision for the Southwest: remove all Native peoples from the Rio Grande valley to make it safe for American settlement. He enlisted Kit Carson—a frontiersman who had once been friendly with the Navajo—to round up the Mescalero Apache and Navajo peoples.
Carson's method was devastatingly effective. He destroyed their crops and slaughtered their livestock, leaving them with a simple choice: walk to the reservation at Fort Sumner or starve. This forced migration became known as the Long Walk, one of the most traumatic events in Navajo history.
The reservation system itself was often a death sentence by other means. The land was frequently unsuitable for farming or hunting. Rations were inadequate. Disease spread easily in the crowded conditions. And sometimes the government simply changed its mind about where the Apache should live, forcing entire communities to relocate again.
The Largest Battle Most Americans Have Never Heard Of
On November 25, 1864, Kit Carson led 400 soldiers and Ute scouts into the Texas panhandle. They captured an apparently abandoned encampment—but they had walked into something far larger than they expected.
More than a thousand Comanche, Kiowa, and Plains Apache warriors attacked.
This was the First Battle of Adobe Walls, one of the largest engagements of all the American Indian Wars. Carson took a defensive position in an abandoned adobe building on a hilltop and spent the entire day repulsing wave after wave of attacks. By evening, he realized his position was untenable. He ordered a retreat.
The remarkable thing is that the Indians let him go. After fighting all day, they simply watched as Carson's battered command withdrew. Six soldiers died; the Army estimated sixty Indian casualties. Plains Apache chief Iron Shirt was among the dead.
The battle revealed something important: when Native peoples could mass their forces and choose their ground, they could fight the U.S. Army to a standstill. The problem was that such coordination was rare. The Apache, in particular, typically fought in small bands rather than large armies.
Victorio's War
By 1879, the remaining Apache had been confined to reservations. But the government kept moving them, often to worse land. That year, a Chiricahua war chief named Victorio faced forced removal from his people's homeland at Ojo Caliente, New Mexico, to the San Carlos reservation in Arizona.
He refused.
On August 21, 1879, Victorio fled the reservation with eighty warriors and their families. Other Apache joined him, especially Mescalero fighters, until his force may have numbered two hundred warriors—an unusually large concentration for people who typically fought in small groups.
For fourteen months, Victorio conducted a guerrilla campaign across southern New Mexico, western Texas, and northern Mexico. He fought more than a dozen battles and skirmishes with the U.S. Army. Several thousand American and Mexican soldiers, plus Indian scouts, pursued him relentlessly. He evaded them all, slipping from one stronghold to another.
His luck ran out in Mexico. On October 14, 1880, Mexican soldiers surrounded Victorio's band at Tres Castillos in Chihuahua. He and many of his followers died there.
But the resistance continued. Victorio's lieutenant, a man named Nana, picked up the fight with fewer than forty warriors. From June to August 1881, this small band raided extensively throughout New Mexico. Nana survived to die of old age in 1896.
The Medicine Man and the Battle That Followed
In August 1881, soldiers from the Fort Apache reservation were sent to arrest a medicine man named Nock-ay-det-klinne. Reports of "Apache unrest" had alarmed the authorities. Three Native scouts made the arrest peacefully, and the group headed back to camp.
They arrived to find the camp surrounded by Nock-ay-det-klinne's followers.
The Battle of Cibecue Creek erupted. Nock-ay-det-klinne was killed in the fighting. The next day, Apache warriors attacked Fort Apache itself in retaliation.
The violence sparked more violence. In the spring of 1882, a warrior named Na-tio-tisha led about sixty White Mountain Apache fighters on a rampage. They ambushed and killed four San Carlos policemen, including the police chief. Local Arizona settlers panicked and demanded Army protection.
The Army responded with overwhelming force: fourteen companies of cavalry from forts across the region. Na-tio-tisha led his warriors up Cherry Creek toward General Springs, a well-known water hole. Noticing they were being followed by a single troop of cavalry, the Apache set an ambush in a gorge cut into the Mogollon Rim.
They waited.
But the chief scout, Al Sieber, discovered the trap and warned the troops. During the night, reinforcements arrived. What the Apache expected to be an easy ambush of a small unit became the Battle of Big Dry Wash—a far more even fight.
The Surrender That Wasn't
Cochise, the man whose family Bascom had hanged two decades earlier, eventually made peace. He agreed to relocate his people to a reservation in the Chiricahua Mountains, their traditional homeland. He died there in 1874, having achieved something rare: a negotiated peace that let his people remain on their own land.
It lasted two years.
In 1876, the U.S. government decided to move the Chiricahua to the San Carlos reservation instead. Half complied. The other half, led by Geronimo, escaped to Mexico.
This became the pattern of Geronimo's life: surrender, reservation, escape, pursuit, surrender again. In 1877, the Army captured him and brought him to San Carlos. He stayed until 1881, then fled with seven hundred Apache to Mexico when he feared imprisonment. In 1883, General George Crook tracked him down with two hundred Apache scouts and persuaded him to return. Geronimo finally came back in February 1884.
In May 1885, he escaped again.
Five Thousand Soldiers for Thirty Warriors
By 1886, the Apache Wars had essentially become a hunt for one man.
Geronimo and his band raided across the Southwest, killing dozens of people in attacks like the Bear Valley Raid. The U.S. Army assigned more than five thousand soldiers to capture or kill him—the largest military operation against Native Americans in U.S. history.
Think about that ratio. Five thousand soldiers pursuing a band that never numbered more than a few dozen warriors at any time. It speaks to both Geronimo's tactical brilliance and the desperation of the military leadership.
General Crook caught up with Geronimo just over the Mexico border in March 1886. Geronimo fled. Crook, humiliated, could not catch him.
Finally, in September 1886, Geronimo surrendered to General Nelson Miles. He had thirty followers left. This is generally considered the end of the Apache Wars, though sporadic violence continued for years. The last well-recorded Apache raid into Texas was the McLaurin Massacre of 1881, but raids reportedly continued until 1882 or later.
The Camp Grant Massacre
Not all the atrocities came from the military. In 1871, a vigilante force of six white Americans, forty-eight Mexicans, and nearly a hundred Papago warriors attacked Camp Grant in Arizona. They massacred approximately one hundred fifty Apache men, women, and children.
This wasn't a battle. It was a slaughter of people who had come to the camp seeking peace.
The Camp Grant Massacre shocked even many Americans who supported aggressive action against the Apache. It demonstrated something ugly: the line between "military action" and murder often disappeared entirely when the victims were Native peoples.
Exodus Day
The Yavapai Wars, sometimes called the Tonto Wars, paralleled the broader Apache conflicts. The Yavapai and Tonto peoples, closely related to the Western Apache, fought American settlers throughout the 1860s and early 1870s. The battles of Salt River Canyon and Turret Peak showed the intensity of the violence.
On February 27, 1875, the Yavapai were forcibly removed from the Camp Verde Reservation to San Carlos. The Yavapai still commemorate this date as Exodus Day—a reminder of everything they lost.
What the Apache Wars Reveal
The Apache Wars lasted nearly forty years. They involved thousands of casualties on both sides. They produced atrocities that still disturb the conscience: the murder of Mangas Coloradas, the Camp Grant Massacre, the countless broken treaties.
Yet these wars are far less remembered than conflicts like the Battle of Little Bighorn or the Trail of Tears. Perhaps that's because they don't fit neatly into the narrative Americans prefer—the Apache weren't defeated in a single dramatic battle, and they weren't peacefully relocated along a single tragic trail. They fought, surrendered, escaped, fought again, and were slowly ground down over decades.
The Apache Wars also reveal the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of American Indian policy. Treaties were signed and ignored. Reservations were established and then abolished when the land proved valuable. Surrender was offered and then punished with murder. The Apache learned, again and again, that American promises meant nothing.
Geronimo spent his final years as a prisoner of war, first in Florida, then in Alabama, and finally at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. He died in 1909, having never returned to his homeland. The man who had evaded five thousand soldiers became an attraction at fairs, selling autographs and photographs to curious Americans.
The skull of Mangas Coloradas was never returned to his people.