DB Annex

The Apache (from a Zuni word meaning "enemy") are a North American Indian people of the Southwest. Their name for themselves is Inde, or Nde ("the people"). Together with the Navajo, they are classified as belonging to the Southern Athapascan linguistic family. The Apache were composed of six regional groups: the Western Apache, Chiricahua, Mescalero, Jicarilla, Lipan, and Kiowa Apache. Each group was made up of numerous localized bands.

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Apache prisoners at Fort Bowie, ca. 1884to(detail)

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Chiricahua Apache prisoners,
including Geronimo (first row, third from right), 1886to(detail)


Pictures of Indians in the United States
NARA (US National Archives & Records Administration)-

Leaders of these people included Naiche, Geronimo, Mangas, Chihuahua, and Nana. The U.S. Military under General Crook pursued them but encounters were rare. Some were captured but few were killed. Desperate raids for ammunition and supplies were common. The military was frustrated and the insurgents were hard pressed.

On March 27th of the next year, 1886, the insurgents were able to negotiate a surrender. As they were coming in, a group of 37 men, women and children led by Naiche, Geronimo, and Mangas returned to Mexico. They feared treachery and they may have been right. The U.S. refused to honor the surrender terms between General Crook and the Apaches.

“To inform the Indians that the terms on which they surrendered are disapproved would, in my judgment, not only make it impossible to negotiate with them, but would result in their scattering to the mountains, and I can’t at present see any way to prevent it. He (Crook) allowed the seventy-five hostiles in Chihuahua’s band, who were still on their way to Fort Bowie, to continue to believe that his arrangements with them had been accepted in Washington.”

Reservations were established by the United States for the Chiricahua Apaches during 1871 - 1875 within the aboriginal homelands in Arizona and New Mexico. In 1876, however, the government attempted to move all Chiricahua Apaches from their ancestral homelands and settle them on the San Carlos Reservation. Various parties of the Chiricahua Apaches fled from the San Carlos Reservation, returned to their homelands, and engaged in hostilities. The Government, determined to hold all members of the Tribe responsible for their hostile members, during 1885 and 1896 guarded the Chiricahua Apaches living on the San Carlos Reservation and waged war against the insurgent groups. The final surrender of a party of hostile Chiricahua Apaches under Geronimo as prisoners of war to an army in the field took place on September 4, 1886. This date constitutes the date of taking of the Tribe’s aboriginal lands by the United States.

A History
Fort Sill Apache Nation
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Mangas Coloradas

Mangas Coloradas (Red Sleeves) was at least six feet tall, with a powerful body and an enormous head. Anglo Americans regarded him as the greatest Apache leader of the mid nineteenth century. Indian agent Edward Wingfield called him "a noble specimen of the genus homo. He comes up nearer the poetic ideal of a chieftain . . .than any person I have ever seen." He was a war chief, diplomat, and consummate strategist—one who, according to legend, married one daughter to Cochise, another to a Navajo chief, and a third to a leader of the Western Apaches. In a kin-based society, Mangas Coloradas wove a web of obligations that extended from central Arizona to Chihuahua.

His life spanned three chaotic epochs in Southwestern history. He was born in the early 1790s at a time when Spanish soldiers were scouring the Apacheria from Tucson to Texas. As a child he must have visited or perhaps even lived in the Apache peace camp near the presidio of Janos in northwestern Chihuahua, but he spent his adult years taking advantage of Mexican decline and decay. From his strongholds in the mountains of western New Mexico, he raided as far south as Durango in north central Mexico.

During the Mexican War, Mangas Coloradas welcomed the Anglo American soldiers and urged General Stephen Watts Kearny to join with the Apaches and conquer northern Mexico once and for all. Over the next fifteen years, however, friendship degenerated into wariness and war. In 1861, Mangas Coloradas tried to persuade miners in southwestern New Mexico to leave Chiricahua territory. The miners allegedly tied him to a tree and whipped him, so he and his warriors drove them out with fire and blood. The next year, he and his son-in-law Cochise ambushed troops from General James H. Carleton's California Column in Apache Pass between the Dos Cabezas and Chiricahua Mountains. The soldiers repulsed the ambush with howitzers, and Mangas Coloradas slipped away to nurse his wounds.

Finally, in January 1863 members of mountain man Joseph Walker's party of gold seekers lured the old chief into the deserted mining camp of Pinos Altos to talk peace. Instead, they seized him and delivered him to General Joseph R. West, who had orders from Carleton to "punish the Gila Apaches, under that notorious robber, Mangus Colorado." That evening, West placed Mangas Coloradas under the guard of two soldiers. According to Daniel Ellis Conner, a member of the Walker party, "About 9 o'clock I noticed that the soldiers were doing something to Mangas, but quit when I returned to the fire and stopped to get warm. Watchmg them from my beat in the outer darkness, I discovered that they were heating their bayonets and burning Mangas's feet and legs. This they continued to do [until] Mangas rose upon his left elbow, angrily protesting that he was no child to be played with. Thereupon the two soldiers, without removing their bayonets from their Minie muskets each quickly fired into the chief, following with two shots each from their navy six-shooters. Mangas fell back into the same position . . . and never moved."
Tales of Apache cruelty spread like smallpox on the frontier, but the Apaches never murdered a high-ranking U.S. officer during a peace negotiation. The savagery did not end with the Apache chief's death. First the soldiers scalped Mangas Coloradas with an "Arkansas toothpick," a Bowie knife. Then they cut off his head and boiled it in a pot so they could send his skull to a phrenologist, who determined that it was larger than Daniel Webster's.

Arizona - A History
Thomas E. Sheridan
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Cochise
CHAPTER II. INDIANS—MASSACRES—OUTRAGES—RAIDS
HISTORY OF ARIZONA, Volume II
Books of The Southwest/Electronic Texts Project
University of Arizona Library