Western Apache

The Apacheans, or Southern Athabaskans, arrived in the American Southwest between 1000 and 1500 A.D., but the exact routes they travelled and the chronology of their migrations are not well understood. By the late 1500s, the Apacheans had separated into several smaller groups and spread over a vast region extending from central Arizona to northwestern Texas. These groups gradually became more isolated from each other, adapting to local ecological conditions, and developing the linguistic and cultural characteristics that were to distinguish them in historic times. Of the seven major tribes into which anthropologists have divided the Apacheans, two reside at least in part on the Colorado Plateau: the Navajo and the Western Apache.

Five subtribal groups of the Western Apache occupied contiguous regions in the eastern and central portions of Arizona. Farthest to the southwest, and south of the Colorado Plateau, lived the San Carlos Apache. The White Mountain Apache, eastermost of the subtribal groups, ranged over a wide area bounded by the Pinaleño Mountains on the south and by the White Mountains on the north. The Cibeque Apache extended north from the Salt River to well above the Mogollon Rim; its western boundary was marked by the Mazatzal Mountains, homeland of the Southern Tonto Apache. The Northern Tonto, farthest to the west, inhabited the upper reaches of the Verde River and ranged north as far as Flagstaff.

The Western Apaches originally practiced a hunting and gathering economy. This may have been modified by their first contacts with the Pueblos, because by the 1600s they had developed a seasonal cycle of food gathering that included planting crops in the spring and summer. During the spring, the Apache parties traveled, sometimes a great distance, to harvest mescal; in May they planted crops and reactivated irrigation ditches; in July they often went to harvest saguaro fruit in the Gila Valley of what is today Arizona; and in late July they moved month for a month-long harvest of acorns. Crops were harvested in September, while fall and winter were the seasons for hunting. Except for early spring, when farm-plots were seeded in the mountains, and early fall, the time of harvest, they were almost constantly on the move.

After the introduction of livestock herds into the southwest, the Apaches soon came to supplement their subsistence cycle with raiding of Spanish and other Indian settlements for cattle. As they learned to ride Spanish horses, they became almost legendary for their swift, daring raids. When necessary they ate the horses, as well as sheep and goats. The daring Indian horsemen who struck terror into European settlers from Canada to northern Mexico were creations of the conquests. They did not exist until Indians learned to steal or break wild Spanish horses.

U.S. Government policy of exile or extermination of western Indians to make way for Anglo settlement culminated in the defeat of the Western Apache in 1875 by General George Crook. Crook subsequently pursued the Apache into every corner of their territory and during the winter of 1872-73 succeeded in confiscating and burning most of their stores of cornmeal, dried meat, wild seeds, and roasted mescal which were their entire winter diet. As they were herded onto reservations, the delicate web of subsistence agriculture and a seasonal cycle of food gathering was destroyed forever.

Things got even worse in 1874 when the government decided to consolidate many of the smaller reserves into one giant reservation where the Indians could be isolated and controlled. The San Carlos Reservation was established in one of the lowest and hottest parts of the territory of the San Carlos Apache, and well to the south of the vast forests of pinon-juniper and ponderosa pine and the sacred mountains which were the deepest sources of Apache identity and culture. Only the White Mountain Apache were located in a portion of their homeland, at Fort Apache in the valley of the White River. There they could at least continue to raise corn, beans, and squash as they had for generations.