The Apache Wars ran from 1849 to 1886, beginning after the Mexican-American War handed the Southwest to the United States. Mangas Coloradas signed a peace treaty recognizing the Americans, but Congress never ratified it, and gold miners poured into the Santa Rita Mountains. In 1851 miners near Pinos Altos tied him to a tree and whipped him. In February 1861 Lieutenant George Bascom accused Cochise of a kidnapping carried out by a separate Coyotero band and tried to seize him and his family at Apache Pass. Cochise cut through the tent and escaped, hostages were killed on both sides, and the Bascom affair opened years of open war just as the Civil War pulled troops east.
Mangas Coloradas and his son-in-law Cochise allied to drive out Americans and Mexicans, facing howitzers at the Battle of Apache Pass in 1862. When Mangas came in to negotiate in 1863, General Joseph West ordered him killed, and his skull went to a phrenologist in New York. Victorio’s breakout from San Carlos tied down thousands of troops until his death at Tres Castillos in 1880. Geronimo’s final 1885 escape led General Nelson Miles to field 5,000 soldiers and a heliograph network against a band of 24, ending in surrender at Skeleton Canyon in September 1886.
- Heliograph mirrors on mountain peaks flashed Morse code across gaps of 50 miles during the 1886 hunt.
- The 1871 Camp Grant Massacre killed about 150 Apache people, mostly women and children, who had surrendered under Army protection.
- Victorio’s band of about 80 warriors could cover 70 miles a day and fought more than a dozen battles in 14 months.
- After the surrender, the Apache scouts who had tracked Geronimo were shipped to Florida prisons alongside the people they hunted.
- Fifty Chiricahua children died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and isolated raids continued in the Sierra Madre until 1924.
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