Look out at these blue mountains and bottomless canyons, because you are driving through the last free homeland of the Apache, and the country of one of the most famous names in the American West.
This broken maze — the Blue Range, and the peaks beyond it running down into Mexico — was Apache ground for centuries. The Chiricahua, the White Mountain, the San Carlos bands knew every spring, every hidden canyon, every seep that held water in June, in a country so vast and so rugged that a small band could melt into it like smoke and simply cease to exist as far as any pursuer was concerned.
And you have to understand what the Apache actually were, because the picture most people carry is wrong. They were not a single nation with a chief. They were bands, family groups, following the food through the seasons across enormous distances, and they were arguably the finest light infantry the world has ever produced. An Apache warrior could cover forty, fifty, seventy miles a day on foot through this terrain, in heat that kills, living on almost nothing. They could go where horses could not and did not need what soldiers needed.
The man the world remembers is Geronimo — Goyaałé in his own language, which means the one who yawns. He was not a chief. He was a medicine man and a war leader, and the reason he fought as long and as bitterly as he did is worth knowing: Mexican troops killed his mother, his wife and his three young children while he was away trading. He came back to find them dead. He said afterward that he never again felt anything but hatred for the men who did it, and he never made peace with what had happened.
When the Army came in the eighteen eighties to force the last free bands onto reservations — hot, flat, malarial ground where their people sickened — it was into country like the country outside your window that Geronimo took his last holdouts and refused.
Now hold this number in your head. At the end, Geronimo's band was somewhere around three dozen people. Not warriors — PEOPLE. Perhaps sixteen or eighteen fighting men, and the rest women, children and the old. And the force hunting them was five thousand United States soldiers — about a quarter of the entire American army at the time — plus thousands of Mexican troops on the other side of the line, and hundreds of Apache scouts, because in the end it took Apaches to find Apaches.
Three dozen against all of that. For over a year. Across thousands of miles of desert and mountain, striking and vanishing, never brought to a stand-up fight they did not choose. It is, in cold military terms, one of the most remarkable evasions in the history of warfare.
It ended in eighteen eighty-six with his surrender, and that closed the Apache wars. And then came the part that ought to be better known: the government loaded them onto trains as prisoners of war and shipped them to Florida — and it shipped the Apache SCOUTS too, the men who had served the Army and found Geronimo for them. Loyalty bought them nothing. They were held as prisoners for twenty-seven years. Geronimo died still a prisoner of war, in Oklahoma, having never been allowed to come home to this country.
Whatever you make of that long and bloody history — and there is blood on every side of it — sit and look at this land a minute and you will understand why it took an army so long. It is a fortress the Almighty built, and they knew it the way you know your own front porch.
Their descendants are still here. The White Mountain and San Carlos Apache nations hold country just west of this road, governing themselves, right now, today. This is not a story about a people who vanished. It is a story about a people who were not beaten so much as finally out-supplied. Drive it with some respect.
Photo: Ben Wittick · Public domain