Wars for Empire

Surveying the U.S.-Apache wars of the nineteenth century, one is tempted to describe them as the inevitable and bloody clash of two militaristic nations, the Apaches and the United States. In the 1830s and 1840s, Chiricahua and Jicarilla warriors first drew white Americans' attention by raiding the Santa Fe Trail and the Mexican borderlands, a region the United States sought to conquer. In the 1850s the U.S. Army conducted counterraids on Apache camps and built forts in Apacheria. This desultory campaign preceded all-out war in the 1860s, a decade-long “maelstrom of extermination and perfidy” during which American soldiers and militia killed one of every six Apaches (p. 128). The army offered refuge on remote reservations, but some of these reserves offered their inmates only starvation and slow death. To survive, many had to escape their confinement and resume their careers as raiders. Only by hunting down Chiricahua runaways and deporting them to Florida could the United States achieve the pacification it sought. For many Apaches, this pacification meant the peace of the grave

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