In 1541 Spanish explorers probably saw ancestral Eastern Apaches on the Great Plains using pack dogs to move hide tipis and other possessions. These Plains Apaches killed bison, deer, and antelope during communal hunts. They reckoned descent through women; men avoided their mothers-in-law.
Spaniards colonized the upper Rio Grande in 1598, and Plains Apaches soon acquired horses. Armed with lances, mounted Apaches expanded over the southern plains after 1620. Tribes differentiated from one another. Judging from linguistic evidence, one tribe split into the historic Lipan and Kiowa Apache groups.
Mounted Comanches with guns defeated Plains Apache tribes around 1718, forcing them to retreat. About that time, Wichitas and Pawnees forced Paloma Apaches to flee from their homeland north of the Platte River to the middle Arkansas River. Penxayes Apaches gardened along the Purgatoire River tributary of the Arkansas. By 1730, the Paloma, Arkansas River, and Carlana tribes had united into eastern-band Llanero Jicarillas. By 1750, western-band Ollero Jicarillas lived at Taos Pueblo, growing crops along the Rio Grande. Numerous Eastern Apaches amalgamated into three post-1750 southern Plains tribes: Jicarillas; Lipan Apaches (see entry under Lipan Apache), and Mescaleros.
Mescalero Apaches ranged from Jicarilla country to colonial El Paso del Norte on the lower Rio Grande. They alternately traded with or raided Spanish villages until 1775, when they negotiated peace. Mescalero warriors then served the Spaniards as scouts against other natives. Living mainly on rations, bored Mescalero women learned to play Spanish card games, gambling as Apaches always had. Mescaleros learned the Spanish language and adopted Spanish clothing, except moccasins. Soon after Mexico gained independence in 1821, it stopped issuing rations to the Mescaleros, who resumed raiding in order to survive.
Early in the nineteenth century the Kiowa Apaches still ranged with the Kiowas on the central plains near the confluence of the Platte and Missouri Rivers. Thus they escaped Spanish colonial domination, only to find themselves in the path of westward U.S. expansion. By midcentury they had participated in treaty councils in Kansas and Indian Territory.
In 1851 Mescalero and Jicarilla Apache chiefs signed a peace treaty with New Mexico's American governor. Having rustled horses from a U.S. Army command at El Paso late in 1847 during the war between the United States and Mexico, hungry Mescaleros continued raiding until January 1856, when U.S. troops decisively defeated them. In November of that year, the Indian agent Michael Steck began issuing them provisions and clothing at Fort Stanton.
In 1849, the Jicarillas made themselves the most hated natives in New Mexico when Jicarilla warriors killed half a dozen male travelers and captured the wife and daughter of one of them. Would-be rescuers watched a Jicarilla woman kill the captive woman as she tried to escape. The daughter and two African-American servant women disappeared. Still, federal agents thereafter issued rations to Jicarillas, who hunted and sold pots to villagers in order to live.
Early in the Civil War, Union forces abandoned southwestern military posts and Apaches resumed economic raiding. In 1862, Union volunteers from California took control of New Mexico, interning most Mescaleros, together with thousands of Navajos, at Bosque Redondo on the Pecos River. Union officers recruited Jicarillas to fight other Plains tribes. On November 3, 1865, the last Mescaleros fled Bosque Redondo. Mescaleros remained hidden from official view until 1870, when some began trading with J. H. Blazer near their former agency at Fort Stanton.
After the war, the United States settled Kiowa Apaches and Kiowas with Comanches on a large reservation in western Indian Territory. Jicarillas drew federal rations where Utes did, and the two peoples began to intermarry.
On May 29, 1873, the U.S. president reserved Tularosa River watershed lands for Mescaleros, but the reservation provided little protection. Outlaws rustled Mescalero livestock, and federal troops occupied their reserve, murdering scores of men.
In 1876, the government sent Jicarillas to Fort Stanton, but few stayed. In 1883, the government sent the Jicarillas to the Mescalero Reservation, but two hundred of them fled back to Santa Fe in 1886. In 1887, the president reserved for them lands in north central New Mexico. There Jicarillas built homes, using lumber from a reservation sawmill. Colonists harassed them, too, as they sold pots and baskets to raise money to buy sheep.
In 1887 Congress passed the General Allotment Act, which accelerated the transfer of reserved lands from natives to newcomers and initiated a period of intense native suffering. The termination of communal land management shattered traditional governance throughout Indian Territory. In 1900, Congress approved allotting 320 acres to each Comanche, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache, and selling the "surplus" reserved acres.
In New Mexico, demoralized Mescaleros dwindled in numbers. Then in 1905, 37 Lipans moved from Mexico to the reservation. In 1913, 187 Chiricahua ex-prisoners of war moved from Fort Sill to the reservation. Finally the birth rate began to exceed the death rate. In the north, the Jicarilla population dropped from 995 in 1905 to 588 in 1920, when about 90 percent of the schoolchildren had tuberculosis.
During the allotment era, Bureau of Indian Affairs personnel tried to force Eastern Apaches to farm, speak English, cut their long hair, wear ready-to-wear clothes, and convert to Christianity. Ironically, the bureau financed its program of forced Mescalero cultural change with income from reservation timber sales and grazing leases.
When President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the Indian New Deal in 1934, no reservation population took better advantage of the reforms than the Mescaleros. The new Mescalero Reservation Business Committee canceled grazing leases so Indians could run cattle on their reservation. Net annual income from cattle rose in three depression years from $18,000 to $101,000. The reservation government prospered along with families. In 1963, the business committee's president, Wendell Chino, borrowed money from New Mexico banks to purchase the Sierra Blanca ski resort. Later, the reservation government constructed a fish hatchery, a resort hotel, golf courses, and an industrial park.
The Jicarillas organized their elective government in mid-1937, as authorized by the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. Petroleum-company exploration fees boosted family and government incomes in the 1950s. The Jicarilla Tribal Council began publishing a newspaper in 1962. In 1963, a liquor store opened in Dulce; two years later an alcoholism program started.
The Comanche, Kiowa, and Kiowa Apache Business Council, established after the 1936 Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act, reflected the pre-1900 tri-tribal reservation. Following three decades of intertribal disputes, the Comanches in 1966 left that council, claiming that the other two groups had worked against them.
See also
Apache, Western;
Lipan Apache.
Dolores Gunnerson, The Jicarilla Apaches (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974); Michael E. Melody, The Apache (New York: Chelsea House, 1988); C. L. Sonnichsen, The Mescalero Apaches (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1972).
Henry F. Dobyns
Tucson, Arizona
