Fort Apache Historic Park

The fort came first, in 1870 — a camp on the White Mountain River that the Army called Ord, then Mogollon, then Thomas, and finally, in 1879, Fort Apache. From here the Army ran its campaigns against the Apache and, in one of the period's harder ironies, recruited Apache scouts to track other Apaches. Thirteen of the post's buildings still stand around the parade ground, including the log cabin General Crook used in 1871.

When the Army left in 1922, the fort didn't close so much as change weapons. In 1923 the Bureau of Indian Affairs opened the Theodore Roosevelt School on the grounds — a boarding school built to take Native children, mostly Navajo and Apache, from their families and remake them: English only, hair cut short, ceremony forbidden, the whole assimilation machine that ran across the country in those decades. Ndee elders who passed through it in later years still carry what it cost. A tribal school of the same name operates in some of the buildings today, on the tribe's own terms.

That reversal is the point of the place now. After a long fight to keep the land, the White Mountain Apache administer the entire 288-acre National Historic Landmark, and at its western end they built a cultural center, Nohwike' Bagowa — House of Our Footprints — where the Apache creation story is told by Apaches and the museum holds what the school once tried to erase. Four miles west stand the Kinishba Ruins, a great stone pueblo of four to five hundred rooms raised by ancestral Puebloan people around 1150 to 1350 and now preserved by the tribe. Between the ruin, the fort, and the school, this ground holds three separate centuries of the region's history — and the people who were meant to disappear from all three are the ones telling it. The reservation capital, Whiteriver, is four miles north; the sacred summit of Mount Baldy rises to the east; and the Salt River Canyon marks the reservation's southern edge.