The Chiricahua Apache were the last people the United States moved into what is now Oklahoma, and they came as prisoners of war. Their homeland had covered much of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico along the Mexican border. In March 1886 seventy-seven people with Chief Chihuahua, who had come in after negotiating with General George Crook, were put on a train for Florida; the Tribe's history says the government did not honor the agreement. Naiche's and Geronimo's group followed in September, and Mangus, the last leader to surrender, in October. Families who had stayed on the Arizona reservation were rounded up and shipped east too, and Chief Loco, coming home from a delegation to Washington, was held for months at Fort Leavenworth and sent on to Florida.
Twenty-seven years
After Florida came Alabama, and in 1894 Congress passed a special provision to move the prisoners to Fort Sill. They were told the post would be their permanent home, and the military reservation was enlarged for them. The Tribe's history describes the people divided into villages under their leaders: Chihuahua, Mangus, Noche, and Loco, whose village raised crops near Four-Mile Crossing while his son John served as a scout. Geronimo farmed too. In the Tribe's words he was a leader but not a chief, a medicine man, and the attention outsiders gave him has often crowded out everything else about the Tribe.
The choice of 1913
Once the reservations around the post were allotted, local politicians, businessmen and Army officers pressed to keep the land for the military, and by 1910 they were working to remove the prisoners. Freedom was offered on condition that they leave. Leaders of the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico, urged by government agents, invited them there, and in 1913 most went, Naiche among them. About a third refused and held out for the land they had been promised. A compromise between the Indian Bureau and the War Department settled them on unused allotments from the old Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation, and in 1914 about eighty-one people in some twenty families were released and resettled on small farms around Apache and Fletcher.
What they made of it
Mildred Imach Cleghorn was born a prisoner of war at Fort Sill on December 11, 1910, and grew up in one of those families. She taught home economics and kindergarten, made dolls dressed for forty tribes, and in 1976 became the first chairperson of the newly organized Fort Sill Apache Tribe, serving until 1995. Sam Haozous and Blossom Wratten, both released in 1914, were the parents of a later chairwoman, Ruey Haozous Darrow, and of the sculptor Allan Houser. In 2011 a reservation was proclaimed for the Tribe in its home country in New Mexico, and in 2014 the New Mexico Supreme Court ordered the state to recognize it. The Tribe's office stands just north of Apache, among the farms the families who stayed made.