The Disease Environment of the Apache Wars

One context that is essential to understanding the Apache Wars — and the conditions that produced people like Lozen — is the specific disease environment in which the Apache were living throughout this period.

The Chiricahua Apache had survived the major waves of epidemic disease that had decimated many other Indigenous peoples in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

By the time of the Apache Wars, they had developed some population-level immunity to the diseases that had been catastrophic for other peoples.

Their population, while significantly reduced from pre-contact levels, was not at the catastrophically low levels that made many other Indigenous groups unable to mount sustained resistance.