They had lived in and around the area of Ojo Caliente — the Warm Springs — in what is now southwestern New Mexico for generations before the Apache Wars brought their way of life to a violent end.

The territory they ranged included some of the most rugged and dramatically beautiful landscape in North America: the Black Range, the Mogollon Mountains, the desert basins of the southwestern corner of New Mexico, and the bordering regions of Arizona and the Mexican states to the south.

This landscape was not merely the background of Apache life.

It was the material of Apache life.

The Chiricahua Apache were experts in this terrain in the deepest sense of the word — they knew where the water was hidden in apparently waterless country, they knew which passes through the mountains could be crossed in winter and which could not, they knew how to move through the desert without leaving traces, how to travel at night using the stars and the terrain, how to use the landscape itself as a defensive weapon against people who did not know it as well as they did.