The Chiricahua had been in contact with Spanish colonial power, and later with Mexican authority, for more than a century before the United States absorbed the territory through the Gadsden Purchase of 1853.

The relationship had been characterized by intermittent war and intermittent peace, by raiding and trading, by the complex and shifting alliances that characterized the relationship between the Apache and both the colonial and national authorities of Mexico.

The Apache had developed their specific skills of mobile warfare and desert survival partly in response to this sustained pressure — they had been fighting for their territory and their autonomy for longer than the United States had existed.

By the time Lozen was born, the Apache were already experienced adversaries of organized military power.