It was a spiritual violence — a severing of the relationships between a people and the land that sustained them in every sense of the word.

The Prisoner Years and Their Devastation

The Apache prisoners held at Fort Marion and the subsequent locations of their confinement experienced a period of concentrated misery that killed many of them and profoundly disrupted the cultural and social fabric of those who survived.

Fort Marion, the sixteenth-century Spanish fort at St.

Augustine, Florida, had been used as a military prison before the Apache were sent there.

Its facilities were not designed for the long-term housing of hundreds of people, and the conditions in which the Apache were held were crowded, unhealthy, and utterly foreign to people who had lived their entire lives in the dry air of the mountain Southwest.