They had survived epidemics that had reduced other Indigenous peoples to small fractions of their former populations.

They had adapted to the introduction of horses, firearms, and the other material changes of the colonial contact period.

They had maintained their political independence and their territorial integrity against sustained pressure that had destroyed many other peoples.

But the United States was a different kind of adversary than anything the Apache had faced before.

It was a nation with an inexhaustible supply of manpower and material, with the ideological commitment to “manifest destiny” that made the elimination of Indigenous territorial autonomy a national project rather than a local conflict, and with the specific willingness to use sustained military force until resistance was broken.

The Apache Wars, as the conflict between the Apache and the United States military is known, began in earnest in the 1860s and lasted until Geronimo’s final surrender in 1886.