The relationship between the Apache and both Mexico and the United States was defined by cycles of conflict, tentative peace, and renewed conflict throughout the nineteenth century.

The influx of American settlers into the Arizona and New Mexico territories after the Civil War, the discovery of silver at Tombstone in 1877 and the resulting boom in Anglo settlement, and the policy decisions of Army commanders who varied enormously in their approaches to Apache communities produced a situation of chronic instability.

The Cochise years — the period when the Chiricahua chief Cochise maintained a period of relative peace after the disaster of the Bascom Affair in 1861 — showed that agreements were possible.

Cochise’s death in 1874 and the dissolution of the Chiricahua Reservation in 1876, which concentrated the Chiricahua at the hated San Carlos Reservation in Arizona’s hot lowland desert country, re-ignited the conflict.