The oral histories and scholarship of Apache historians and community members provide additional depth.

The work of historians like Karl Jacoby and others who have engaged seriously with the Apache side of the nineteenth-century Southwest conflict offers the kind of perspective that balances the military and political history with the human experience.

The Apache Community Today: Descendants And Living History

The Apache people — the various Apache communities that include the descendants of the nineteenth-century Apache leaders and the Fort Sill prisoners — are living communities in the twenty-first century, with their own governments, their own cultural programs, and their own ongoing relationships with the history of the nineteenth century.

The Mescalero Apache Tribe in New Mexico includes descendants of the Chiricahua Apache who were allowed to return to the Southwest after the end of the Fort Sill prisoner-of-war period.