apascan family indirectly, as its component
tribes are not known by that name in any of the Indian languages of the
Southwest, and there is no evidence of its being of other than Indian
origin.

[Illustration: At The Ford - Apache]

At The Ford - Apache

_From Copyright Photograph 1903 by E.S. Curtis_

Since known to history, the many bands of Apache have occupied the
mountains and plains of southern Arizona and New Mexico, northern Sonora
and Chihuahua, and western Texas--an area greater than that of the states
of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts,
Vermont, Maine, Ohio, North Carolina, South Carolina, and West Virginia.
They were always known as "wild" Indians, and indeed their early warfare
with all neighboring tribes, as well as their recent persistent hostility
toward our Government, which precipitated a "war of extermination," bear
out the appropriateness of the designation. An admission of fear of
anything is hard to elicit from the weakest of Indian tribes, but all who
lived within raiding distance of the Apache, save the Navaho, their
Athapascan cousins, freely admit that for generations before their
subjugation the Apache were constantly held in mortal terror.

Through the constant depredations carried on against the Mexican
settlements in northern Sonora and Chihuahua, under the leadership of Juan
Jose, an Apache chief educated among the Mexicans, those two states were
led, in 1837, to offer a bounty for Apache scalps. The horror of this
policy lay in the fact that the scalp of a friendly Indian brought the
same reward as that of the fiercest warrior, and worse still, no exception
was made of women or children. Nothing could have been more effective than
this scalp bounty in arousing all the savagery in these untamed denizens
of the mountains, and both Mexico and the United States paid dearly in
lives for every Apache scalp taken under this barbarous system. Predatory
warfare continued unabated during the next forty years in spite of all the
Mexican government could do. With the consummation of the treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo, in 1848, the Apache problem became one to be solved by
the United States as well.

In 1864, under General James H. Carleton, the "war of extermination" was
begun in a most systematic manner. On April 20 this officer communicated a
proposal of co-operation to Don Ignacio Pesqueira, Governor of S