Return to the Stronghold: Oklahoma Apache tribe buys back some ancestral land in Arizona

A 55 acre property in the Dragoon Mountains, about 85 miles southeast of Tucson, is now back in the hands of descendants of the Chiricahua Apache people who once lived across southeastern Arizona. The Fort Sill Apache Tribe, based in Oklahoma, purchased the parcel in Cochise Stronghold, a landscape of granite cliffs, oak lined arroyos and mountain ridges that holds deep historical and cultural importance for the tribe.

The land is roughly five miles from the place where Chiricahua Chief Cochise met with U.S. Army Gen. Oliver O. Howard to negotiate a peace agreement in 1872. That agreement led President Ulysses S. Grant to establish the Chiricahua Indian Reservation by executive order on Dec. 14 of that year. The reservation covered about 4,275 square miles in the southeastern corner of the Arizona Territory, an area nearly as large as the present day Tohono O’odham Nation west of Tucson.

The promise of a permanent homeland did not last. Cochise died of natural causes on the reservation about two years after it was created. In 1876, Grant abolished the reservation and returned the land to the public domain. About 1,000 Chiricahua Apaches living there were forced to relocate to what is now the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation east of Globe. Some later escaped and returned to their homeland, including groups led by the famed warrior Geronimo and Naiche, Cochise’s son and the last hereditary chief of the Chiricahua.

U.S. and Mexican forces pursued those groups until the last of the Chiricahua holdouts surrendered at Fort Bowie in 1886. The prisoners were sent first to Florida, then Alabama and eventually Oklahoma, where they remained captive for nearly 30 years. In 1913, the government permitted about two thirds of the group to move to the Mescalero Apache Reservation in south central New Mexico. Roughly 80 people remained at Fort Sill and were released the following year to settle on small farm allotments. Their descendants eventually formed the Fort Sill Apache Tribe, which received federal recognition in 1976.

The tribe now has about 800 enrolled members, but it does not have a formal reservation in Oklahoma. Its land there includes a 10 acre headquarters and approximately 120 acres of scattered homes and farmland. The tribe won the right to establish a reservation in New Mexico in 2011 and owns 30 acres near Deming. The newly acquired Cochise Stronghold parcel gives the tribe another foothold in the region where its ancestors lived, negotiated, fought and were ultimately removed.

The Trust for Public Land helped arrange the purchase. The San Francisco based nonprofit is widely known for preserving land for parks, trails and other public spaces, but it also has a tribal lands program that has helped about 70 tribes recover approximately 200,000 acres of ancestral territory. The Fort Sill transaction is the organization’s first tribal land conveyance in Arizona and its first project involving an Apache tribe.

Michael Patrick, a senior project manager with the trust, said he began looking for property in Arizona or New Mexico that could be meaningful to descendants of the Chiricahua Apaches. He found a real estate listing for the Dragoon Mountains land in December and entered a signed option agreement with the owners by January. The property was jointly owned by a Green Valley couple and a widower from Phoenix, who had purchased it about 20 years ago and spent time camping there. They had planned to build homes but never did, and supported both conservation of the land and its transfer to the tribe.

After an appraisal and environmental assessment, the trust purchased the property for $550,000 and sold it to the Fort Sill Apache Tribe for the same amount. The transaction closed Sept. 10, when all six members of the tribe’s governing Business Committee and two staff members met with trust representatives in Sierra Vista to sign the final documents. They then drove to the eastern side of the Dragoon Mountains to tour the land and take photographs.

The parcel is surrounded on three sides by the Coronado National Forest and lies within two miles of a four acre property the tribe already owns. Its terrain includes 200 foot granite cliffs, green ridgelines and views across the Sulphur Springs Valley toward the Chiricahua and Dos Cabezas mountains. A seasonal waterfall can flow into a large arroyo lined with oak trees when conditions are right. The tribe plans to use the property as a gathering place where members can harvest native plants, teach younger generations, reconnect with their history and care for the land according to Apache cultural traditions.

Fort Sill Apache Chairwoman Jennifer Heminokeky described the purchase as a meaningful step toward honoring ancestors and preserving cultural ties to the region. Patrick said about 80 percent of the tribe’s members live outside Oklahoma, scattered across the country, making a shared place for ceremonies, meetings and cultural reconnection especially important. For Tucson and southeastern Arizona, the purchase also adds a new chapter to the long history of the region’s Apache homelands, placing a small but significant part of Cochise Stronghold under the care of the people whose ancestors made it a refuge.