Geronimo Campaign, between May 1885 and September 1886, was the last large-scale military operation of the Apache wars. It took more than 5,000 U.S. Army Cavalry soldiers, led by the two experienced Army generals, in order to subdue no more than 70 Chiricahua Apache who fled the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation and raided parts of the surrounding Arizona Territory and adjacent Sonora state in Mexico for more than a year.
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
8 soldiers killed in various skirmishes; Cochise casualties unknown
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