This engagement should not be confused with the 1879 Battle of Ojo Caliente between Victorio's band and the 9th Cavalry.
The Battle of Ojo Caliente Canyon, or simply the Battle of Ojo Caliente was an engagement of the Jicarilla War on April 8, 1854. Combatants were Jicarilla Apache warriors, and their Ute allies, against the United States Army. The skirmish was fought as result of the pursuit of the Jicarilla after the Battle of Cieneguilla just over a week earlier.
Gorenfeld, Will, The Battle of Cieneguilla, Wild West magazine, Feb., 2008
Bennett, James A., Forts & Forays: A dragoon in New Mexico, 1850–1856, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1996, p 53
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.
This page covers Ojo Caliente — Victorio Breaks from Reservation (September 4, 1879). A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
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