Eastern exile of the Chiricahuas The decline of the Gila Pimas

The result of the surrender was a train ride to Florida and an exile that lasted 23 years. Miles and the U.S. government believed Arizona would not be secure until the Chiricahuas were destroyed, and their opinion prevailed. The first to go were seventy-seven Chiricahuas rounded up during Crook's second campaign. The government dispatched them to Fort Marion in April 1886. Miles then persuaded Sheridan that all the Chiricahuas in Arizona had to be removed, although he argued for Indian Territory in Oklahma as their destination rather than Florida, where the Apaches "would in a short time most likely die." He even arranged to send Chato and twelve other Chiricahua leaders, including three women, on a tour of Indian Territory to persuade them to settle there.

Instead, President Cleveland brought Chato and the rest of the Chiricahua delegation to Washington D.C., where Chato was presented with a silver medal. Cleveland asked him to convince his people to move to Florida. Chato refused and demanded a "paper" allowing them to stay in Arizona. Cleveland responded by giving the illiterate scout a document that proclaimed he had visited the nation's capital. Then, after the Chiricahuas were on their way back to Arizona, Chato and the others were arrested as prisoners of war at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

The military called in the rest of the peaceful Chiricahuas and Indians married to Chiricahuas for a "routine count" at Fort Apache and reprimanded them to Fort Marion as well. Geronimo and his rebels were last to go. By the end of the year, the government had confined nearly 500 Chiricahuas on the other side of the continent. The men were sent to Fort Pickens near Pensacola, and the women and children were sent to Fort Marion on Florida's Atlantic coast. The Apache wars had come to an end.

Crook spent the last years of his life protesting the treatment of the Chiricahuas. On January, 1890, he even visited them at Mount Vernon, Alabama, where they had been transferred after 119 of the 498 exiles had died in the overcrowded prisons of Florida. He returned to Washington to lobby for a bill to settle the Chiricahuas at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, but after he died on March 21 of that year, the bill expired as well.

For the next four years the Apaches remained in Alabama, and in 1894 the government finally sent them to Fort Sill where they scattered across the reservation in "villages" that resembled their traditional local groups. Although Indian agents helped them become farmers and ranchers, most remained refugees on the Southern Plains. In 1913, after Arizona had become the 48th state of the U.S., they were offered a choice: private land in Oklahoma or a part of the Mescalero reservation in central New Mexico. After living outside the Southwest for nearly three decades, 187 of the 271 surviving Chiriciahuas, including Chato, chose to return home. No other Southwestern Indians had been moved so far or been gone so long.