Here are photos of a sculpture and the cultural museum outside the Mescalero Apache Tribe on the Mescalero reservation near Tularosa, New Mexico. Ulysses S. Grant formally created the Mescalero reservation, comprising almost half a million acres in 1873, and today three sub-tribes of Apaches live there.
The Lipan Apache at the reservation arrived in 1903, and in 1913, 200 survivors of the Chiricahua Apache Texas wars joined after years of being prisoners of war in Fort Still, Oklahoma after the capture of the famed warrior Geronimo in 1884. These groups joined with the Mescalero Apache, named after the Mescalero plant that they prepared and consumed.
Centuries before the Spanish, Mexican, and American settlers arrived, the Apache lived in the North American and northern Mexican southwest as hunter-gatherers whose style of guerilla warfare emerged as the strongest resistance to white occupation.
In the third image you see the faded picture of Lozen (1840s-1886), an example of a highly esteemed warrior leader among the Mescalero Apache. She belonged to the Chiricahua Apache, and was famed for her ability to predict her enemies’ whereabouts and evade capture. In 1886 she surrendered with the last of the Apache and died at the Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama. Her descendants live at the Mescalero reservation..
