Apache History
West Texas
Sometime around 1300 AD, some of the Atha-baskans, the ancestors of the Apache and Navajo people, left their homes in what is now western Canada and slowly travelled south to what is now Arizona, New Mexico, and western Texas. This may have been because of the climate change known as the Little Ice Age. The Navajo people settled to the west, and the Apache to the east. When the Apache arrived in the Southwest, they began to trade with the Pueblo people who were their new neighbors. The Apache learned many new things from the Pueblo people.
Apache house and tools
But the Apache did not begin to farm, as the Pueblo and Navajo did. Instead, they seem to have continued their own culture of hunting buffalo on the Plains. They hunted on foot. According to early Spanish reports, they ate raw buffalo meat and drank the blood of the buffalo they killed. But Apache people also traded buffalo meat and buffalo skins to the Pueblo people to get corn (maize) and woven cotton cloth and good stone tools. Apache people used dogs pulling sleds to move their tepees and their stuff from hunting place to hunting place.
Apache people after 1500 AD
To find out more about Apache history, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
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