APACHE, an aggregation of tribes or bands, forming with the Navaho the southernmost offshoot of the great Athabascan family of North American Indians, and noted for a ferocity, wili ness and raiding disposition which have made their name a by word. In general physical type they resemble the other south western Indians on the basis of anthropometric observations, but display a distinctive physiognomy which is perhaps to be inter preted as the reflection of their habits of mind and life. They never possessed national unity and were scarcely even organized into definite tribes, but since known have consisted of bands which variously separated, merged or shifted their location. Two main divisions are distinguishable : a group east of the Rio Grande, mostly in the mountains at the edge of the Great Plains, known to the Spaniards as vaqueros (buffalo hunters) and llaneros (plainsmen) and comprising the modern Jicarilla, Mescalero and Lipan ; and a group about the headwaters of the Gila in south ern New Mexico and Arizona, which included the Chiricahua, Coyotero, Pinaleno, Arivaipa and others. The former took on cer tain customs of the Plains tribes ; both groups have also absorbed religious and other cultural traits from the Pueblo, although re maining essentially non-agricultural, unsettled and predatory. The eastern group was found in its historic range by the Span iards in 154o ; the western may not yet have arrived in Arizona by that date. It is probable that Apache and Navaho were an undifferentiated people not many centuries ago, but that the lat ter, on occupying the San Juan drainage between the several branches of the Pueblo, absorbed more culture from closer con tact with these relatively advanced peoples, and gradually came to prosper and increase. The Apache were not so much brave as ex tremely skilled in raiding and guerrilla fighting. They terrorized the south-west, the western Plains and Texas and northern Mex ico. The Chiricahua were not finally subdued until 1886 after many years of intermittent and of ten dramatic warfare under Cochise, Vittorio and Geronimo against American and Mexican troops. The total population in 1903 was 6,000—probably as great as at any time in their history.
In Paris, the name Apache is given to a class of criminals to de scribe whom in America the name thug was borrowed from India.