Hendé

The Hendé are the Chiricahua Apache, whose own name for themselves means simply the people. They were never one tight tribe but a cluster of closely related, intermarrying bands often called the Central Apaches, who spoke a Southern Athabaskan language of the Na-dené family.

At European contact their country ran from south-western New Mexico and south-eastern Arizona across the Sierra Madre into northern Sonora and Chihuahua, where they moved between mountain strongholds and desert ranges.

The Spanish first recorded Apache peoples in 1598, and by the late seventeenth century Chiricahua raiding parties were striking deep into Sonora; for the next two centuries they alternated trade and truce with devastating raids against Spanish, and later Mexican, mines and towns, becoming the most feared force of the northern frontier.