Geronimo

• 1. Introduction

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  Geronimo was born on the 16th of June 1829 near Turkey Creek, a tributary of the Gila River, on land that Mexico claimed and the Apache did not. He died on the 17th of February 1909 in the hospital at Fort Sill, still a prisoner of war. In between, he fought Mexican and American armies across two countries, then ended up as a paid attraction at fairs, parades and Wild West shows. His name is now shouted by parachutists, borrowed for a Doctor Who catchphrase, and attached to a rumor about a Yale secret society. Yet the man himself was never a chief. How did a medicine man become the most famous Native American of his day? What drove him to fight for so long? And why do arguments over his surrender, his grave and his name still continue?

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• 2. A Shaman Among Warriors

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  Thirty to fifty warriors was the size of the parties that Geronimo often led, even though he held no chieftainship. He was a shaman of the Bedonkohe band, much as Nokáy-doklini was among the Western Apache. His authority came from skill at raiding and warfare, and from a reputation for powers that other Apaches took seriously.

  Eyewitness accounts from Apaches describe him sensing distant events as they happened and anticipating what was coming. They also describe him healing the sick. Those gifts suggested to his people that he could use his powers for good or for harm, and they stood in awe of him.

  Awe did not make him beloved. Within his own Chiricahua community, many felt mixed about him, and he was not widely popular among the other Apaches. He refused to bow to American demands, and some Apaches feared the retaliation his defiance might bring on everyone.

  His grandfather Mahko had been a chief of the Bedonkohe, so leadership ran in the family even if the title did not pass to Geronimo. Later, white audiences would invent the title for him anyway, and that invention would be sold along with his shirt buttons.

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• 3. Revenge Warfare

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  At Janos, in Chihuahua, 400 Mexican soldiers from Sonora attacked Geronimo's camp on the 5th of March 1851. They were led by Colonel José María Carrasco. The men of the camp were in town trading, and the soldiers fell on the women, children and the guard left behind. The dead included Geronimo's mother, his young wife Alope and their three small children. He had married Alope at 17, and she was the first of what would become nine wives.

  He later described how word reached the returning men, and how they hid until dark and met at a thicket by the river. When they were counted, he wrote, his aged mother, young wife and three small children were among the slain. He added that his band had been at peace with the Mexicans at the time.

  The loss shaped everything after it. Geronimo hated Mexicans for the rest of his life, and his bands attacked and killed Mexican groups whenever they met them. The source says his hostility toward Mexicans stayed stronger than any he felt toward Americans.

  His chief, Mangas Coloradas, sent him to Cochise's band for help in taking revenge. Out of that campaign came the name Geronimo. One account says he charged Mexican soldiers with a knife through heavy gunfire. Another says the soldiers cried out to Saint Jerome, calling "Jerónimo!" Historians disagree, and one even speculates that it was the closest Mexicans could come to the sounds of his Apache name.

  This was a quarrel with a long history. Presidios had been built at Janos in 1685 and at Fronteras in 1690 to counter Apache raids on Spanish settlements. In 1835 Mexico placed a bounty on Apache scalps. Between 1820 and 1835 alone, some 5,000 Mexicans died in Apache raids, and 100 settlements were destroyed.

  The historian Angie Debo wrote that the Apaches, driven into the mountains, treated raiding as an economic enterprise as legitimate as gathering berries or hunting deer. Retaliation was just as harsh and seldom aimed at particular individuals. In 1873 a peace treaty at Casas Grandes ended with Mexican troops giving mezcal to the Apaches and then killing 20 of them while they were drunk.

  The source credits Geronimo with a record of brutality unmatched by his contemporaries. It ties that record to the murder of his family.

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• 4. Breakouts and the Sierra Madre

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  Three times, in 1878-1881 and 1885, Geronimo led his followers out of the reservation. Rations were provided there, but corrupt Indian agents sometimes let them run perilously short. Malaria and other diseases killed many, though the reservation did shield Apaches from the violence of warfare. For a people who had lived as semi-nomads for generations, it was confining, and others had also broken out.

  After each escape, his band fled across Arizona and New Mexico into Mexico, killing and plundering along the way. Their new base was the rugged Sierra Madre Occidental, which straddles the line between Sonora and Chihuahua. They knew the terrain intimately, and it kept American forces from following them easily. From there they could raid villages, haciendas and wagon trains in both Mexican states.

  They also struck back across the border. In March 1883, the historian Utley notes, Geronimo and Chihuahua raided the Sonora River valley for livestock and provisions. Meanwhile Chatto and Bonito rode through southern Arizona to gather guns and cartridges. In the United States, the raiders hit isolated ranches, wagon trains, prospectors and travelers. They often killed everyone they met so that no alarm would spread before they crossed back into Mexico.

  Mexican forces in Sonora and Chihuahua could not suppress the Chiricahua bands in the mountains. In 1883 Mexico therefore allowed American troops to cross the border in pursuit.

  The last breakout began on the 17th of May 1885. Nana, Mangus, Chihuahua, Naiche, Geronimo and their followers left the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona after a show of force against the commanding officer, Britton Davis. General George Crook answered by sending two columns into Mexico, one under Captain Emmet Crawford and one under Captain Wirt Davis.

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• 5. The Long Surrender

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  Each of Crook's columns carried about forty cavalrymen and about 100 Apache Scouts. The scouts proved good at locating mountain strongholds, and the shock for Geronimo's band was that their own people had helped find them. Pursuit by both Mexican and American forces wore the bands down and gradually eroded their will to resist.

  On the 9th of January 1886, Crawford located Geronimo's band, and the scouts attacked the next morning. They captured the Apache horse herd and camp equipment, and the demoralized Apaches agreed to negotiate. Then Mexican troops arrived and mistook the scouts for hostile Apaches. They killed Captain Crawford.

  Geronimo agreed to meet Crook at the Cañon de los Embudos, the Canyon of the Funnels, about 20 miles south of the border. The photographer C. S. Fly took about 15 exposures there in March 1886. One shows Geronimo standing with two of his sons, made at his own request. They remain the only photographs of the surrender, and the only known photographs of an American Indian still at war with the United States.

  The agreement did not hold. After the Apaches agreed to Crook's terms, a soldier who sold them whiskey told them they would be murdered once they crossed the border. That night Geronimo, Nachite and 39 followers slipped away. Crook, after heated telegrams with General Philip Sheridan, asked on the 1st of April 1886 to be relieved, and Sheridan agreed.

  General Nelson A. Miles took over. He chose Captain Henry Lawton to pursue Geronimo south of the border, and First Lieutenant Charles B. Gatewood to lead the expedition that would bring him back. Geronimo credited Gatewood for his decision, since Gatewood spoke some Apache and respected their ways. He credited Lawton too, whose constant pursuit left the Apaches no time to rest.

  Geronimo surrendered to Miles on the 4th of September 1886 at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona. He carried a Winchester Model 1876 rifle, now at West Point, and a Colt revolver and a Bowie knife now at the Fort Sill museum.

  Whether the surrender was unconditional is still argued. Geronimo insisted in his memoirs that his people had been misled and that he surrendered as a prisoner of war, with witnesses present. General Oliver O. Howard said it was accepted from a dangerous outlaw without conditions, and the US Senate heard that account contested.

  By the end he led only 38 men, women and children. They had evaded thousands of troops for more than a year. Settlers called him the "worst Indian who ever lived".

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• 6. Prisoner on Display

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  Fort Pickens, in Pensacola, Florida, was where the prisoners were sent after about six weeks at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. The quick transfer kept Arizona civil authorities from arresting and trying Geronimo for the many deaths of earlier decades. The Washington Post reported that in Florida's alien climate the Apache died "like flies at frost time." Hundreds of visitors a day were let into the fort to see the "bloodthirsty" Indian in his cell.

  Back in Arizona, the government sent hundreds of Chiricahua children to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. More than a third quickly died of tuberculosis. In 1888 the Chiricahuas were moved to Mt. Vernon Barracks in Alabama, where families were reunited. After a quarter of the population died of tuberculosis, they were moved again, to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894. There they built villages by kindred group, and Geronimo was given land to farm.

  The train journey to Fort Sill was his first taste of selling himself. Tourists paid 25 cents for a button he cut off his shirt or a hat from his head. At each depot he bought more buttons and hats to sell again.

  In 1898 he went with a Chiricahua delegation to the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, where he became a major attraction. Fame from newspaper coverage of the Apache Wars preceded him. He was in demand at fairs for the rest of his life, including the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo in 1901 and the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. Always under Army guard, he wore traditional clothing, posed for photographs and sold crafts.

  Pawnee Bill's Wild West shows then arranged with the government to add him to their cast. The shows described the Indians as lying, thieving, treacherous, murderous monsters, and visitors paid to take a button from the coat of the vicious Apache chief. The shows put money in his pockets and let him travel, but never without guards.

  In 1905 he rode horseback down Pennsylvania Avenue in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade, with five other Indian chiefs in full headgear and paint. One newspaper said the point was to show that they had buried the hatchet forever. That same week he asked Roosevelt to let the Chiricahuas at Fort Sill leave prisoner-of-war status and return to Arizona. Roosevelt refused, citing continuing anger over civilian deaths, and through an interpreter told Geronimo that he had a "bad heart." He said he would see how Geronimo and his people acted.

  Geronimo later said of the St. Louis fair that he was glad he went, that he had learned much of white people, and that no one tried to harm him there. Had it been among Mexicans, he added, he would have had to defend himself often.

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• 7. Faith, Family and Final Words

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  The Dutch Reformed Church admitted Geronimo as a member in 1903, then expelled him four years later for gambling. He had been raised in the traditional Bedonkohe religion. In his 1905 autobiography he said the tribe's teachings about an afterlife were not specific. They believed in a life after this one, he wrote, and hoped that family and tribal ties would resume there.

  In later years he praised Christianity and urged his people to study it. He said that church membership had helped him. He also said he was glad the President was a Christian. Yet in 1908 he told missionaries at a summer camp meeting that he wanted to start over, while telling his own people that he held to the old Apache religion.

  The autobiography itself came about in 1905, when S. M. Barrett, a school superintendent in Lawton, Oklahoma, interviewed him. Barrett had to appeal to President Roosevelt for permission to publish. Geronimo spoke in Spanish, arrived at each interview knowing exactly what he wanted to say, and refused to answer questions or change his account. Asa Daklugie translated it into English.

  His family life was complicated. After Alope came Chee-hash-kish, who bore him two children, Chappo and Dohn-say. Nana-tha-thtith, Zi-yeh, She-gha, Shtsha-she and Ih-tedda followed, and the ninth and last wife was Azul. One daughter, probably Dohn-say, married Zebina Streeter, called the "White Apache," although intermarriage with whites was considered dishonorable.

  Geronimo's horse threw him as he rode home one cold night, and he lay on the ground until a friend found him gravely ill. Pneumonia killed him. To his nephew, he confessed regret over surrendering. His reported last words were: "I should have never surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive." He was buried in the Beef Creek Apache Cemetery at Fort Sill, among relatives and other Apache prisoners.

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• 8. An Afterlife of Names

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  The most unsettling claim about Geronimo's remains comes from 1918. In that year, a letter from Winter Mead of Yale's Skull and Bones society told F. Trubee Davison that the skull of "the worthy Geronimo the Terrible" had been exhumed from Fort Sill and was inside the society's building. Prescott Bush had been among six society members serving as Army volunteers at Fort Sill during World War I.

  In 1986, former San Carlos Apache chairman Ned Anderson received an anonymous letter with a photograph and a log-book copy making the claim. The society's lawyer called the ledger a hoax. The group offered a glass case holding what looked like a child's skull, and Anderson refused it. Marc Wortman found the Mead letter in 2006, and Geronimo's great-great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo wrote to President George W. Bush, the grandson of Prescott Bush, asking for help.

  The letter proves little. Mead was not at Fort Sill, and the grave was unmarked then. In 2009 Ramsey Clark filed a suit on behalf of Geronimo's claimed descendants, though he admitted he had no hard proof. Fort Sill said nothing indicated the bones were anywhere but the grave, which the Army covered with concrete in 1928. In 2010 the court dismissed the case because the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act applies only to events after 1990.

  The name itself traveled further than the man. After the 1939 film Geronimo, US Army paratroopers testing jumps from planes began shouting "Geronimo!" to show no fear, and the 1/509th Parachute Infantry Regiment still uses it as a moniker. In 2011 the military used the code name for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, which outraged some Native Americans. Harlyn Geronimo told a Senate commission that it was either an outrageous insult or a mistake.

  There are happier remembrances. Towns in Arizona, Oklahoma and Texas carry his name, as did a Liberty ship of World War II. A 29-cent stamp in the Legends of the West series came out on the 18th of October 1994.

  Popular culture has never stopped borrowing him. The Shadows had a number 11 British single called Geronimo in 1963. Michael Martin Murphey's Geronimo's Cadillac reached number 37 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972, and the band Sheppard hit number one in Australia with Geronimo in 2014. Films include two released within days of each other in 1993, with Wes Studi in one and Joseph Runningfox in the other. Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor made the name a catchphrase on British television.

  Harlyn Geronimo taught Apache language lessons at the Mescalero Apache Reservation until his death in 2020, a quieter kind of inheritance than any of these.

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