He became a legend in his own time. Courageous, ruthless, stubborn, brilliant, and brutal, he became an icon of resistance whose aura has faded but definitely is far from vanished. He was the Mescalero-Chiricahua Apache known in the non-Indian world as Geronimo. After more than three decades of raiding and fighting, he finally surrendered 132 years ago tomorrow, Sept. 4, 1886, ending the last guerrilla warfare fought on U.S. soil.
To detractors, a bloodthirsty renegade, a terrorist. To admirers, a freedom fighter, a patriot. To members of his own tribe in his own time, a hero to some and to others a rigid man who brought trouble to all the Apaches because of his unwillingness to end what they viewed as a hopeless struggle against the tide of U.S. occupation.
Of him, Michael Darrow, the tribal historian of the Fort Sill (Oklahoma) Apaches, told an interviewer a decade ago: "The iconography of Geronimo is such that one is able to change him into whatever people want to think or feel. It's as if there was this mythological vacuum that needed to be filled by American society. So they used the image or idea of Geronimo to fill that need. And you can use that image or idea to make him whatever you want him to be whether it's a hero or a villain."
U.S. officials first became aware of Goyaałé, his Apache name, in the late 1860s when he and his band robbed and killed Mexicans, all of whom he despised because Mexicans had killed his wife and daughters. So, in 1872, Washington decided to lock up him and hundreds of other Chiricahuas on a reservation in what was then Arizona territory. He escaped a few years later with a large band of Apaches from several Chiricahua bands who objected to confinement. Thus began the final decade of a 30-year war to maintain the traditional Apache way of life. Ultimately, Geronimo gave himself up to Brigadier General Nelson Miles in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona. The thrice-captive Geronimo was the last Indian war leader to formally surrender to the United States.
He and his small, battered Bedonkohe band had honed their already prodigious guerrilla warfare skills during five years of outwitting the U.S. and Mexican troops and civilian vigilantes trying to track them down. Soldiers on horseback could only cover 40 miles a day because of watering needs in the dusty drylands where they rode. The Apaches could travel 60 miles and easily stay beyond the grasp of Miles and his brigades. But with his people exhausted and malnourished from the constant pursuit, Geronimo finally agreed in late summer negotiations with someone he respected—Lt. Charles Gatewood—to give up, first to Captain H.W. Lawton and then to the ambitious Miles.
By then only 39 warriors were still following Geronimo. Arrayed against them at one time had been 5,000 U.S. cavalry, 3,000 Mexican soldiers and what some historians estimate to have been upward of 1,000 Indian-hating civilians, many of them eager to make a name for themselves by killing or capturing the nearly 60-year-old Geronimo. The newspapers eagerly followed the pursuit, publishing fact mixed with fantasy and rumor. It was Gatewood, the culturally respectful officer who spoke some Apache, who ultimately persuaded him to talk and then to peacefully surrender.
Within a few days of the surrender, the general had shipped Geronimo and the 35 men in his band young enough to be combatants to prisons in Florida, Alabama, and eventually to Fort Sill in Oklahoma. Sent along with them on the train, in what must have made for a tense trip, were the Army’s Apache scouts (including some Chiricahua) without whom Gatewood would not have been able to track down the band. The scouts’ fate marked yet another instance of the deceit and betrayal with which Indians were relentlessly treated in that era.
There was more deceit from Miles to come. To avoid violent resistance from the captives intent on not being shipped to a faraway prison camp in the alien East, the general had promised Geronimo that he and his band would spend only a couple of years incarcerated in Florida and then be allowed to return to reservation lands in Arizona. Geronimo never saw home again. After 23 years of captivity, he died in 1909 from complications of pneumonia contracted in the Fort Sill hospital after he was thrown from his horse and spent the night in a ditch. He was 80.
On his death bed, he reportedly said: "I should never have surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive."
Just a month after Geronimo and his warriors arrived in Florida, the rest of the Chiricahua men, women, and children were arrested, had their land seized, and were sent by rail to the Florida prison camp in sealed boxcars. At Fort Marion, 447 adults were being held by early 1887. They were separated from all but their youngest children and sent to Fort Pickens in Pensacola where they were forced into hard labor. They were said to “die like flies at frost time” in the unfamiliar climate.
By 1894, all those still alive had been transferred to Fort Sill. Those who survived had been held as prisoners of war for 27 years, longer than any other POWs held by the American government on or off U.S. soil. Disease and age took many lives over the years, but another big killer was malnutrition. Surviving POWs were not allowed to return home until 1913, a quarter-century after the three dozen warriors of Geronimo’s band and the hundreds of other Chiricahua were supposed to have been released to the reservation.
Although it has since been edited, five years ago, the History Channel website contained a brief, riddled-with-factual-errors account of Geronimo’s surrender and subsequent life. Included was the ludicrous statement that he had never learned how to shoot a gun, a claim his contemporaries certainly did not agree with. When he surrendered, after all, he was carrying a Model 1876 Winchester rifle now displayed at the military academy at West Point. Here is a photo of it. He also was carrying a nickel-plated Model 1873 Colt single-action revolver in a Mexican-style holster and belt rig covered with silver conchos, now on display at the Fort Sill museum. He was also photographed with other firearms during his life, none of which he carried for show.
Although permanently a prisoner, Geronimo became a minor celebrity and spent much time traveling around the eastern part of the country in his latter days, sometimes with wild west shows, and always with a military guard. He signed autographs, sold buttons off his coat to souvenir collectors, told stories to tourists at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904 and was an invited guest at the inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt in 1905.
He used the occasion to plead futilely with the president: "Let me die in my own country, an old man who has been punished enough and is free." Roosevelt’s ‘no” was unsurprising since he had given a speech in New York in January 1886 in which he referenced Gen. Phil Sheridan’s infamous remark in 1868 to the Comanche leader Tosawi: "The only good Indian I ever saw was dead”:
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, [said Roosevelt] but I believe nine out of every 10 are. And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
To Geronimo, Roosevelt said through an interpreter that the Indian had a “bad heart.” “You killed many of my people; you burned villages … and were not good Indians.” Any return to Arizona, he made clear, would have to wait on whether officials believed the Chiricahua had learned to behave the way the government demanded of them. Large numbers, including Geronimo, eventually were transformed into “good Indians” in Washington’s eyes because they died at Fort Sill just as they had died at Fort Pickens and Fort Marion.
Geronimo’s obituary in The New York Times can be found here —filled with errors, fabrications, slurs, idiocies, and many stereotypes that we still have with us more than a century after his death.
Eleven children of Geronimo’s warriors were immediately shipped east to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Eventually, hundreds of Chiricahua children were sent there, and their parents lived in permanent dread that still more children would disappear from their lives in this way. About a third of those children soon died at Carlisle, many from tuberculosis.
The school had been founded seven years earlier by Capt. Richard H. Pratt. He too adjusted Sheridan’s remark to make his point in 1892: "A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
In other words, forced assimilation: Remove Indian children from their tribes, isolate them from their families, forbid them to speak their own language, decry their religions and traditions, sterilize their culture, and Christianize them. That happened to tens of thousands of Indians at forced boarding schools like Carlisle well into the 1970s. The negative impact of those quasi-prisons has generated a kind of intergenerational post-traumatic stress syndrome and mangling of identity for Indians of many tribes.
In the photo below, the Chiricahua children from Geronimo’s band are pictured when they arrived at Carlisle in mid-November 1886.
Same children four months later. The attempt to kill the Indian in them was by then already well underway.