Geronimo

The man the world knows as Geronimo was born in June 1829 near the upper Gila River, in country that Mexico then claimed and that later became part of Arizona and New Mexico ^[1]. His people, the Bedonkohe, were one of several bands of the Chiricahua Apache, seminomadic hunters and raiders who moved through the mountains and desert basins of the borderlands. His parents named him Goyahkla, a name usually translated as "the one who yawns" ^[2].

Apache boyhood was a long apprenticeship in survival. Goyahkla learned to hunt, to run long distances in rough country, to read terrain and weather, and to endure hunger and thirst without complaint. By his late teens he had completed the four raiding expeditions required of a young man and was admitted to the council of warriors ^[2]. Around this time he married a woman named Alope, and the couple had three children.

Anyone asking who was Geronimo before his years of fame finds an ordinary Bedonkohe man of his generation: a husband, a father, and a capable but not yet prominent warrior. That life ended abruptly in the early 1850s. While the men of his camp were away trading near the Mexican town of Janos in Chihuahua, Mexican soldiers attacked the camp and killed many of the women and children, among them Goyahkla's mother, his wife Alope, and their three children ^[1]. He later said the loss left him with a hatred of Mexicans that never softened.

Grief turned Goyahkla into a fighter of unusual ferocity. He helped organize revenge expeditions into Mexico alongside the Chiricahua chief Cochise and the Mimbreno leader Mangas Coloradas, and in these fights he earned a reputation for reckless courage under fire ^[3]. According to a widely repeated account, panicked Mexican soldiers cried out to Saint Jerome, "Jeronimo," during one battle, and the name attached itself to him in the form Geronimo ^[2].

He was never a hereditary chief. His authority came from two other sources. The first was his record in war, which drew followers who trusted his judgment in a fight. The second was spiritual: among the Chiricahua he was known as a man of Power, a healer and seer credited with the ability to sense approaching enemies and to treat wounds and illness ^[3]. This standing as a medicine man mattered as much within Apache society as his skill with a rifle.

Through the 1850s and 1860s the pressures on the Chiricahua multiplied. The Gadsden Purchase of 1854 put their homeland under United States authority, miners and settlers pushed into Apache country, and cycles of raid and reprisal hardened on both sides. The killing of Mangas Coloradas by American soldiers in 1863, after he had come in under a flag of truce, deepened Apache distrust of American promises ^[1].

In the 1870s federal policy concentrated the Chiricahua bands on reservations, and in 1876 the government began moving them to San Carlos, a hot, malarial stretch of the Gila River valley in Arizona that the Apache came to despise ^[4]. Geronimo submitted to reservation life several times and broke away from it several times, leading followers into the Sierra Madre of Mexico, where the rugged country favored small mobile bands over conventional cavalry.

His first arrest came in 1877, when agent John Clum seized him at the Warm Springs agency in New Mexico and brought him to San Carlos in irons ^[4]. He escaped the reservation system in 1878, returned, and fled again in 1881 after tensions following the killing of the Apache prophet Noch-ay-del-klinne at Cibecue Creek. In 1882 he led a daring raid back onto San Carlos itself, compelling the Warm Springs leader Loco and several hundred people to leave with him for Mexico ^[3].

General George Crook pursued the Chiricahua into the Sierra Madre in 1883, using Apache scouts, and persuaded most of the bands, Geronimo among them, to return north ^[4]. The peace did not hold. In May 1885 Geronimo left the reservation for the last time with roughly 140 followers, and for more than a year his shrinking band evaded thousands of American soldiers, Mexican troops, and Apache scouts across two countries. In March 1886 he agreed to surrender to Crook at Canon de los Embudos, then slipped away with a few dozen people after a whiskey trader alarmed the group with rumors of executions ^[1]. Crook resigned his command, and General Nelson Miles took over the campaign with some 5,000 troops, about a quarter of the entire United States Army, deployed against a band that by the end numbered fewer than 40 men, women, and children ^[3].

The end came through talk rather than battle. Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, accompanied by two Apache scouts, located Geronimo's camp in the Sierra Madre and told him that the Chiricahua who had remained peacefully on the reservation had already been shipped to Florida. There was no home left to fight for. On September 4, 1886, Geronimo surrendered to General Miles at Skeleton Canyon in southeastern Arizona ^[1]. He was the last Native American leader to formally give up armed resistance to the United States.

The terms he understood, a short exile followed by a return to Arizona, were never honored. Geronimo and his warriors were sent by rail to Fort Pickens in Florida, separated at first from their families at Fort Marion. Even the Apache scouts who had served the army against him were packed onto the trains as prisoners ^[5]. Disease spread quickly in the humid Gulf climate, and tuberculosis killed Chiricahua adults and children at a terrible rate. Many Apache children taken to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania died there as well ^[5].

The prisoners were moved to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama in 1888, and in 1894 to Fort Sill in Indian Territory, later Oklahoma. Geronimo remained a prisoner of war for the rest of his life, 23 years in all, though at Fort Sill he lived in a village with other Chiricahua, farmed, and raised melons and other crops ^[4].

Geronimo married nine times over his long life, a number unusual even in a society that permitted plural marriage ^[2]. After the murder of Alope and their children, his later wives included Chee-hash-kish, mother of his son Chappo and daughter Dohn-say, and Ta-ayz-slath. Several wives and children were killed or captured by Mexican forces over the decades, and others died of disease in captivity. His son Chappo, sent to Carlisle, died of tuberculosis shortly after being returned to his father ^[5].

In old age at Fort Sill he joined the Dutch Reformed Church in 1903, though he was later expelled, reportedly over gambling, and he never abandoned his Apache religious understanding ^[2]. He dictated his life story in 1905 and 1906 to Stephen Melvil Barrett, a school superintendent in Lawton, Oklahoma, with the Apache interpreter Asa Daklugie translating. President Theodore Roosevelt personally approved the project, and the book appeared in 1906 as Geronimo's Story of His Life ^[6].

The memoir is one of the most direct records of the Apache Wars from an Apache point of view. In it Geronimo gave his own account of the Janos massacre, his campaigns, and his surrender, and he closed with an appeal to be allowed to return to Arizona, writing that he wished to spend his last days in his own country.

Captivity made Geronimo a celebrity. The army allowed him to appear, under guard, at public events, and he discovered a market for his fame. He appeared at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha in 1898, the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, where crowds paid to see him and he sold autographs, photographs of himself, bows, and the buttons off his coat ^[4].

In March 1905 he rode in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade in Washington, one of six Native leaders invited to take part. Days later he met Roosevelt and asked to be allowed to take his people home to Arizona. The president refused, citing the certainty of renewed violence if the Chiricahua returned ^[6]. Arizona's settlers and press remained implacably hostile to the idea.

Geronimo never saw his homeland again. In February 1909, riding home to his village at Fort Sill, he was thrown from his horse and lay exposed through a cold night before being found. He developed pneumonia and died at the Fort Sill hospital on February 17, 1909, at about 79 years of age ^[1]. He was buried in the Apache prisoner of war cemetery at Fort Sill. His nephew later recalled that on his deathbed Geronimo regretted having surrendered at all. The Chiricahua prisoners were finally freed in 1913, four years after his death, when they were allowed to choose between remaining in Oklahoma and moving to the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico ^[5].

Few names from the nineteenth century carry the instant recognition of Geronimo's. During the Second World War, American paratroopers of the 501st Parachute Infantry began shouting "Geronimo!" as they jumped, reportedly after watching the 1939 film about him, and the cry passed into popular speech as an exclamation of fearless commitment ^[7]. The 1993 feature film Geronimo: An American Legend, with Wes Studi in the title role, brought his story to another generation.

His legacy is contested as well as celebrated. In 2011 the United States military used the codename Geronimo in connection with the operation against Osama bin Laden, drawing formal protests from Apache leaders and other Native organizations who objected to linking their ancestor's name with a terrorist ^[7]. Fort Sill descendants and the Mescalero community have also pressed, so far without success, for the return of his remains to the Gila River country of his birth. A longstanding story that members of Yale's Skull and Bones society stole his skull in 1918 has never been proven, but it prompted a lawsuit by his descendants in 2009 ^[8].

Any honest Geronimo biography must hold two truths together. To many Americans of his own day he was a feared raider whose war parties killed civilians on both sides of the border; to the Chiricahua and to later generations he became a symbol of a people defending their country against overwhelming force. Among the lasting Geronimo facts is this one: a man who commanded fewer than 40 followers at the end obliged the United States to field a quarter of its army to bring him in, and his achievements as a strategist of irregular warfare are still studied ^[3]. His grave at Fort Sill, marked by a stone pyramid topped with an eagle, remains a place of pilgrimage.