Gregory McNamee: Remembering Geronimo on the 100th Anniversary of His Death
Goyathlay, “The One Who Yawns,” is better known to history by the name Mexican soldiers gave him: Geronimo, the Catholic saint Hieronymous. He was born deep within No-doyohn Canyon, near where present-day Arizona and New Mexico meet; he placed his birthday in 1829, though many historians put it in 1823. Following Apache custom, Geronimo considered his birthplace his true homeland, and though he would roam far and wide, he would often return to it, fleeing pursuers, to cloak himself in ancestral dirt for protection.
Geronimo was a Bedonkohe, a member of a small band of Chiricahua Apaches that lived in the rugged country below the Mogollon Rim. As a young boy, he learned to farm crops of corn, beans, squash, and peppers in that fertile, well-watered country. But, early on, his fellow Bedonkohe recognized that he had a gift for seeing into the future in order to interpret the present, and he was trained as a shaman, learning songs to guide him between the spirit world and the ordinary one.
Though a holy man, skilled in medicine and prophecy, Geronimo had been an unforgiving warrior since his early manhood, after Mexican soldiers came into the high country and murdered his mother, his wife, and three of his children. After that, he took matters into his own hands; as he recorded in his autobiography, he had learned as a child that Usen, the chief Apache deity, “does not care for the petty quarrels of men,” and that it was up to the injured party to exact retribution.
So he did. For two decades, he traveled with small bands of Bedonkohe into Mexico, raiding farms and laying siege to small towns, stealing cattle and horses, occasionally killing the enemy. Wounded many times in battle, Geronimo taught his fellow warriors the tactics of invisibility, slipping away into rocky canyons and mountains when pursued, striking quickly and from a long distance.
Geronimo paid little attention to the Anglos who came into Apache territory at first. They were, after all, an enemy of Mexico, too. But soon it was not Mexican soldiers but American ones who came. They killed Apache leaders such as Mangas Coloradas. They killed ordinary Apaches, too. After that, Geronimo said, “all of the Indians agreed not to be friendly with the white men any more.”
The Chiricahua elder Cochise led his people into war. When he died, in 1874, his son Naiche emerged as a leader. So, too, did Geronimo, who led the band from the United States to Mexico and back again, depending on which side was safer at the time. He fought the armies of both countries for a few years. Finally, in 1877, surrounded, he went to the San Carlos Reservation and surrendered.
Geronimo submitted to the demand that he wear brass dog tags and present himself at daily roll call. But in time, fed wormy hardtack and rancid beef, unable to farm in the salty bottomlands, lied to by one government agent after another, Geronimo left with a handful of warriors, as he would do several times in the coming years. When he did, he and his followers would disappear as if by magic. To this day, historians have not been able to reconstruct with certainty the paths they followed far south into the Sierra Madre of Mexico, from which Geronimo conducted a brilliant guerrilla campaign.
In March 1886, after having been pursued relentlessly by a quarter of the U.S. Army, Geronimo surrendered to General George Crook. By this time his band—there were about 35 warriors and 100 women and children with him—had split apart. Many of the Apaches remained in the Sierra Madre, where Mexican loggers would find their campfires and arrowheads well into the 1940s. Geronimo had a simple demand on behalf of those who stayed with him: if he surrendered, he said, then he would submit to imprisonment for a couple of years, as long as his people were allowed to return to Arizona.
President Grover Cleveland refused. The Chiricahuas were shipped off to Fort Marion, Florida, an island prison. Geronimo was not with them; with Naiche and a few others, he escaped to Mexico. The noose tightened, again with Mexican soldiers in pursuit on one side, Americans on the other. In a few months, on September 3, 1886, at a rugged place called Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, Geronimo made his final surrender—this time to General Nelson Miles, for Crook had been relieved from command, perhaps because he had publicly voiced sympathy for the Apaches.
Geronimo would never see his native land again, even though Miles promised him that on signing the peace treaty, “Your past deeds shall be wiped out . . . and you will start a new life.” He was imprisoned in northwestern Florida and put to hard labor for nearly eight years.
Then, in 1894, along with some 340 other Apache prisoners, he was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he farmed and posed for tourist photographs, sitting at the steering wheel of a Cadillac sedan bedecked in a top hat or a Plains Indian headdress. He made an appearance in St. Louis honoring the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, selling bows and arrows and signing autograph books. He related his life story to a white biographer.
He traveled to Washington to appear in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905, and he submitted a request to the country’s new leader: “Arizona is my land, my home, my father’s land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among the mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct.” Roosevelt, it seems, did not reply.
When death came to Geronimo on February 17, 1909, it must have been a relief. And for a time, it appeared as if the Apaches would die with him. For the next decades, the residents of San Carlos raised hay and barley for the horses of the government that confined them, and they continued to die, now the victims of diseases like malaria and typhus and especially of hunger—for, as Crook’s fellow officer John Gregory Bourke thoughtfully remarked, “Our government had never been able to starve any of them until it had them placed on a reservation.”
The Apache people survived, against terrible odds. Long forgotten, Geronimo reemerged in history in World War II, when American paratroopers shouted his name while jumping into battle. Their cry made a fitting tribute to a great warrior—one who, it seems, would rather have been tending his garden in his native mountains than battling his way through a long and storied life.
Read entire article at Britannica Blog
Geronimo was a Bedonkohe, a member of a small band of Chiricahua Apaches that lived in the rugged country below the Mogollon Rim. As a young boy, he learned to farm crops of corn, beans, squash, and peppers in that fertile, well-watered country. But, early on, his fellow Bedonkohe recognized that he had a gift for seeing into the future in order to interpret the present, and he was trained as a shaman, learning songs to guide him between the spirit world and the ordinary one.
Though a holy man, skilled in medicine and prophecy, Geronimo had been an unforgiving warrior since his early manhood, after Mexican soldiers came into the high country and murdered his mother, his wife, and three of his children. After that, he took matters into his own hands; as he recorded in his autobiography, he had learned as a child that Usen, the chief Apache deity, “does not care for the petty quarrels of men,” and that it was up to the injured party to exact retribution.
So he did. For two decades, he traveled with small bands of Bedonkohe into Mexico, raiding farms and laying siege to small towns, stealing cattle and horses, occasionally killing the enemy. Wounded many times in battle, Geronimo taught his fellow warriors the tactics of invisibility, slipping away into rocky canyons and mountains when pursued, striking quickly and from a long distance.
Geronimo paid little attention to the Anglos who came into Apache territory at first. They were, after all, an enemy of Mexico, too. But soon it was not Mexican soldiers but American ones who came. They killed Apache leaders such as Mangas Coloradas. They killed ordinary Apaches, too. After that, Geronimo said, “all of the Indians agreed not to be friendly with the white men any more.”
The Chiricahua elder Cochise led his people into war. When he died, in 1874, his son Naiche emerged as a leader. So, too, did Geronimo, who led the band from the United States to Mexico and back again, depending on which side was safer at the time. He fought the armies of both countries for a few years. Finally, in 1877, surrounded, he went to the San Carlos Reservation and surrendered.
Geronimo submitted to the demand that he wear brass dog tags and present himself at daily roll call. But in time, fed wormy hardtack and rancid beef, unable to farm in the salty bottomlands, lied to by one government agent after another, Geronimo left with a handful of warriors, as he would do several times in the coming years. When he did, he and his followers would disappear as if by magic. To this day, historians have not been able to reconstruct with certainty the paths they followed far south into the Sierra Madre of Mexico, from which Geronimo conducted a brilliant guerrilla campaign.
In March 1886, after having been pursued relentlessly by a quarter of the U.S. Army, Geronimo surrendered to General George Crook. By this time his band—there were about 35 warriors and 100 women and children with him—had split apart. Many of the Apaches remained in the Sierra Madre, where Mexican loggers would find their campfires and arrowheads well into the 1940s. Geronimo had a simple demand on behalf of those who stayed with him: if he surrendered, he said, then he would submit to imprisonment for a couple of years, as long as his people were allowed to return to Arizona.
President Grover Cleveland refused. The Chiricahuas were shipped off to Fort Marion, Florida, an island prison. Geronimo was not with them; with Naiche and a few others, he escaped to Mexico. The noose tightened, again with Mexican soldiers in pursuit on one side, Americans on the other. In a few months, on September 3, 1886, at a rugged place called Skeleton Canyon, Arizona, Geronimo made his final surrender—this time to General Nelson Miles, for Crook had been relieved from command, perhaps because he had publicly voiced sympathy for the Apaches.
Geronimo would never see his native land again, even though Miles promised him that on signing the peace treaty, “Your past deeds shall be wiped out . . . and you will start a new life.” He was imprisoned in northwestern Florida and put to hard labor for nearly eight years.
Then, in 1894, along with some 340 other Apache prisoners, he was sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he farmed and posed for tourist photographs, sitting at the steering wheel of a Cadillac sedan bedecked in a top hat or a Plains Indian headdress. He made an appearance in St. Louis honoring the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, selling bows and arrows and signing autograph books. He related his life story to a white biographer.
He traveled to Washington to appear in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905, and he submitted a request to the country’s new leader: “Arizona is my land, my home, my father’s land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among the mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct.” Roosevelt, it seems, did not reply.
When death came to Geronimo on February 17, 1909, it must have been a relief. And for a time, it appeared as if the Apaches would die with him. For the next decades, the residents of San Carlos raised hay and barley for the horses of the government that confined them, and they continued to die, now the victims of diseases like malaria and typhus and especially of hunger—for, as Crook’s fellow officer John Gregory Bourke thoughtfully remarked, “Our government had never been able to starve any of them until it had them placed on a reservation.”
The Apache people survived, against terrible odds. Long forgotten, Geronimo reemerged in history in World War II, when American paratroopers shouted his name while jumping into battle. Their cry made a fitting tribute to a great warrior—one who, it seems, would rather have been tending his garden in his native mountains than battling his way through a long and storied life.