by Jon E. Lewis
The stories made Geronimo uneasy. He also feared trouble from the reservation authorities for breaking the rule that prohibited the drinking of tiswin (corn beer), a pleasure the Apaches found unable to resist. Expecting the worst, Geronimo, Nana and 92 women and children, eight boys and 34 men departed for Mexico on the night of 17 May 1885. Before leaving, Geronimo cut the telegraph wire.
“THE APACHES ARE OUT!” warned the Arizonan newspapers two days later. Whites had little to fear, however, since Geronimo was trying to avoid any confrontation with them, and was hurrying his people towards Mexico, not even stopping to make camp until they reached the safety of the Sierra Madre.
General Crook was detailed by Washington to apprehend the fugitive Geronimo, with orders to take his unconditional surrender or kill him. To fulfil his mission, Crook was obliged to mount the heaviest campaign in the Apache wars up to that date, with more than 2,500 cavalry troopers and 200 Indian scouts. (Some of these were old Apache cohorts of Geronimo, including Chato; the Apaches, understanding the boredom of reservation life, did not usually blame People who scouted for the Whites.)
Throughout the winter of 1885–6 Crook hunted Geronimo in the Sierra Madre, but having been surprised there before the Apache leader was more cautious. In January, Crook’s force managed to discover and attack one renegade camp, although their quarry got away. But in March, Geronimo decided to surrender. Units of the Mexican Army, as well as the US cavalry, were combing the Sierra Madre for him. Caught between the Mexicans who only wanted to kill him and the Americans who might accept a surrender, Geronimo chose to meet with Crook at Cañon de los Embudos (Canyon of Tricksters), a few miles below the border.
When Crook arrived at the canyon, he was surprised to find neither Geronimo nor his braves looking particularly discouraged. “Although tired of the constant hounding of the campaign,” Crook later recalled, “they were in superb physical condition, armed to the teeth, fierce as so many tigers. Knowing what pitiless brutes they are themselves, they mistrust everyone else.”
He and Geronimo talked for two days, and Geronimo agreed once more to live on the reservation. “Do with me what you please,” he said. “Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you, and that is all.”
Despite his submission to Crook, within days Geronimo went fugitive. On the dark and rainy night of 28 March, as he and his surrendered Chiricahua band neared Fort Bowie, Geronimo, his young son Chappo, Naiche and 17 other warriors, and 18 women and children, slipped away from their escort. “I feared treachery,” he later said, “and decided to remain in Mexico.” A trader had got the hostiles drunk and filled them full of tales about how the local people were going to make “good injun” of them. It would be Geronimo’s last break-out.
As a result of Geronimo’s flight, the War Department severely reprimanded Crook for laxity and his over-indulgences towards the Indians. Crook resigned immediately, and was replaced by Brigadier-General Nelson A. Miles, whose orders were to “capture or destroy” Geronimo and his band of hostiles.
Miles managed to do neither, although his work amongst the Apaches would prove destructive enough. One of his first decisions was to transfer all the Mimbrenos and Chiricahuas on the reservations – including the scouts who had helped Crook – to Florida.
For the manhunt of Geronimo, Miles put 5,000 soldiers – a quarter of the entire army – in the field, and built 30 heliograph stations to flash messages from mountain to mountain, a system of communication well known to the Apaches, who had long before shifted from smoke signals to mirrors. Meanwhile, Geronimo raided almost at will. In April of 1886, he and his warriors crossed into Arizona and killed a rancher’s wife, child and an employee. A short while later, Geronimo’s war party killed two men outside Nogales, and then ambushed the cavalry sent in pursuit of them. Two troopers died. The Apaches suffered not a single loss. Geronimo would later say of this period, “We were reckless of our lives, because we felt that every man’s hand was against us. If we returned to the reservation we would be put in prison and killed; if we stayed in Mexico they could continue to send soldiers to fight us; so we gave no quarter to anyone and asked no favours.”
Throughout the summer of 1886 Miles pursued Geronimo and his 20 warriors, but to no avail. They seemed as elusive as ghosts. Finally, Miles decided to try another tack – he would negotiate with the enemy. His appointed emissary was Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, who had met Geronimo a number of times. Accompanying Gatewood were two scouts, Martine and Kayitah.
To make contact with the renegades, Gatewood headed across the border and wandered around, listening for word of the Apaches’ whereabouts. Eventually, he discovered that Geronimo was sending women into the small town of Fronteras to procure mescal. He trailed one such woman out of Fronteras and deep into the Sierra Madre. It was the end of August 1886.
Gatewood sent Geronimo a message via his scouts, and the two met near a bend in a river. The Apache laid down his rifle and walked over to Gatewood (“Big Nose”) shook his hand and asked how he was. But when they sat down to talk and smoke cigarettes in the Apache fashion, with tobacco rolled in oak leaves, Geronimo deliberately sat close enough to Gatewood for the lieutenant to feel his revolver.
Geronimo opened the council formally by announcing that he and his warriors had come to hear General Miles’s message. Gatewood gave it to them straight. “Surrender, and you will be sent to join the rest of your friends in Florida, there to await the decision of the President as to your final disposition. Accept these terms or fight it out to the bitter end.” At this Geronimo bristled, “Take us to the reservation [San Carlos], or fight!”
Gatewood then had to inform Geronimo that the reservation no longer existed, and that all the Chiricahuas had been removed to Florida, including members of Geronimo’s own family.
The Apache were devastated by the news. They withdrew for a private council, which in the Apache way was democratic, with everyone having a voice. Perico, Fun, Ahnandia – all of them Geronimo’s cousins – indicated that they wished to surrender so that they might see their families again. Geronimo still had a taste to fight on, but he was weakened by these defections. He stood for a few moments without speaking. At length he said, “I have been depending heavily on you three men. You have been great fighters in battle. If you are going to surrender, there is no use my going without you. I will give up with you.”
Geronimo, the last of the Apache leaders, had finally surrendered.
There was a formal cessation of hostilities, signed at Skeleton Canyon. Brigadier-General Miles was in attendance, getting his first look at Geronimo: “He was one of the brightest, most resolute, determined looking men that I have ever encountered. He had the clearest, sharpest dark eye I think I have ever seen, unless it was that of General Sherman when he was at the prime of life . . . Every movement indicated power, energy and determination. In everything he did, he had a purpose.”
The surrender ceremony was officially concluded on the afternoon of 4 September, and on the following day Miles flashed the news to the nation that Geronimo had finally given up arms. With a last glimpse at the Chiricahua mountains, Geronimo was taken to Fort Bowie, and from there transported, along with his hostile band, in a railway cattle car to San Antonio, Texas. From San Antonio Geronimo was shipped to Fort Pickens in Florida, a crumbling, abandoned fortification on Santa Rosa island, where he would start the first of his 23 years in captivity.
Learning to be White
Probably Geronimo was not surprised, after all these years of dealing with the White man, to find that he had been lied to. He did not, as General Miles had promised him, see his family on arrival in Florida, and instead spent two years in close confinement. To the great distress of Geronimo and the other male hostiles, the women and children of their band were taken from them and sent to Fort Marion, 300 miles across the state.
The warm and humid land of Florida, so unlike the dry country of Arizona and New Mexico, was not healthy for the Apaches. Eighteen di
ed of a disease diagnosed as consumption within only a matter of months. Their children were sent away to a school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where they were to be readied for integration into White man’s society. Our job, said the school’s founder, is to “kill the Indian and save the man.”
After two years of misery in Florida, the hostile warriors were transferred to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama. To their great joy, there they were finally reunited with their families, with Geronimo seeing an infant daughter Lenna for the first time. To those accustomed to seeing the Apache warlord as an “inhuman monster”, the care he showed for his daughter was striking. One visitor wrote: “I had luck today . . . Saw Geronimo . . . He is a terrible old villain, yet seemed quiet enough today nursing a baby.” Aside from family reunions, the pleasures to be found at Mount Vernon were few. The Apaches were put to work at hard labour. Their rations were pitiful. There were several outbreaks of tuberculosis and pneumonia. Many became depressed. Nineteen of the 352 Chiricahua prisoners died within eight months.
If it had not been for the efforts of a few White friends of the Apaches such as John Clum and George Crook, many more would have died at the barracks on the Mobile River. In August 1894 the War Department was finally persuaded to move the Apaches back West, although not as far west as their original stomping grounds. They were sent to Fort Sill, in southern Oklahoma, which their old enemies, the Comanches and Cheyenne, generously offered to share with them.
Here the White men set about turning the Apache into dark-skinned White men. They were given small log houses, made to learn handiwork, made to garden, growing melons and cantaloupes on small patches of land, and made to farm. At one point, Geronimo was forced to learn how to be a cowboy. The Apaches, in fact, did well at raising cattle, but only moderately well at the other trades.
Something at which Geronimo excelled in captivity was selling himself. The Apache had always had a hard head for business and was soon making and purveying Geronimo souvenirs for the steady stream of visitors who dropped by to view him. One such visitor wrote:
Geronimo has an eye to thrift and can drive a sharp bargain with his bows and arrows, and quivers and canes, and other work, in which he is skillful. He prides himself upon his autograph, written thus, GERONIMO, which he affixes to what he sells, usually asking an extra price for it. He had a curious headdress, which he called . . . his war bonnet . . . He seemed to value this bonnet highly, but finally in his need or greed for money, offered it for sale at $25.
In 1898, Geronimo met with General Miles at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, where the old warrior was the prime exhibit. He asked the former clerk to use his influence to allow him to return to Arizona.
“The acorns and piñon nuts, the quail and the wild turkey, the giant cactus and the palo verdes – they all miss me,” said Geronimo.
“A very beautiful thought, Geronimo,” laughed Miles. “Quite poetic. But the men and women who live in Arizona, they do not miss you. Folks in Arizona sleep now at night. They have no fear that Geronimo will come and kill them. The acorns and the piñon nuts will have to get along as best they can without you.”
Later that year Miles visited Geronimo at Fort Sill. The Army man again told Geronimo that he would not be allowed home. However, he did agree to Geronimo’s request that he might be excused from forced labour because of his age. He was 69 years old.
In 1905 Geronimo was taken to Washington to ride in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade. People bought his autographs for 25 cents as quickly as he could write them. Geronimo stole the show. Only the president himself attracted more attention.
When the parade was over, Geronimo was able to meet with Roosevelt. He took advantage of the occasion to plead for a return to Arizona:
Great Father, other Indians have homes where they can live and be happy. I and my people have no homes. The place where we are kept is bad for us . . . We are sick there and we die. White men are in the country that was my home. I pray you to tell them to go away and let my people go there and be happy.
Great Father, my hands are tied as with a rope. My heart is no longer bad. I will tell my people to obey no chief but the Great White Chief. I pray you to cut the ropes and make me free. Let me die in my own country, an old man who has been punished enough.
Roosevelt was sympathetic, but his reply was essentially the same as Miles’s. The people of Arizona would not stand for it. He told Geronimo, “I am sorry, and have no feeling against you.”
In the autumn of the same year, Mr S. M. Barrett, the White Superintendent of Education in Lawton, Oklahoma, secured permission from Roosevelt to interview Geronimo about his life. Geronimo related the tale in the Apache language to Asa Daklugie, the son of Juh, who translated it into English for Barrett to write down. More than anything in his old age Geronimo wanted to be allowed to return to the land of the Chiricahuas, and in telling his life story he politically left out most of his dealings with Americans. The book, Geronimo’s Story of His Life, was dedicated to President Roosevelt.
By now Geronimo’s years were piling up, and his rugged squat body showing signs of wear. Yet it took an accident to kill him. On a cold night in February 1909 he fell, drunk, off his horse and lay in a freezing creek all night. He developed severe pneumonia. He fought the illness for seven days, but it eventually overwhelmed him. Geronimo died at 6.15 in the morning of 17 February, and was buried the following day in Fort Sill’s cemetery. He was about 80 years old, and still technically a prisoner of war.
He was never to realize his dream of returning to Arizona. But he was always proud that to finally subdue him and his band of 37 Chiricahua Apache it had taken 5,000 White soldiers.
Ghost Dancers
The whole world is coming,
A nation is coming.
The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe.
Over the whole earth they are coming;
The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming,
The Crow has brought the message to the tribe.
Ghost Dance Song
With the final capture of Geronimo in 1886 all great chiefs were within the reservations. Some, like Quanah Parker of the Quahadi Comanche, took up White ways, trying to do their best for their people by beating the Americans at their own games, like politics, real estate deals and money-making. Occasionally they won. Usually they lost. Every year the reservations got smaller, as did government allotments of beef and clothing. In 1889 drought came to the West; there was starvation on the reservations, and when measles struck the children they were too weak to resist.
It was a time for hope, a time to dream. A time to remember the buffalo which used to coat the plains, the chokecherries which used to hang by the mouthwatering bunch, and the freedom to roam over the range.
There were many shaman dreamers, but the most powerful was the Paiute Wovoka. Just before dawn on New Year’s Day, 1889, far out in remote Nevada, the 34-year-old Wovoka fell ill. In his delirium he dreamed he visited the Great Spirit in heaven. There, he was told that a time was coming when the buffalo would once again fill the plains and dead tribesmen would be restored to their families. If the Indians refrained from violence, and if they were virtuous and performed the proper ritual dance – the Ghost Dance – they could hasten the coming of the new world, which would cover the old, and push the White men into the sea.
Some Indians, like the Kiowa and Comanche, were sceptical. But among the former tribes of the northern plains the Ghost Dance religion took a powerful hold. It spread wildly and rapidly across the reservations, from the Arapaho, to the Cheyenne, to the Wichita. In the winter of early 1890, a holy man of the Teton Sioux, Kicking Bear, brought the new gospel to Dakota.
The Sioux began Ghost Dancing in the spring, in secret ceremonies away from White Eyes. Adapting Wovoka’s original ceremony to the Sioux Sun Dance, they danced around a sacred tree. At Kicking Bear’s behest, the dancers also wore “ghost shirts” painted with magical symbols to keep away White bullets.
/> By mid-autumn of 1890, the Sioux were in something approaching a religious frenzy. Thousands of Sioux were now participating in the Ghost Dances, shuffling around in great circles, which speeded up until the exhausted dancers reached a state of delirious ecstasy where they saw the dead “come to life”. Normal life on the reservations all but stopped. Even the schools were emptied, as the Indians spent all day dancing and chanting.
In October, Kicking Bear was invited by Sitting Bull to come to his isolated reservation at Standing Rock and teach the Huncpapa Sioux the Ghost Dance.
Sitting Bull’s personal attitude to the Ghost Dance was one of disbelief. Yet, he considered that it would give succour to his people, and began to supervise personally the Huncpapa’s dances.
The news that Sitting Bull, the great Sioux war leader and patriot, was Ghost Dancing caused White officials to panic. They already considered the situation out of control; with Sitting Bull involved they thought it might turn into an uprising.
On 17 November General Nelson Miles ordered troops to the Sioux reservations, including the all-Black 9th Cavalry and the late Custer’s regiment, the 7th Cavalry. By December a third of the armed forces of the US was on alert. The former Indian agent Valentine McGillycuddy was dispatched by Washington to assess the gravity of the situation on the Sioux reservations. He went and saw, and counselled patience. “I should let the dance continue,” he wrote to Washington. “The coming of the troops has frightened the Indians . . . . If the troops remain, trouble is sure to come.”
Unfortunately, the government did not listen to McGillycuddy. Instead they listened to James McLaughlin, head of the Standing Rock Agency, who urged that Sitting Bull was dangerous and should be arrested. The government acceded, and McLaughlin sent 43 Sioux policemen up to Sitting Bull’s cabins on the banks of the Grand River.
