Lieutenant Capron’s Apache company had no military duties. They guarded the Chiricahua camp and, like their people, worked at building their homes and tilling their gardens. The policy of Indians as soldiers had come under increasing scrutiny, and the opinions of high army officers spelled its doom. In July 1895, Company I of the Twelfth Infantry was mustered out of the service and its members integrated into Troop L, Seventh Cavalry, commanded by Captain Scott at Fort Sill. This troop, composed of Kiowas and Comanches, had performed well under the sure hand of its captain, and the well-trained Apaches made it even better. The experiment ended on May 31, 1897, as Troop L paraded for the last time and turned in its equipment, the last Indian unit mustered out of the army. Many of the Apache soldiers formed a scout unit to keep order in the Chiricahua villages near the fort. All, though honorably discharged from the army, lived as prisoners of war.8
As the Chiricahuas went about their chores of building, gardening, and herding cattle, they felt secure in the repeated promises that they now occupied the reservation General Miles had promised them in 1886. Unknown to them, however, a combination of events unfolded that once again portended betrayal. On the one hand, reflecting the fervent demand of the politically powerful Indian rights organizations, the Dawes Act of 1887 provided for allotment of land in severalty to the Indians. On the other, the demand of land-hungry whites led to efforts to buy all “surplus” reservation land not needed for allotments—and to buy before allotments began.
The Kiowa-Comanche Reservation fell victim to a fraudulent agreement in 1892: the Jerome Commission had failed to secure the vote of three-fourths of adult males as required by the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867. The army intended, when it ultimately abandoned Fort Sill, that the Kiowas and Comanches would be paid for the military reservation and it would become the Chiricahua Reservation. The fort embraced only enough land for allotments of eighty acres. So in 1896 Captain Scott, joined by the acting agent of the Kiowas and Comanches, Captain Frank D. Baldwin, negotiated with the two tribes for the needed additional acreage. These Indians trusted Captain Scott and would do anything he advised: they agreed. The Chiricahua Reservation appeared secure.9
Geronimo toiled seemingly content in his garden. He delighted in the crops of melons and sweet corn that he grew and sold to the army, along with sweet potatoes and other vegetables. Sam Kenoi remembered Geronimo’s pride in his garden. “Every now and then,” said Kenoi, “he’d take a watermelon, cut it up under his arbor, and say, ‘Come on boys.’ He liked watermelon pretty well himself. He used to tell the boys, ‘Don’t smoke until you have caught a coyote on foot boys. That’s an old Apache custom.’ “10
Seventy-one when he arrived at Fort Sill, Geronimo was regarded by officers as too old and worn-out to perform the duties of scout, or leader of his village. He loved his uniform and proudly wore it. He was hardly worn-out, as his future years demonstrated. His name still roused curiosity throughout the nation, although at Fort Sill the mobs such as in Florida and Alabama could not reach him. Special visitors, such as artist E. A. Burbank and Indians Rights officer Francis Leupp (a future commissioner of Indian affairs) readily gained military permission.
Burbank’s visit, in 1897, belied the common belief. Geronimo “was short, but well built and muscular. His keen, shrewd face was deeply furrowed with strong lines. His small black eyes were watery, but in them there burned a fierce light. It was a wonderful study—that face, so gnarled and furrowed”—so wonderful, in fact, that Burbank won the permission of Geronimo and Captain Scott to paint it. “As we worked day after day, my idea of Geronimo, the Apache, changed. I became so attracted to the old Indian that eventually I painted seven portraits of him.” He also painted Naiche and other Chiricahuas.11
Leupp toured the Chiricahua villages in 1897 and described them in detail. He had just come from Arizona, where everyone told him that Geronimo was the “Apache arch-fiend.” If he ever set foot in the territory, he would be hanged without the formality of a trial. Such talk, ten years after Geronimo left Arizona, impressed Leupp. “But to pass up into Oklahoma and find this same Geronimo putting in his honest eight hours of work daily as a farmer in the fields, and at intervals donning his uniform as a United States scout and presenting himself with the other scouts for inspection,” was even more impressive.12
Soon, however, Geronimo was to discover that the attitudes of Arizonans had not entirely died out among the melon fields of Fort Sill. In February 1898 newspapers carried the story of the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana Harbor. The Chiricahuas learned of the coming war, and a number of the former soldiers came to Lieutenant Capron (who had succeeded Captain Scott in January 1898) and told him they would like to go with him and whip the Spaniards.13
In mid-April 1898, as the Apaches watched the Fort Sill garrison march away to Rush Springs to board a train for the war zone, Geronimo and other Apaches gathered around a fire and joked about how easy it would be, with the soldiers all gone, to make a break for Arizona. A young girl, graduate of Carlisle who had forgotten some of her native language, took alarm. She worked as a servant for one of the officers at the fort and hastened to alert the women that Geronimo and the others were holding war dances and plotting an uprising. At the Apache villages, the people probably failed to note the frantic scampering of the women around the fort but took note of the arrival of cavalry units.
The captain of one of the cavalry troops summoned Geronimo, Naiche, and other headmen to the fort and questioned them. Expressing sadness at being mistrusted, the Apaches declared their innocence; the tale lacked any truth. Geronimo spoke up: “I am a U.S. soldier. I wear the uniform, and it makes my heart sore to be thus suspected.” And suspected they were for a week or more.14
Geronimo would have been amused had he known what a stir, approaching panic, the rumor of an impending uprising caused in the army—from department commanders to the secretary of war. Even before Lieutenant Colonel Edgar R. Kellogg marched his battalion of the Tenth Infantry out of Fort Sill on April 19, the army’s commanding general, Major General Nelson A. Miles, worried enough to order a troop of the Seventh Cavalry to hasten by rail to the fort. As Kellogg waited for transportation at Rush Springs, a telegram and a galloping courier reached him with word of the threatened outbreak. He sent Captain William C. Brown and his troop of the First Cavalry galloping back to Fort Sill to quell the uprising. After interviewing Geronimo and Naiche, and with the impending arrival of the troop of the Seventh Cavalry, Brown hastened back to Rush Springs to rejoin Kellogg. Even then, generals believed that Fort Sill needed more cavalry to stand guard over the Apaches. Within a week, all was calm at Fort Sill.15
The furor over a Chiricahua outbreak, which alarmed the people of the Southwest as well as the army high command, demonstrated that Geronimo, despite his seventy-five years, still aroused fear as well as public notoriety.
TWENTY-EIGHT
GERONIMO’S LAST YEARS
FORT SILL HAD DENIED Geronimo the chance to pose before the public and sell his craftwork, as he had done at Mount Vernon. That changed only a few weeks after the scare of an Apache uprising swept Fort Sill as the garrison marched off for the Spanish American War. The Trans-Mississippi International Exposition of 1898 opened in Omaha, Nebraska. A major segment of the exposition was the “Indian Congress,” which drew five hundred Indians from thirty-five tribes and opened in August. Over the objections of their overseer, Lieutenant Francis H. Beach, Geronimo and Naiche headed a Chiricahua delegation of twenty-two from Fort Sill. They lived in tents, guarded by soldiers since they were still prisoners of war, displayed themselves to the public, and sold their craftwork to eager fairgoers. Most of the fair attendees demanded Indians in their native state, contrary to the attitude of those who pushed the “civilization” agenda. But the fair managers ensured that all the tribes engaged in war dances, ceremonials, and sham battles. Geronimo was the star attraction. “Whenever he appears in the procession,” noted a reporter, “the beholders cheer him w
ildly.”1
Geronimo rewarded another reporter with an account of the past and future as he conceived it. “For years I fought the white man,” he began,
thinking that with my few braves I could kill them all and that we would again have the land that our Great Father [Spirit] gave us and which he covered with game. I thought the Great Spirit would be with us, and after we had killed the whites then the buffalo, deer, and antelope would come back. After I fought and lost and after I traveled over the country in which the white man lives and saw his cities and the work that he had done, my heart was ready to burst. I knew that the race of the Indian was run.
The newsman then asked about the future. “The sun rises and shines for a time,” Geronimo replied, “and then it goes down, sinking out of sight and is lost. So it will be with the Indians.”2
The Omaha exposition launched Geronimo to new heights of fame. For the rest of his life, he was in constant demand as an attraction at fairs large and small.
The two largest were the Pan American Exposition at Buffalo, New York, in 1901, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at Saint Louis in 1904. At both, Geronimo played his usual role, dressed in his traditional bonnet and a mix of civilian and Apache clothing. He posed for photographs and sold his craftwork. At Buffalo the assassination of President William McKinley overshadowed Geronimo and other celebrities. Even so, at seventy-eight and still under guard, Geronimo participated in mock skirmishes between Indians and cavalry. The New York Times commented that the Buffalo exposition presented an imposing array of Indian chieftains, “but among them all will hardly be found a more imposing figure than that of old GERONIMO.”3
At the exposition in Saint Louis in 1904, Geronimo played his customary role. There, however, he was introduced to a feature of the Palace of Agriculture—the motion picture. With 150 other Indians, Geronimo was escorted into the Nebraska Theater and shown a film promoting agriculture. “While interested in the general farm scenes that show planting, cultivation and harvesting, the cattle scenes and especially those depicting the wild life on the range are most to his liking.” This experience cultivated in Geronimo a “special fondness for the Nebraska Theater.”4
Saint Louis also provided an opportunity for Geronimo to demonstrate his Power as a medicine man and healer. In a contest between Apaches and whites over whose medicine was more effective, Geronimo performed many of the incantations and gyrations that formed part of his healing ceremony. When the hats were passed, however, the whites had more dimes and pennies than the Apaches.5
Dimes and pennies had nothing to do with healing powers. Although Geronimo had once turned to an army doctor to treat him for incipient syphilis, he never in his own mind and the eyes of his people lost his healing Power. A better example of a “contest” had taken place in 1901 in the army hospital at Fort Sill. Geronimo took his daughter Eva to the hospital with a large boil on the back of her neck. Geronimo told the doctor that the boil should be opened. The doctor said that it should not. When the doctor turned his back, Geronimo pulled out his jackknife and lanced the boil. For this offense he was thrown in the guardhouse for three days. But the boil speedily healed. “Among the Apaches Geronimo is called an excellent doctor,” concluded this account, “and they will have no other.”6
The Saint Louis exposition provided the stepping-stone to Geronimo’s next triumph as a celebrity. The assassination of President William McKinley elevated to the presidency Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. He won the election of 1904, and he ensured that his inauguration would showcase American Indians.
As the parade of marching bands, West Point cadets, and army regiments made their way past the presidential reviewing stand on March 4, 1905, the hyperactive president applauded, waved his hat, and vigorously pumped his arms. Then suddenly, around the corner, came a spectacle that brought the people in the stand to their feet—a rank of six mounted Indian chiefs riding side by side in front of the next band. They represented six tribes: Ute, Comanche, Blackfeet, two tribes of Lakota Sioux, and the Chiricahua Apaches. Next to Geronimo rode his neighbor, the Comanche chief Quanah Parker. Geronimo stood out among the six because the others sported colorful feather bonnets and traditional native paint and garb. Geronimo wore a broad-brimmed hat and dark clothing with no ornamentation. White horses flanked Geronimo’s dark horse. The chiefs created a sensation, eclipsing the intended symbolism of a formation of 350 uniformed Carlisle students led by a marching band in which Colonel Richard H. Pratt took inordinate pride.7
As a newsman noted, the Indians seemed to interest the president more than any other parade feature except the cowboys. “When old Geronimo, as if carried away by the cheers which he and his companions received, brandished his spear and gave a wild whoop, the President acknowledged it by waving his hat.”8
For Geronimo, the inauguration was not all triumph. On March 9, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis E. Leupp escorted Geronimo and the other chiefs into the president’s office in the White House. After exchanging greetings, a tearful Geronimo begged President Roosevelt to “take the ropes from the hands” of his people. “The ropes have been on my hands for many years and we want to go back to our home in Arizona.”
Through the interpreter, the president replied: “When you lived in Arizona you had a bad heart and killed many of my people. I have appointed Mr. Leupp the Indian Commissioner to watch you. I cannot grant the request you make for yet awhile. We will have to wait and see how you act.”
As the group left the president’s office, Geronimo told Commissioner Leupp he wanted to go back “and speak again to the father.” Leupp denied the request and said that anything further Geronimo had to say would have to be submitted in writing.9
Geronimo returned home more bitter than elated. But his appearance in the inaugural parade may be considered his “Last Hurrah.”
As Geronimo traveled about the country appearing at local celebrations, fairs, and other public events, the relentless opening of Indian reservations to white settlement continued. The Chiricahuas had little to worry about as the Territory of Oklahoma took shape after repeated land rushes beginning in 1889. The Fort Sill Military Reservation would become the Chiricahua Indian Reservation once the army abandoned the fort. In 1901, as Geronimo appeared at the Buffalo exposition, the sale by lottery of “surplus” lands of the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation added still another chunk of Indian land to the Territory of Oklahoma. It also produced the seat of Comanche County, Lawton, only five miles from Fort Sill. The white people who for seven years had been kept distant from the Chiricahuas now surrounded them. The Apaches had flourished under the care of the army and the fruits of their own labor. Their children attended an Indian school at Anadarko, thirty miles distant. Their health had recovered from the torments of Alabama. Dutch Reformed missionaries ministered to the Chiricahuas and converted some. Except for an occasional soldier bootlegging whiskey, the Indians had been relatively free of the old scourge of drunkenness. Now they could easily obtain whiskey, and they did.10
The Dutch Reformed missionaries made a special effort to convert Geronimo. Late in 1902 two missionaries invited him to attend a service. Usen’s “religion” was good enough for him, but he went. After a sermon on the atonement, Geronimo declared, “The Jesus Road is best and I would like my people to travel it. Now we begin to think the Christian white people love us.” Throughout his life Geronimo had frequently been impulsive, and for such a sudden transformation of belief, impulse seems to have governed.
Impulse governed for a year as Geronimo tried to make up his mind: cling to the old beliefs or embrace Christianity. In 1903, limping from a fall from his horse, he made his way into the church to listen to a sermon on Jesus. Geronimo then begged the pastors to give him a new heart. They did; they baptized him into the Dutch Reformed Church.
Geronimo influenced many of his people to take the Jesus Road, including Naiche. After Geronimo’s baptism, he faithfully attended the weekly sermons. He asked the pastors to pray for him, and he t
old them, “You may hear of my doing wrong, but my heart is right.”
Knowledge of Geronimo’s drinking and gambling disturbed the church officials. He is said to have been “excommunicated” for his habits, but church records reveal nothing of the kind. He may have been censured or suspended for a time, and at least one missionary at Fort Sill declared it a mistake ever to have admitted him to membership.
The most plausible explanation of Geronimo’s spiritual beliefs in his last years is a conflict between Usen and Jesus. Jesus may not have lost entirely, but despite periodic apostasy throughout Geronimo’s life, Usen always prevailed.11
In the summer of 1904, Geronimo became acquainted with S. M. Barrett, the superintendent of schools in nearby Lawton. Geronimo needed an interpreter to help him sell a bonnet, Barrett translating between English and Spanish. When Barrett told Geronimo he had once been wounded by a Mexican, all the old hatred rose to the surface and cemented a friendship between the two. Each visited the other in their homes. Geronimo related to Barrett much of his life story as well as the history of the Chiricahuas. In the summer of 1905, shortly after Geronimo’s return from the inauguration ceremony in Washington, Barrett asked Geronimo’s permission to publish some of what the old man had told him. Geronimo at first refused, but ever on the alert for ways to make money, he said that if the army officer in charge consented he would tell the story of his life.
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