by Geronimo
One can perfectly imagine without the aid of official documents how Crook’s immediate superior, Philip Sheridan, reacted to the loss of Geronimo. Crook resigned before he could be censured, and General Nelson A. Miles replaced him with orders to run the little band, already doing its full share of killing and looting, into the ground. A huge pursuit force was sent out with orders to kill or capture, preferably the former. This time there was to be no treating with the hostiles.
Miles gave effective command of this latest expedition to Captain H. W. Lawton of the Fourth Cavalry, who in turn wisely employed several old friends of Geronimo’s. At that it took almost five months before Geronimo came in near Fronteras in Sonora to ask for peace. If there were terms offered, they were at best ambiguous, and Geronimo was hardly in a position to bargain for more binding promises: the people had simply had it. They were tired, ragged, starving, and finally their will to resist had been broken, the inevitable end of any clash between a people with a huge numerical and technological superiority and a tiny tribe essentially pretechnological.
When Geronimo and Naiche surrendered for the last time on September 4, 1886, and a few days later were put aboard a train for Florida, they were headed for a life of that pauperdom General Sherman had envisioned, even if they did not know it. The other once-hostile Chiricahuas had already been put aboard another train for Florida, leaving behind them at the railroad station their personal belongings, their horses, and their dogs, some of these latter forlornly running after the departing train and going on for twenty miles down the tracks. The train, that symbol of progress that had cut its way westward, split the bison herd in two, and joined the coasts of a continent, was now bearing into alien grounds the last remnants of the human barriers who had once for a brief moment thought to oppose something they never really understood.
The Chiricahuas never got back home, despite promises that had been made them and despite years of pleas that became ever more pathetic as time and exile lengthened. (Probably the main reason Geronimo finally agreed to tell his story to Barrett was the opportunity it gave him to address the white man’s Great Father one more time on this subject.) After being imprisoned in Florida and Alabama, where more than a quarter of them died of tuberculosis, malaria, and simple despair, the remnant Apaches were granted a return to the West. Not to their homelands, though, as they had so long hoped, but to a military reservation, Fort Sill, Oklahoma. In the fall of 1894 they arrived there to begin all over again from scratch. Like so many of his people, Geronimo left behind the graves of family members, in his case a wife and two children.
Fort Sill was better than Fort Marion or Fort Pickens in Florida, and better too than Mount Vernon in Alabama that had seemed so oppressive to the prisoners with its thick forests and high humidity. Here at least they could see the sky and feel it, though initially the post commander had planned to pen them inside a high stockade until he was overruled by more humane superiors. Geronimo, however, remained a marked man, just as he had been since the mid-1870s, and none of his keepers at Fort Sill had anything good to say about him, even though he’d caused no trouble for a long time and had become one of the best of the Apache farmers. It was as if even so reduced—wearing his lumpy white man’s costume, toiling in his little melon patch—he was still a threat, his face and eyes yet untamed and offering a continual challenge. The soldiers on the post called him “Gerry,” because they knew he detested the name. But they all knew who he was and what.
Off the post the old man had become something of a celebrity, and he was quick to exploit his new status. Eastward in the country, where Indians were but a fast-fading memory, Geronimo could be regarded with a nostalgic thrill: a photogenic reminder of the wild days gone by and a trophy of white civilization’s triumph over a wilderness continent. In 1898 he was put on exhibit at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition at Omaha, and on the train trip there he cut the buttons from his coat and sold them at stops along the way. When the train moved on to its next stop he sewed on new buttons from a supply he had brought with him. In the summer of 1901 he was taken to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, and he was still there when President Mc-Kinley was fatally wounded. What he thought about this violence to the Great Father was not recorded, but he kept right on hawking the bows and arrows he had made, until he was taken back to Fort Sill. By the time he was taken to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, he had learned to print his name and would do so for money. The next year he rode in Teddy Roosevelt’s inaugural parade alongside Quanah Parker, another redskin whose name once had struck fear into frontier hearts, and American Horse, the Ogalala Lakota who’d survived the Ghost Dance hysteria and the ensuing massacre at Wounded Knee. When they clip-clopped down Pennsylvania Avenue past the reviewing stand, people in the dense crowd hollered, “Hooray for Geronimo!” and tossed their hats in the air.
V
Over the years since Geronimo died at Fort Sill in 1909, his name and that of the Apaches have lived on in an odd variety of ways. So too have the attitudes that pushed the Chiricahuas and most other tribes to the very brink of cultural extinction. World War II paratroopers hollered the old warrior’s name as they leapt from their planes over enemy territory, while kids leaping from the high board at public pools did the same. And, of course, Geronimo has been invoked in an apparently endless string of Hollywood oaters that, even when sympathetic (as nowadays they tend to be), trade on a name that still is equated with “savage.” The same holds true for the tribal name “Apache,” which has even crossed the Atlantic to enter the French language, where it denotes a Parisian thug.
As for the attitudes, they are to be most forcefully encountered west of the Mississippi, which was to have been Indian country forever. Out where most of the large reservations are located and where most of the public lands are too, there is still a steady, settled hatred of Native Americans that gathers in intensity the nearer you get to a reservation, and there is still a white desire to take what little land they have left. “My solution to the Indian problem?” a school official rhetorically asked on the Navajo reservation. “Turn ’em out. Make ’em Americans.” Spend a day and a night in the town nearest any reservation, and you will hear—and see—anti-Indian prejudice that has not lost that much of its vigor since Geronimo and his people were deported to the East.
The same sentiment that favors the termination of the tribes’ reservation status also applies to our public lands, our national parks, and our national forests, though here it is hard to see how even in private hands the lumber companies could get more out of them. Ever since the public domain came into existence, it has been the object of a steady, relentless attack by private interests in a campaign that tellingly resembles the one called for by that Arizona newspaper against the Chiricahuas back in 1876. In the West the federal government and its minions, the BLM, the Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Department of the Interior, are regularly stigmatized as the mindless enemies of free enterprise, and in an odd, ironic way they almost seem to have taken the place of the savages, threatening the livelihood of the hard-pressed settlers.
It is tempting to suggest that Geronimo and Sitting Bull and Red Cloud would understand this, would see it as another aspect of that same mind-set they faced back in the nineteenth century. And in fact, many of those in the West calling for the breakup of the reservations and the dispersal of the public lands, national parks, and forests proudly identify themselves as descendants of those who won the West. And now that almost all of the West is theirs, it proves not to be enough: there is always some more that might be had. Red Cloud might have come closest to articulating the situation when, after he knew further resistance was futile, he allegedly told a white delegation, “We didn’t need all this land, and neither did you.”
Frederick Turner
Santa Fe, New Mexico
A Note on the Text
GERONIMO told the story of his life in 1905-6 to Asa (Ace) Daklugie, the son of Juh (Who, Whoa), a hostile chief
who fought with Geronimo in the last campaigns and who drowned in a stream outside of Casas Grandes, Sonora, in 1886; he had gotten drunk on mescal during a peace mission. Daklugie, who had received some education at the Carlisle Indian School, translated the story for S. M. Barrett, a white who was then superintendent of education in nearby Lawton, Oklahoma.
During the storytelling sessions, Geronimo would range freely over the events of his life in a manner characteristic of many American aboriginal narratives. This manner consists of telling only that which seems to the teller important and telling it in the fashion and the order which seems to him appropriate. I emphasize this because it is clear that certain rearrangements of the materials would make a more coherent narrative. Yet this would not be the aboriginal style of extended narratives, and so it would be false to make such changes. I have resisted the temptation, and Geronimo’s narrative stands as Barrett published it. I have, however, deleted some of Barrett’s obviously superfluous material: in his Introduction, the narration of his dealings with the War Department; and in the body, his account of Apache-white warfare in the nineteenth century.
As to the accuracy of the whole, let us say to begin with that Geronimo, for reasons of his own, did not choose to tell Barrett everything. He was, after all, still a prisoner of war, and he was a bitter man who regretted to the end of his life that he had surrendered to Miles rather than fighting it out in the mountains. Considering his treatment in subsequent years, one cannot much blame him. At any rate, there are numerous gaps and omissions in his narrative, and wherever possible I have tried to supply the relevant factual data in footnotes followed by my initials (FT). In some cases, particularly those events before Geronimo came to the attention of whites, it is simply impossible to comment on what he says. I have left the majority of Barrett’s footnotes (followed by his initials) as they originally occurred, even though these are occasionally inaccurate.
Geronimo died February 17, 1909, in the military hospital at Fort Sill. Frank Lockwood reports that he interviewed an official of the Dutch Reformed Church who said that a few days before his death Geronimo had gone to nearby Lawton to sell one of the bows he was always making. There he got drunk with the money from the sale and, while returning “home,” fell out of his buggy and lay all night on the road in a freezing rain. He was discovered the next day and taken to the hospital, where he died. By his own reckoning, Geronimo was about eighty. If one accepts Debo’s earlier birth-date of 1823, he would have been eighty-six. As a young man he had a vision in which a spirit voice told him bullets could never kill him, and so it proved, though his body was riddled with more than half a dozen wounds. He died a prisoner of war.
Introductory
I first met Geronimo in the summer of 1904, when I acted for him as interpreter of English into Spanish, and vice versa, in selling a war bonnet. After that he always had a pleasant word for me when we met, but never entered into a general conversation with me until he learned that I had once been wounded by a Mexican. As soon as he was told of this, he came to see me and expressed freely his opinion of the average Mexican and his aversion to all Mexicans in general.
I invited him to visit me again, which he did, and upon his invitation, I visited him at his tepee in the Fort Sill Military reservation.
In the summer of 1905, Dr. J. M. Greenwood, superintendent of schools at Kansas City, Missouri, visited me, and I took him to see the chief. Geronimo was quite formal and reserved until Dr. Greenwood said, “I am a friend of General Howard, whom I have heard speak of you.” “Come,” said Geronimo, and led the way to a shade, had seats brought for us, put on his war bonnet, and served watermelon à l’Apache (cut in big chunks), while he talked freely and cheerfully. When we left he gave us a pressing invitation to visit him again.
In a few days the old chief came to see me and asked about “my father.” I said, “You mean the old gentleman from Kansas City—he has returned to his home.” “He is your father?” said Geronimo. “No,” I said, “my father died twenty-five years ago. Dr. Greenwood is only my friend.” After a moment’s silence the old Indian spoke again, this time in a tone of voice intended to carry conviction, or at least to allow no further discussion. “Your natural father is dead, this man has been your friend and adviser from youth. By adoption he is your father. Tell him he is welcome to come to my home at any time.” It was of no use to explain any more, for the old man had determined not to understand my relation to Dr. Greenwood except in accordance with Indian customs, and I let the matter drop.
In the latter part of that summer I asked the old chief to allow me to publish some of the things he had told me, but he objected, saying, however, that if I would pay him, and if the officers in charge did not object, he would tell me the whole story of his life.1 I immediately called at the fort (Fort Sill) and asked the officer in charge, Lieutenant Purington, for permission to write the life of Geronimo. I was promptly informed that the privilege would not be granted. Lieutenant Purington explained to me the many depredations committed by Geronimo and his warriors, and the enormous cost of subduing the Apaches, adding that the old Apache deserved to be hanged rather than spoiled by so much attention from civilians. A suggestion from me that our government had paid many soldiers and officers to go to Arizona and kill Geronimo and the Apaches, and that they did not seem to know how to do it, did not prove very gratifying to the pride of the regular army officer, and I decided to seek elsewhere for permission. Accordingly I wrote to President Roosevelt that here was an old Indian who had been held a prisoner of war for twenty years and had never been given a chance to tell his side of the story, and asked that Geronimo be granted permission to tell for publication, in his own way, the story of his life, and that he be guaranteed that the publication of his story would not affect unfavorably the Apache prisoners of war. By return mail I received word that the authority had been granted. In a few days I received word from Fort Sill that the President had ordered the officer in charge to grant permission as requested. An interview was requested that I might receive the instructions of the War Department. When I went to Fort Sill the officer in command handed me a brief, which constituted my instructions.
Early in October I secured the services of an educated Indian, Asa Daklugie, son of Whoa, chief of the Nedni Apaches, as interpreter, and the work of compiling the book began.
Geronimo refused to talk when a stenographer was present, or to wait for corrections or questions when telling the story. Each day he had in mind what he would tell and told it in a very clear, brief manner. He might prefer to talk at his own tepee, at Asa Daklugie’s house, in some mountain dell, or as he rode in a swinging gallop across the prairie; whenever his fancy led him, there he told whatever he wished to tell and no more.2 On the day that he first gave any portion of his autobiography he would not be questioned about any details, nor would he add another word, but simply said, “Write what I have spoken,” and left us to remember and write the story without one bit of assistance. He would agree, however, to come on another day to my study, or any place designated by me, and listen to the reproduction (in Apache) of what had been told, and at such times would answer all questions or add information wherever he could be convinced that it was necessary.
He soon became so tired of book making that he would have abandoned the task but for the fact that he had agreed to tell the complete story. When he once gives his word, nothing will turn him from fulfilling his promise. A very striking illustration of this was furnished by him early in January, 1906. He had agreed to come to my study on a certain date, but at the appointed hour the interpreter came alone, and said that Geronimo was very sick with cold and fever. He had come to tell me that we must appoint another date, as he feared the old warrior had an attack of pneumonia. It was a cold day and the interpreter drew a chair up to the grate to warm himself after the exposure of the long ride. Just as he was seating himself he looked out of the window, then rose quickly, and without speaking pointed to a rapidly moving object coming our way.
In a moment I recognized the old chief riding furiously (evidently trying to arrive as soon as the interpreter did), his horse flecked with foam and reeling from exhaustion. Dismounting he came in and said in a hoarse whisper, “I promised to come. I am here.”
I explained to him that I had not expected him to come on such a stormy day, and that in his physical condition he must not try to work. He stood for some time, and then without speaking left the room, remounted his tired pony, and with bowed head faced ten long miles of cold north wind—he had kept his promise.
When he had finished his story I submitted the manuscript to Major Charles W. Taylor, Eighteenth Cavalry, commandant, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, who gave me some valuable suggestions as to additional related information which I asked Geronimo to give. In most cases the old chief gave the desired information, but in some instances he refused, stating his reasons for so doing.
“How the Book Was Made.” From the left, S. M. Barrett, Geronimo, and interpreter Asa Daklugie, second cousin of Geronimo. (PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE ORIGINAL EDITION. COURTESY OF THE CENTER FOR SOUTHWEST RESEARCH, GENERAL LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO)
When the added information had been incorporated I submitted the manuscript to President Roosevelt, from whose letter I quote: “This is a very interesting volume which you have in manuscript, but I would advise that you disclaim responsibility in all cases where the reputation of an individual is assailed.”