Geronimo!

Geronimo married Cochise's daughter,  Dos-teh-seh, after his first wife, the love of his life, was murdered by the Mexicans.  (In all, Geronimo had nine wives, a number befitting a warrior of his fame.)

Born in what is now New Mexico in 1829 of the Bedonkohe band of Chiricahua Apaches, Geronimo was first known as Goyathlay, meaning "yawns a lot."  That might have described him as a baby, and even up to the murder of his mother, wife and three children, but soon after that he became known as Geronimo.

Where was Geronimo when his camp was being overrun and his family killed?  Well, there are two sides to every coin.  Geronimo was out raiding a Mexican town (some say trading...) 

After the murder of Geronimo's family, Geronimo went into the wilderness to grieve.  While there he heard a voice say, "No gun will ever kill you. I will take the bullets from the guns of the Mexicans … and I will guide your arrows." That's pretty powerful!


What does the name Geronimo mean?  One can only guess.  It's a handle that was given to him after a particularly bloody encounter with the Mexicans.  Seems the Mexicans were screaming something that sounded like "Geronimo" to everyone that heard it - but no one has yet to figure out what it means!  Some think maybe the Mexicans were shouting desperately for Saint Jerome to save them, crying "Jeronimo."  (That might be true, because Saint Jerome is remembered in the Catholic faith as having a very bad temper!)  That's plausible to me.  Some say the Mexicans were simply mispronouncing the Indian's given name, Goyathlay.  Some say there was a play back in Spain that was popular at the time, and the story resembled Geronimo's.  The name of the play's main character?  Geronimo.  Regardless, "Geronimo" is the name the world knows him by now.

Geronimo had a murderous hate for the Mexicans after the death of his first wife, but he was okay with Americans - in the beginning.  Of the first white men that he encountered he thought they were nothing like the rapacious Mexicans.  His father-in-law, Cochise, had negotiated a deal that would allow the Americans to ship mail and goods across their lands and for Americans in general to traverse the Apache lands unmolested.  Geronimo was okay with that.  But eventually the depravity of mankind showed itself thanks to the California gold rush miners of 1849.

Miners were hard men.  The miners who came west were hard men who knew no social boundaries and knew that there was no lawmen to prevent them from "entertaining" themselves or perpetrating horrors on whomever they pleased.  The Apache they considered an enemy, and the miners would poison their watering holes, kill the men and do unspeakable things (I mean really, really awful things that I can't even type into the blog!!) with the Apache women and children.  The Apache had a social structure that valued women and children; the miners had zero restraints on their behavior.

Geronimo was never made a chief.  He was always too angry, too impetuous - he was smart, but he lacked wisdom.  Two years after Cochise made peace with the Americans and agreed to settle on a reservation, Cochise died and there was no one to keep Geronimo in check.  But there also was no one to keep the Army in check either.  On instructions from Washington, D.C., the Reservation Cochise had negotiated for was closed, and the Apache were forced to move to a mosquito invested piece of trash land.  The land was so worthless they couldn't even begin to grow a crop - though the Apache were never farmers to begin with.

Geronimo left the reservation with a band of warriors and began raiding down into Mexico for things that they wanted or needed.  Their attacks weren't for land acquisition or retaliation.  Raiding was the Apache way of life, a way to get the things they needed, and if the other guy wasn't man enough to protect his own stuff, well, he didn't deserve to keep it anyway. 

Geronimo didn't care that the sheer number of Americans dwarfed the whole Apache tribe.  (There's that lack of wisdom again.)  Geronimo felt that as long as they had their secret stronghold in the Dragoon Mountains they would always be free to live the old ways.

Slowly but surely, as braves were killed during raids or skirmishes with the cavalry, Geronimo's band of warriors was growing smaller and smaller.  He knew he had to increase his numbers, and it dawned on him that he could simply go to the reservation and force all Apaches to join him in the stronghold or be killed on the spot.  In essence, he kidnapped his tribe back!  Not all of them were happy about the deal.  They were tired of running and being chased and losing loved ones to the battle.  Most just wanted to be left alone.

One Indian, not an Apache but someone that was swept up in Geronimo's wholesale kidnapping scheme, chose to sneak away and go back "home"  to the reservation.  When he got there, General Crook realized that he now had someone who could guide the Army back to the Stronghold.  At that, as they say, was that.

In 1886, Geronimo was off raiding in Mexico when he had a vision that the Stronghold was being overtaken.  He immediately headed back, and sure enough, Crook was waiting for him.  Geronimo was the very last Native American of any tribe to stop fighting against the spread of white settlers.


Over the next several years Geronimo and his last band of raiding warriors were bounced around, first to a prison in Florida, then a prison camp in Alabama, and then Fort Sill in Oklahoma. In total, the group spent 27 years as prisoners of war.  (I wonder what happened to those awful miners ???)

In 1905, at the age of 76, Geronimo was still trying to petition for his peoples return to the Dragoon Mountains, and he received a private audience with President Theodore Roosevelt.  He published an autobiography in 1905, too.  (How many Native Americans did that?  Actually, the first autobiography was published in 1829, A Son of the Forest, The Experiences of William Apes, A Native of the Forest Written by Himself.  Apes was a Pequot Indian born in 1797 in what is now Connecticut.)

True to the vision he had received as a young man, Geronimo did not die in battle.  In February, 1909, as he was traveling home one evening, his horse threw him and, after lying on the cold ground all night, he was found by a friend.  Six days later he passed on, but with his dying words you could tell he had never really stopped wanting revenge:  "I should never have surrendered," Geronimo, still a prisoner of war, said on his deathbed. "I should have fought until I was the last man alive."


Geronimo was a warrior's warrior, but he was a man driven more by revenge than principle.  I admire Cochise much, much more.

Geronimo was buried at Fort Sill, Oklahoma in the Apache Indian Prisoner of War Cemetery.  But that's not the end of the story....