NOT UNTIL THE AGE of fifty-three did Geronimo come to the attention of the American people. For thirty years he had raided and made war on Mexicans, whom he detested, and occasionally raided in the American Southwest. Apache raids typically ranged from simply stealing stock and other plunder to killing and mutilating or capturing victims. Geronimo practiced all forms of raiding and accumulated a record of brutality that matched that of any of his comrades.
In 1876 Geronimo grew careless and boldly demanded government rations from the agent at the Ojo Caliente agency in New Mexico. He used this place as a base for raids into Arizona while insisting on rations for the time he had been absent. A government agent from Arizona’s White Mountain Reservation caught up with him, tricked him into opening himself to seizure by Apache police, took him, shackled in irons, to the White Mountain Reservation, and threw him in the jailhouse, still shackled. Here he endured a humiliating four-month ordeal until released. Here he began his checkered career as a reservation Apache.
A muscular, squat, fierce-looking man, Geronimo had mastered the skills of an Apache fighting man. He possessed the strength and endurance to travel long distances rapidly, even without food or water. He came to know every feature of the Apache landscape—mountains, canyons, deserts, water holes, natural food sources, and above all the virtually inaccessible canyons and heights of Mexico’s Sierra Madre. He could “read” signs on the landscape from a broken twig to an upturned stone, and he could travel without leaving his own trail. Bow and arrow, knife, lance, rifle, and pistol were his weapons, and he used them to great effect.
Geronimo was not a chief. Only about thirty Apaches counted him their leader, but a superb leader he was in raid and war. Therefore, he frequently led larger numbers than his own following. On the reservation, he aroused contradictory opinions. “Thoroughly vicious, intractable, and treacherous,” pronounced one army officer. “Schemer and liar,” declared another. But still another found him “friendly and good natured.” His own Chiricahua tribe had mixed feelings, but they stood in awe of one attribute that either intimidated or impressed them: the Apache cultural concept of “Power.” Geronimo possessed, or was thought to possess, this surreal potency that could be applied for harm or help. His Power included high achievement as a shaman, or medicine man, with healing qualities. Even so, some who knew him well agreed with the harsher army officers. “I have known Geronimo all my life up to his death and have never known anything good about him,” said one Apache.
The government reservation provided a comfortable environment for Geronimo only in one sense: government rations, and those were often inadequate or not forthcoming at all. His true home lay in both southern New Mexico and Arizona, but more often he stayed in the peaks, gorges, canyons, and ridges of the Sierra Madre of Mexico. There he could hide from Mexican or American soldiers and launch raids against ranchers, villagers, and travelers in both Chihuahua and Sonora. Three times after 1876 Geronimo broke free of the reservation, eluded the soldiers who took his trail, and returned to the Sierra Madre.
Illustrating Geronimo’s qualities of leadership in war was an ambush he and his fellow leader Juh arranged in Chihuahua. Juan Mata Ortíz had led a massacre of Apaches who had come to negotiate. In Apache culture, such an act demanded revenge. Mata Ortíz kept a ranch near Galeana. Geronimo and Juh led about 130 fighting men from their Sierra Madre sanctuary down to Galeana and struck Mata Ortíz’s ranch. On November 14, 1882, Ortiz collected a force of twenty-two citizens and led them to retaliate. The Chiricahuas had prepared an ambush in Chocolate Pass. Mata Ortiz avoided the trap and had his men dig in on a high hill. Geronimo and Juh gathered their men and attacked up the slope against a heavy fire and overwhelmed the enemy in hand-to-hand fighting. Mata Ortíz and all but one of his men perished. As the lone survivor galloped away on a horse, Geronimo shouted to let him go. He would bring more Mexicans to be slaughtered.
Geronimo demonstrated his raiding technique on April 27, 1886. It occurred during his last raid into Arizona. He led a small party of raiders down the Santa Cruz River and, ten miles north of the border, rode into Hell’s Gate Canyon. Here they discovered a ranch house. Approaching, one man climbed a rail fence around a corral and sat. Dogs began barking. A young girl came out to investigate, then ran back inside. A woman rushed out, a baby in her arms. The Apache shot her, picked up her baby, and dashed the baby’s head against an adobe wall. Fifteen raiders entered the house and ransacked it. They discovered a young girl, whom Geronimo saved and took captive. From a ridge the Apaches spotted two men working with cattle. They had heard the shots and mounted. Bullets killed one and downed the other’s horse, throwing him to the ground and knocking him senseless. Apaches roused him with rifle butts, stripped off his boots and clothing, and took him before Geronimo. For an unknown reason, Geronimo told the man he was free to go and then led the raiders away. The man, Artisan Peck, walked back to his house and saw what had been done to his wife and child and his home. He had seen his wife’s niece, a captive, mounted behind Geronimo’s son Chappo.
The raiding party killed men both before and after this raid but quickly returned to Mexico when US cavalry got on their trail. The raid exemplified only one of hundreds Geronimo had led both in Mexico and the American Southwest for thirty years.
Geronimo’s career in raid and war and on the reservation ended on September 3, 1886.
While Geronimo’s legacy in history is undying, he emerges essentially as a not very likable man—neither the “thug” of some accounts nor the great leader fighting to save his homeland of other narratives. The latter image, encompassing all American Indians, seized the American imagination in the late twentieth century and the early twenty-first. It still prevails, largely the result of the remarkable success of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Vine DeLoria’s Custer Died for Your Sins. Not only motion pictures but popular and some scholarly literature, and the Indians themselves, embraced the new vision, which was a return to the “Noble Savage” era of American history. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Quanah Parker, Satanta, Chief Joseph, Tecumseh, Pontiac, and of course Geronimo crowd the heroic mold. Indians were heroes, culturally pure innocent victims of American expansion. For Geronimo, my book rejects both extremes—thug and hero—and reveals that, within the constraints of Apache culture, he was a human being with many strengths and many flaws.
The public, however, continues to look on Geronimo as an Apache leader fighting to save his homeland from takeover by the westward-moving white people. The image persists even though demonstrably untrue. Geronimo and his fellow leaders passed much of their adult lives in Mexico, raiding and plundering Mexicans or eluding Mexican and American military units trying to catch them. Mexico was not their homeland. The Chiricahua tribe, to which Geronimo belonged, could lay claim to southern New Mexico and Arizona, and a band of the tribe to a slice of northern Mexico. Here they rarely fought the army or the more efficient Apache scouts but here, too, either raided and plundered or resided on a reservation. None of this remotely resembles fighting for their homeland.
So deeply entrenched is the image of hero fighting for his homeland that this book, though strongly revisionist, is unlikely to purge it from the collective memory. The legendary Geronimo promises to live on in the American mind because it gives comfort to a public, both white and Indian, that for almost half a century has been full of remorse over the fate of the victims of American expansion.