In the summer of 1886, the United States Army deployed 5,000 troops—one quarter of its entire standing force—across Southern Arizona and Northern Mexico to hunt down a single Apache leader. Mirror stations flashed signals between mountain peaks, cavalry watched every water hole, infantry sealed every pass, and 3,000 Mexican soldiers pressed from the south. Supply lines were cut, food caches destroyed, and water sources poisoned. The target of this massive manhunt was a man called Geronimo.
When he finally came in from the mountains, he had with him just 18 warriors, 13 women, and six children, two of them infants. For 18 months, 8,000 soldiers across two countries had been unable to capture these 37 people in torn clothing. Geronimo was not his birth name. He was born Goyahkla in 1829 in the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apache, in what is now New Mexico.
He grew up as a warrior, husband, and father, with a wife named Alope, three children, and his mother. On March 5, 1851, while Goyahkla and the Apache men were trading in the town of Janos, Colonel Jose Maria Carrasco and 400 Mexican soldiers attacked the camp they had left behind. When Goyahkla returned in the dark, he found his mother, his wife, and his three children dead and scalped where they lay. He said afterward, “I had lost all.
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He burned their possessions, including the decorations Alope had made for their home and the playthings of his children. Standing in the ashes of his own life, he made a decision that reshaped the frontier. During a later battle at Arispe, Mexican soldiers, seeing him refuse to fall and drive through their lines with seemingly unstoppable ferocity, cried out to Saint Jerome for protection. In Spanish, Jerome is Geronimo.
The name stuck, and for 35 years, it became the most feared word on the frontier. By the summer of 1886, the army had been chasing Geronimo’s shrinking band for over a year. General George Crook had tried twice and failed twice, once watching Geronimo agree to surrender and then slip back into Mexico in the dark after being warned that the terms would not be honored. Crook resigned.
General Nelson Miles took command on April 11, 1886, with orders to end the campaign by whatever means required. Miles sent 5,000 men, built the mirror system, and cut every supply line he could find. None of it located Geronimo. On July 13, 1886, Miles gave a different order to a different kind of man.
Lieutenant Charles Gatewood, 33 years old and suffering from rheumatism, was ordered into the Sierra Madre of northern Mexico with five men, two Apache scouts, and no guarantee of return. Gatewood spoke the Apache language and had spent years among the Chiricahua, earning a reputation as a man whose word held. Where 8,000 soldiers had failed, Miles sent one trusted lieutenant. On August 25, 1886, Gatewood found Geronimo at a bend in the Bavispe River in the Terrace Mountains of Mexico.
He removed his weapons, sat down, and passed out tobacco and paper. The men rolled cigarettes and smoked in silence before speaking. Gatewood laid out the situation plainly. The rest of the Chiricahua had already been taken, the reservation they had known was gone, and there was nowhere left to go where the army would not eventually find them.
Geronimo listened and said, “If you will give your word that we can meet General Miles with safety, we will go to him and accept his terms. We will throw ourselves on his mercy, something we have never done before. ”
They broke camp on August 28 and moved north. Gatewood marched with them and slept in their camp.
When Lieutenant Abiel Smith tried to disarm the Apache on the trail with his own soldiers at his back, Gatewood stood between them and told Smith he would fight him before he let him near Geronimo’s band. Smith backed down. They reached Skeleton Canyon on September 2, 1886. Miles arrived the next day, and the formal surrender came on September 4.
Geronimo stood in the canyon and handed his Winchester rifle and his Sheffield Bowie knife to General Miles, saying, “This is the fourth time I’ve surrendered. I think it is the last. ” When it was done, he turned to Gatewood and said, “Good. You told the truth.
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The promises Miles made in Skeleton Canyon did not survive the week. The agreement was two years in Florida, then a return to Arizona. President Grover Cleveland, reading the terms from New York, telegraphed his Secretary of War that he hoped nothing would prevent treating Geronimo as a prisoner of war, then added that he would much prefer to hang him. Geronimo and his band were loaded into boxcars under armed guard and shipped to Fort Pickens, Florida, then Fort Marion, then Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, then Fort Sill, Oklahoma in 1894, where he was given a small plot of land and forbidden from leaving without an armed military escort.
He was displayed at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901 and the World’s Fair in St. Louis in 1904, and he rode in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905. The Apache scouts who had helped track him down were disarmed and shipped to Florida alongside the people they had helped capture. After Skeleton Canyon, only 261 Chiricahua Apache remained alive.
Charles Gatewood, the man who actually ended the Apache wars, was denied promotion and the Medal of Honor his commanding officers recommended. He died on May 20, 1896, ten years after the surrender he alone had made possible. Geronimo died at Fort Sill, Oklahoma on February 17, 1909, of pneumonia. He was 79 years old.
He had not seen his Arizona homeland in 23 years. He died as a prisoner of war, under a government that had broken every promise made to him in the canyon where he surrendered. His great-grandson said more than a century later that he died a prisoner of war and remains a prisoner of war, as his remains were never returned to his homeland.