Geronimo
1829–1909 1 entry
Biography
Geronimo, in his own language Goyahkla, “One Who Yawns”, was a leader and medicine man of the Bedonkohe Apache, a band of the Chiricahua. He was born in 1829 near the upper Gila River, in what is now the border country of New Mexico and Arizona. In 1858 Mexican soldiers attacked his people’s camp near Janos while the men were away trading, and his mother, his wife and his three children were among the dead; from then on he fought Mexican and American soldiers for almost thirty years.
Again and again he left the reservations and led small bands into the mountains of Arizona and northern Mexico, until in 1886 he surrendered to General Nelson Miles in Skeleton Canyon. He and his people were sent as prisoners of war to Florida, to Alabama and finally to Fort Sill in Oklahoma. In his last years he became a celebrity, appeared at the World’s Fair in St. Louis in 1904, rode in the inaugural parade of President Theodore Roosevelt and told the story of his life to the writer S. M. Barrett. He died at Fort Sill in 1909, still a prisoner of war.
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