THE REMODELING OF THE 'WORST INDIAN'

The Remodeling of Geronimo

One hundred years and a troop of latter-day authors have altered the image of "the worst Indian who ever lived."

His people called him Goy-ath-lay, The Man-Who-Yawns, you know. But no one ever yawned with him We call Geronimo.

He was born in the cool, pine-clad mountains of eastern Arizona somewhere near the headwaters of the Gila River, and he must have been a sleepy youngster since his Apache name was Goy-ah-kla, "The Yawner." (Charles Fletcher Lummis spelled it Goy-ath-lay in his poem "Man-Who-Yawns.") According to his own account, he grew up to be an aggressive and successful young warrior and was married early to the slim and beautiful Alope, only to lose her and their three children to Mexican troops who slaugh-tered the women and babes while the men were trading and probably drinking in a small Chihuahua town. After that great loss, he said, "my heart would ache for revenge against Mexico," and he became a swift and deadly raider, on both sides of the boundary, with a new name-Geronimo. There is no agreement about how or when he got it, but it became a cry of fear in the mouths of his victims and a battle slogan for his fighting men. Not a hereditary chief, he was neverthe-less a forceful leader, especially of the disgruntled and discontented, and he had an impressive record among the Apaches as a shaman or medicine man who could call on his Power to help him cure certain illnesses and more important - enable him to predict future events, tell what was happening in places far away, and inter-fere, with startling results, with the normal course of nature. An old man, a member of the band, told anthropologist Morris Edward Opler fifty years after the event that once when they they were crossing open ground at night and shelter was still far away, Geronimo invoked his Power to postpone daybreak. "So he sang, and the night remained for two or three hours longer. I saw this myself." So far as is known, nothing like this had happened since the sun stood still for Joshua while the children of Israel finished off the Amorites in Old Testament times. The Apaches knew he was a man of power even before the American Civil War, but he was not well known among the white people until the great chiefs Vic-torio, Mangas Colorado (also known as Mangas Coloradas), and Cochise were out of the picture. By 1880, however, he had estabished himself as a leader of malcon-tents and rebels, a red-handed raider who hated restraint, brooded over his wrongs, and talked loud and long about his griev-ances. Charles Lummis, who came to Fort Bowie, Arizona, in 1886 to report the end of the Apache campaigns for his Los Angeles newspaper, called him "a talker from Jawville." Lummis had a poor opin-ion of all Apaches at that time ("born butchers and hereditary slayers"), but thir-ty years later his views had changed, and he gave Geronimo his due, and maybe a little more, in his 1928 volume A Bronco Pegasus. The Man Who Yawns, he said, could do something besides talk.

The most consummate warrior since warfare first began, The deadliest Fighting Handful in the calendar of Man.

Yes, he was taken prisoner once-and only once-by white men. Agent John P. Clum of the San Carlos Indian Reservation and his Indian police surrounded Geron-imo and took him by surprise at Ojo Caliente in New Mexico in 1877. They brought him in chains to San Carlos, but they never caught him again. Thereafter when he came in, as he did three times, he came on his own terms and in his own good time. San Carlos was not a good place for mountain Apaches to live. Most of it was a parched desert (biographer Angie Debo calls it "a pestilential flat"). The water was bad, and it was overpopulated by Apache standards with other tribesmen, some of whom were not friendly with the Ojo Caliente group.

In 1878, Geronimo and a band of sympathizers left the reservation and headed for Mexico, raiding and killing as they went, and staying out until 1879, when he returned to San Carlos. He stayed about a year, then again escaped to Mexico where he made his headquarters until 1883, when he once again returned to San Carlos. When he went back, Geronimo found his circumstances had not improved. Military supervision was hard to bear. Rations were in short supply, and During his years of captivity at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Geronimo was a man on exhibition. (OPPOSITE PAGE) This photograph may have been taken at Theodore Roosevelt's inauguration in 1904. When asked why he selected Geronimo to appear in his parade, the President is said to have replied: "I want to give the people a good show."

(LEFT) In top hat, Geronimo poses with unidentified friends at the 101 Ranch near Bliss, Oklahoma, in 1905. Usually self-possessed, alert, and friendly, he was a main attraction for fairgoers.

(BELOW) Already in late middle age, Geronimo was first photographed by A. Frank Randall at the San Carlos Agency in 1884.

the Apaches were forbidden to brew and drink tiswin, their corn liquor. Another edict said they could not discipline their wives in traditional fashion-beating them for small infractions, cutting off their noses for unfaithfulness. The Apaches also suspected that the agent was making off with their food supply.

Said the Agent to Geronimo 'Your ration is too fat! I got a load of weeviled flourWe'll tone you down on that! And meat just makes you uglyI'll let the beef berd goI see some pretty money.' 'Ahnh' said Geronimo.

A small band led by Geronimo escaped the San Carlos reservation for the third and last time in 1885. With him went ninety-two women and children, eight boys, and thirty-three men. Five thousand soldiers could not catch him.

They never saw a hair of him, but ever and oft they feltEach rock and cactus spitting lead from an Apache belt.

Not until General George Crook enlisted 200 Apache scouts did the troops come close. "We're fighters and we're stayers," Lummis said, but "we couldn't fight Apaches till we Hessianized their blood!"

Even then it took many months-until September, 1886-and much blood and treasure to wear Geronimo down and induce him to surrender. Meanwhile every rancher in southern Arizona and New Mexico feared for his life, and with good reason. The Apaches moved fast and spared none who got in their way.

Regional newspapers screamed for protection and blamed the bumbling generals for their troubles. Eastern periodicals picked up the chant, and Geronimo became, for several million Americans, the personification of bloody and merciless savagery, "the worst Indian who ever lived." General Crook, the best military friend the Apaches ever had, called him "a human tiger." John Clum, the only man who ever captured him, thought the Apache troubles would be over if Geronimo could be brought in, tried, and hanged. The man in the street in Tucson was convinced all the Apaches should be destroyed, or at least moved out of Arizona.

To the pioneer settlers of Arizona and New Mexico, Geronimo was a bloodyhanded murderer, and this image of Geronimo the Wicked endured until the third quarter of our century. It was kept alive by a variety of writers, beginning with the leaders of the Indian-fighting Army, all of whom wrote memoirs "at the request of friends and family." To them the Apaches were "the hostiles"-not freedom fighters and hardly human beings. They had to admit that Geronimo was a formidable opponent, a "wily savage,' but that meant he was treacherous, slippery, and without honor.

White historians went along. Frank C. Lockwood in 1938 called Geronimo "a cruel, perfidious rascal, hated and distrusted by Apaches and white men alike." Dan Thrapp in his definitive The Conquest of Apacheria (1967) aimed at objectivity but was not about to make a hero out of this "doughty recalcitrant" whose influence was "baleful."

It was for the novelists, however, that Geronimo and his warriors provided a priceless opportunity. They needed villains, villains for their white heroes to overcome, and the Apaches seemed ideally suited for the role. Edward S. Ellis in On the Trail of Geronimo (1901) tells a silly story about a young West Pointer assigned to Arizona who overcomes a band of "dusky fiends" led by Geronimo. Captain Charles King, a better writer, published An Apache Princess in 1903. A chief's daughter falls in love with the handsome lieutenant, shows her ferocious nature by stabbing his enemies, and leaves him "with the spring of a tigress" when he reveals his love for a white girl. Popular novels from then on treat the Apache as a benighted heathen. The paperback westerns of the 1940s and 1950s give him very little credit. "In his free-running state," says James Warner Bellah, a retired colonel from the East, he is "only a step from the beast. He is lecherous and without honor or mercy, filthy in his ideas and speech, and inconceivably dirty in person and manners." (A Thunder of Drums, 1961).

Between 150 and 200 of these popular novels dealing with the Apache wars appeared before 1980, and Geronimo is the evil influence in many of them. Even when the Apache leader is called something else-Chingo the Butcher, Diablo, Diablito, Satanio-he looks like the 1884 photograph of Geronimo at San Carlos, the best-known of his many likenesses. "The face was one that might look from a smoky window of hell, a beaked nose, a thin slit of lipless mouth" (Gordon D. Shireffs, The Valiant Eagles, 1962); "...in the unyielding slitted mouth one saw determination, in the eyes and mouth and bone of his face was ruthlessness, a cruelty ages old" (George Garland, Apache Warpath, 1961).

As late as 1972, "the wily old butcher" took a leading role in Lewis B. Patten's The Hands of Geronimo, and in the unspeakably violent novels of the seventies and eighties, notably the Cuchillo Oro series by Englishman Terry Harknett (pen name William James), the cover blurb points out that the books "are inspired by such notorious Indian warriors as Cochise and Geronimo."

Thus Geronimo the Wicked has gone marching on down through the years; but Geronimo the Good was there all the time, getting ready to equal and eventually surpass him.

The first signs of change were visible when the Yawner was in full career. The entering wedge was the consciousness that all the Indians had been abused and betrayed by the white man and his government. People talked about the "Tucson Ring" which put rocks in flour sacks and stole the Indians' beef. It is doubtful such a ring ever existed, but General Crook believed it did, and so did Lummis ("...fraud and villainy constantly practiced in open violation of laws and in defiance of public justice"). People back east were quick to point the finger. After the black people of the South were emancipated, the reformers attacked the Army and the Indian Service. "I only know the names of three savages upon the plains," said Wendell Phillips in 1870-"Colonel Baker, General Custer, and at the head of all, General Sherman."

Ring" which put rocks in flour sacks and stole the Indians' beef. It is doubtful such a ring ever existed, but General Crook believed it did, and so did Lummis ("...fraud and villainy constantly practiced in open violation of laws and in defiance of public justice"). People back east were quick to point the finger. After the black people of the South were emancipated, the reformers attacked the Army and the Indian Service. "I only know the names of three savages upon the plains," said Wendell Phillips in 1870-"Colonel Baker, General Custer, and at the head of all, General Sherman."

It took some time, however, to begin to convince the country that the Apache was a human being. One of the first in the

field was novelist Harold Bell Wright with The Mine with the Iron Door (1923). He introduces an Apache named Natachee, educated in the white man's schools but unable to find a place in either of his two worlds. The white man, he says, has ruined the Apache through his lust for gold. His only comfort is his perception that “by this gold shall the destroyers, in their turn, be destroyed.” Lummis came into the picture in 1928 with A Bronco Pegasus, celebrating Geronimo's dedication and endurance, and in 1927 Edgar Rice Burroughs (of Tarzan fame) published the first of two novels in which Geronimo, old and wise, comments sadly on the perfidy of the white man. “Some day,” he hopes, “the Pindah-lick-oyee will keep the words of the treaties they have made with the Shishinday-the treaties they have always been the first to break.” A number of first-rate novels appeared in the 1930s, all taking the side of the Apache, but the climax was reached in 1947 with Elliott Arnold's Blood Brother, a best-seller and the basis for the popular motion picture Broken Arrow. By this time, the white man had become the murderous savage, and the Apache was the truly civilized human being. “There is no private hoarding,” says Tom Jeffords, the central character, a blood brother of Cochise and husband of the beautiful Son-see-ahray, “no cheating. Whatever they have is divided equally. There is no caste system.... I wonder by what standards we have arrogated to ourselves the right to call Indians savages.... Who are we to come along and try to make them over our way?” In the novels that follow Blood Brother, the white man goes down as the Indian goes up. “Have you ever stopped to realize,” asks a character in Hunter Ingram's Fort Apache (1985), “that the Caucasian race is the scourge of the earth? The Apache kills on an individual basis.... They plan to wipe out whole cultures at once.” Lummis agrees, and applies a little whitewash to Geronimo: Behind it all are the white man's guilt feelings and his urge to make restitution. The Wheeler-Howard Act of 1933 began to restore the Indian's land, culture, and religion. Millions of dollars have gone to the tribes to compensate for the loss of (OPPOSITE PAGE, TOP) "Apache Village at Peace," by Bill Ahrendt. Oil on canvas, 30 by 36 inches. The painting "captures the Apaches in a different light, other than as marauders," the artist explains.

(LEFT) Pacheta Falls. This lush high country on the Fort Apache reservation was home to the Chiricahua Apaches for a short time in 1884-85, until Geronimo led an escape and headed for Mexico. HERB MCREYNOLDS (BELOW) Prior to this time, all the western Apache tribes were concentrated at the San Carlos reservation, a hot and dry dessert area not at all suited to mountain people. (OPPOSITE PAGE, BOTTOM) Fragments of Geronimo's rag-tag band at Fort Bowie after the final surrender. From there they were entrained for Fort Marion, Florida, and twenty-seven years of captivity there and in Oklahoma. BOTH FROM ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES their homelands, and the Apaches have had their share. Sentimentalists have written books celebrating the Indian's kinship with nature. Serious historians have documented the white man's crimes. Motion pictures have got on the Indian bandwagon and preached the same sermon. Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a best-seller, and almost nobody doubts now that the white man was the great villain and the Indian was the innocent victim.

Geronimo could not escape being transformed with the rest, and he assisted materially though unintentionally-in his own transformation. He allowed a white school superintendent named S. M. Barrett to record and publish his life story-a development which had far-reaching consequences. For the first time, an Apache described his boyhood and growing up. It was possible to make an appealing juvenile out of him, and in at least seven fictional works by English and American authors, Geronimo emerges as a model for American youth-a sort of Apache Boy Scout.

Anthropologists and Indianists of various complexions pushed Geronimo's remodeling a little further by explaining Apache social organization and religion. Geronimo as a shaman came into the picture frequently. And all the while, someThe distinguished sculptor Allan Houser has a good-and surprising-reason for his special interest in Geronimo: his father was a member of Geronimo's band.

Is that possible? We are talking about events of a century ago. But the arithmetic checks out. "My father was still in his teens when Geronimo surrendered," Houser explained. "He was forty-six when I was born. And I'm seventy-two now."

As a boy, Houser absorbed his father's stories about the Geronimo period, the strict training of a young Apache warrior, life on several reservations, and the periodic departures of Geronimo and his followers.

Houser's sister, Ruey Darrow of Anadarko, Oklahoma, has an even more detailed knowledge of their father's early life because she recorded many of his recollections on tape.

"He had vivid memories of the hardships of those months of constant flight," she said. "He remembered boiling dry bones to make soup, and trying to trap rats for food. The Army was always on their heels."

Eventually Sam Haozous (Allan changed the spelling to Houser) became an Oklahoma farmer, and lived to witness the success of his children in various professions. He died at the age of ninety after an active day spent planting trees.

When Allan Houser (RIGHT) learned of Apache plans to commemorate the centennial of the last Geronimo surrender, he offered to contribute a bronze bust of the famed guerrilla leader. He completed the sculpture (LEFT), cast in a limited edition of twelve, in time for his annual show at The Gallery Wall in Scottsdale last February.-M. W.

where out of sight, Geronimo was being sanctified as a symbol of heroic resistance to entrenched injustice.

In California, where many young people seceded from the middle-class world and tried to become wild and free, like the Indians, an emancipated group moved onto a vacant area owned by the University of California at Berkeley and named it the Power to the People Park. When university authorities tried to move them out, a printed broadside appeared on the street with a picture of Geronimo on it and the words: "Your land is covered with blood. Your people ripped off this land from the Indians. If you want it back now, you will have to fight for it." There was not an Indian among these indignant people, and there was no major battle, but the point had been made.

Geronimo, like Lincoln, "belonged to the ages," and was available as a symbol to anyone who had a use for him.

Among those who found a use were the people of the Paris underground, who called themselves les apaches, and paratroopers in World War II, who invoked the name of Geronimo as they leaped from their airplanes into space.

It remained for Forrest Carter in his 1978 novel Watch for Me on the Mountain to raise Geronimo to the level of Moses and George Washington, and even higher. He fights to keep his people free, leads some of them to a Promised Land deep in the Mexican mountains, and is in constant communion with the Higher Powers.

We see what his possibilities are when Chokole, a warrior woman, is dying, staked out on an anthill by Mexican soldiers, and a great eagle comes to her. He "stretched out taloned feet, and braked against the air, landing close to Chokole. She saw him turn his head, looking at her.... Chokole blinked her eyes. It was Geronimo." Neither Moses nor George Washington could equal that. Geronimo is the Apache Messiah.

We have arrived at the place where the old rule applies: if you can't lick 'em, join 'em! We have made Geronimo our own.

"The spirit of the Apaches," says biographer Alexander B. Adams, "lives where ever men and women are struggling against overwhelming odds for freedom and justice. We, as Americans, should be proud that the Apaches' story is part of our country's heritage."

It would have been better if Geronimo had died fighting the bluecoats in Mexico. It is sad to read that he spent his last years raising watermelons on a patch of land at Fort Sill, Oklahoma; that he traveled to fairs and conventions to show himself to curious crowds; that he sold the buttons off his shirt for a quarter apiece and carried a supply of replacements; that he died of pneumonia after getting drunk in Lawton. He had left the Christian church and gone back to the old religion, but Charles Lummis told it the way it should have been: But Goy-ath-lay, whose breechclout score two nations mocked at will— Serenely yawned himself to death in Sunday school at Sill.

After a distinguished career as professor, chairman of the Department of English, and dean of the Graduate School at University of Texas at El Paso, C. L. Sonnichsen moved to Tucson and is now senior editor of the Journal of Arizona History. Among his Arizona-oriented books are Billy King's Tombstone; Colonel Green and the Copper Skyrocket; Tucson, Portrait of an American City; and Pioneer Heritage.