history

GERONIMO'S LAST RAID

His only regret, Geronimo often declared in later years, was that he did not die fighting in the Sierra Madres.

That's not quite true. The great Chiricahua Apache warrior, his heart softened by the passing years, had one more haunting regret: that he had caused so much pain to little children.

"Often I would steal up to the homes of white settlers and kill the parents," he once admitted to an interviewer quoted by historian David Roberts. "In my hatred I would even take the little ones out of their cradles and toss them in the air. They would like this and would gurgle with glee. But when they came down I would catch them on my sharp hunting knife and kill them. I wake up groaning and very sad at night when I remember the helpless little children."

The atrocities committed by Geronimo and his warriors during their final 15 months of freedom in 1885-86 still horrify those who read of them more than a century later. Sometimes they lanced and beat a terrified victim before stringing him upside down over his wagon and then setting it afire to roast him slowly to death. Often they tortured a husband while his wife was forced to watch.

But these horrors were little worse than those inflicted on the Apaches, beginning with the Spanish in the late 16th century when they marched north from Mexico seeking slaves for their silver mines.

While control of the Southwest changed over the centuries from Spanish to Mexican to American, the hatred and misunderstanding between cultures did not. Mexico at one time offered a bounty of $100 per Apache scalp, and obliging killers brought in long strings of them with no concern for the plight of their victims' families. American soldiers and ranchers killed and mutilated countless Apaches through the years, sometimes as casually as they would destroy coyotes or rattlesnakes.

Geronimo's hatred of the European-Americans was accelerated in January, 1863, with the U.S. Army's betrayal, murder, and mutilation of the great Apache leader Mangas Coloradas. The soldiers cut off Mangas' head, boiled the flesh from it in a cauldron, and sent his brain to the East for study.

But Geronimo spent most of his warrior years avenging the 1851 atrocity inflicted on his family by Mexican soldiers near Janos, Chihuahua. More than a half-century later, as he dictated his autobiography in 1906, the searing memory still burned bright: "I returned to our camp late one afternoon and was told on the way that Mexican troops had killed many of our women and children and stolen all our ponies and supplies.. Among the bodies I found my aged mother, my young wife, and my three children."

Soon thereafter, as Geronimo grieved over his loss, he said he heard a voice calling his name and promising that no enemy bullet would ever kill him. His god, Ussen, also bestowed on him at that moment "The Power," which gave him supernatural abilities, including that of foretelling coming events. Once, his awed followers declared, he held back the dawn for two hours.

Geronimo avenged his lost family by killing Mexicans wherever he found them. Moreover, he thrust himself fearlessly into the forefront of every battle, completely convinced he was invincible.

His given name was Goyalikla, which means "one who yawns," a name bestowed because he often yawned as a baby. But Mexican soldiers, probably pleading for St. Jerome to protect them during an attack by the wily Chiricahua leader, shouted "Geronimo!" and thus gave him the name best-known in Southwestern Indian lore. He was born about 1823 near the present Arizona-New Mexico border, and both Silver City, New Mexico, and Clifton, Arizona, now claim to be his birthplace. His people, he said, were called Bedonkohe Apaches, but later the name Chiricahua Apaches was more universally used.

Just before sunrise on May 15, 1885, Lt. Britton Davis was awakened in his tent on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation by an angry gathering of Apache leaders Chihuahua, Nana, Loco, Naiche (Cochise's son), and Geronimo, among others protesting Gen. George Crook's edict that they could not brew and drink tizwin, and that they could no longer beat their wives when the women misbehaved.

"We all got drunk on tizwin last night," boldly declared Chihuahua. "What are you going to do about it put us all in jail? You have no jail big enough."

Venerable old Nana nodded. "He [Davis] cannot tell me how to treat my women," he added. "He is only a boy. I killed men before he was born."

Geronimo did not participate in the confrontation, but the young lieutenant could see him sulking on the fringes of the crowd.

Davis, who was in charge of the most incorrigible captives on the huge reservation in eastern Arizona Territory, sensed a storm about to break. The restless warriors were going crazy from boredom, and young firebrands had been inciting the others to break out and make a run for Mexico. Promising to pass along their grievances to General Crook, Davis dispersed the protesters and telegraphed his immediate superior at San Carlos that trouble was brewing. But the message was delayed in forwarding. General Crook did not see it until too late.

Under cover of darkness on May 17, Geronimo and Naiche, with about 40 warriors and 100 women and children, eluded the Army guards and rode out of the reservation, racing like panicked deer for the safety of their Mexican mountain hideaway. More than three-fourths of the other reservation Apaches, no great admirers of Geronimo, elected to remain.

"The wife of Mangas [Mangas Coloradas' son] told me they were going to arrest and hang me," Geronimo later declared to General Crook in explaining why he had bolted.

This was his third flight from captivity. In 1877 Indian agent John Clum had lured Geronimo in on the pretext of a peace parley, but perfidiously seized him and welded a set of irons around his legs. Geronimo managed to gain his freedom from the reservation that time, and again in 1879 after he had surrendered to Capt. Harry Haskell. He gave himself up to General Crook in 1883 and spent a year and a half on the Fort Apache reservation before engineering this final breakout.

By that time, ranchers and miners in southern Arizona and western New Mexico had learned to equate the name Geronimo with that of the Devil. Word raced around the two Territories - indeed, around the nation and throughout Mexico that "The Apaches are on the war path again." Newspapers headlined the sensational news in their biggest type, and ranchers and miners hurried in from their labors to barricade their families behind locked doors.

For allowing his charges to escape the reservation, the once-admired General

Crook was excoriated by the press with the vilest invectives they could muster. And in Washington, Army boss Gen. Philip Sheridan was livid.

The canny Geronimo broke his small band into splinter groups and raced for the border, covering 135 miles over the roughest terrain in two days without a moment's pause for rest. Along the trail, pursuers found the bodies of two newborn Apache babies, killed because they could not be cared for in the headlong flight. The fugitives did not worry about exhausting their horses. When their mounts broke down, they raided ranches and stole fresh ones.

General Crook alerted his troops at Fort Bowie, at the north end of the Chiricahua range with sightlines on Sulphur Springs Valley and San Simon Valley, Geronimo's two routes of escape to Mexico. Crook ordered the Fort Bowie troops to close off all avenues of escape and especially to guard the known water holes.

But the Apaches were too clever for the soldiers. They eluded their pursuers with ease, crossing the border and even returning to replenish their stores of horses, ammunition, and food by attacking American settlements.

Anguished press reports of those depredations started appearing immediately. "This city is wild tonight with rumors of all kinds," shouted the Tombstone Epitaph. "All is excitement and confusion," declared a Bisbee editor. From Silver City, New Mexico, on May 28, came one of the most lurid accounts: "This morning Geronimo's band attacked [Phillips] and his family, killing the entire family, except the eldest child, a girl, whom they hanged on a meat hook. The hook entered the back of her head, in which position she was found, still alive, but only lived a few hours."

Before the runaways reached Mexico, 17 American settlers lay dead.

So alarmed was General Sheridan that he boarded a train and crossed the continent to meet with General Crook at Fort Bowie to plan strategy for the recapture of the marauders. Crook and Sonora Governor Luis Torres rushed to parley at Benson, where Torres eagerly renewed an 1882 agreement permitting U.S. troops to pursue the Apaches into Mexico.

Convinced that only Apaches could track Convinced that only Apaches could trackfortress, Geronimo devised a strategy to keep his warriors well-supplied and his neck out of a noose. If possible, he also hoped to rescue his wife (he had nine in his life) and child, who were still held captive at the Fort Apache reservation.

The first objective was the easiest. Ranches and mining camps on both sides of the border were easy prey for the fast-moving Apache raiders.

To rescue his family, he carried out a foray that still ranks as one of the most brilliant and daring in the annals of the Indian wars. With only four companions, he slipped through the cordon of U. S. Army defenders To round Geronimo and his splintered forces, Crook enlisted nearly 100 loyal Apache scouts to ride with his 20 troops. The Mexican government, already reporting widespread Apache raids in northern Sonora and Chihuahua, rushed additional thousands of troops to the feverish manhunt. In all, Geronimo and fewer than 50 warriors succeeded in tying up 5,000 American troops fully one-fourth of the entire American Army and 3,000 Mexican forces for more than a year, inflicting heavy casualties while suffering almost no losses of their own.

Once he had outdistanced his pursuers and gained the security of his almost impregnable Sierra Madre mountain "We at last TASTED the joy of perfect FREEDOM that our forefathers experienced before the white man came.' But that freedom was bought at a crushing PRICE. along the border and raced northward through eastern Arizona toward the reservation from which he had so recently escaped. Although past 60, he displayed the strength and stamina of a man half his age. Somehow he was able to sneak past the Fort Apache guards, snatch his wife, child, and another woman, and escape to Mexico without a soldier ever laying eyes on him.

To Capt. Emmet Crawford, the officer in charge at Fort Apache, went the dolorous duty of explaining to General Crook how Geronimo could have engineered such a coup: "The only way to prevent [it] would be to put them [his Apache charges] in close confinement," he plaintively reported.

To Geronimo and his warriors, their months of liberty in the rugged Sierra Ma-dres were bittersweet. "We at last tasted the joy of perfect freedom that our forefathers experienced before the white man came," one young Apache later recalled. But that freedom was bought at a crush-ing price. Constantly on the run, and wary of every snapping twig and approaching shadow, they lived every day as though it might be their last. Through the ensuing months, Geronimo and his lieutenants conducted sortie after sortie against American and Mexican tar-gets, virtually always without the loss of a single raider. They ranged through Ari-zona's Chiricahua and Dragoon mountains, into Sulphur Springs Valley, within sight of Tombstone and Bisbee, and not far east of Tucson. To terrified Arizonans, they seemed to be everywhere at once. Although the killings on the Arizona side received by far the most publicity, the carnage in Mexico was much greater. Sonora's governor declared that more than 500 of his countrymen were murdered during the summer of 1886 alone. "We were reckless of our lives [on those raids]," Geronimo later declared, "because we felt that every man's hand was against us." As the vise of American and Mexican pursuit closed inexorably around them during the early months of 1886, Geronimo and his followers began to weary of never-ending flight and to long for living at peace once more with their families. Geronimo sent two women to the Americans, offering to meet with General Crook at Canyon de los Embudos in northern Sonora. Crook brought along Tombstone photographer C.S. Fly, who brashly moved the Apache leaders and the general around at the meeting as if they were members of a wedding party to get his famous pictures of the last American Indians to resist the American government's dominance. There on March 27, Geronimo delivered his impassioned surrender oration, which included the oft-quoted words, "Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender, and that is all." Geronimo agreed to surrender only if the Chiricahuas were allowed to return to the reservation near San Carlos and be reunited there with their families after a twoyear imprisonment in Florida. General Crook agreed to those terms, but President Grover Cleveland overruled him as soon as he learned of the agreement, insisting instead on unconditional surrender or death for the defiant Apaches. The question, however, became moot when Geronimo, Naiche, and 32 others had a change of heart that night and fled back into the mountains of Mexico. They apparently were inflamed by whiskey obtained from a white man named Tribolet, who convinced the Apaches that the Americans planned to execute them as soon as they surrendered. The Apache wars which had come so close to ending flared once more. General Crook, crushed by his failure to capture Geronimo, resigned and was replaced by Gen. Nelson Miles, a self-aggrandizing officer who knew little about pursuing Apaches. Despite all Miles could do, throughout the summer of 1886 Geronimo roamed free, raiding and killing on both sides of the border in an incredi-ble campaign of guerrilla warfare. At last Miles discovered the way to har-ness the Apaches: He informed Geronimo and his warriors, in a message delivered

GERONIMO'S LAST RAID

by Apache scouts Martine and Kayitak, that their relatives on the reservation had been sent to Florida. The news came as a stunning blow to Geronimo, who was thus confronted with his final choice: continued resistance or peace with his family in Florida. "Geronimo and the others had an intense love of family," declares historian Jay Van Orden of the Arizona Historical Society. "It was only with that lure that Miles was able to break down their will to continue resisting." So the several dozen fugitives gave themselves up to Lt. Charles Gatewood and straggled into their historic meeting with Miles at Skeleton Canyon in far southeastern Arizona. On September 8, Geronimo and his onceinvincible warriors were herded onto heavily guarded railroad cars at Fort Bowie, as the camp band sneeringly played "Auld Lang Syne," and started on their long journey to captivity in Florida. Some years later, an artist who was painting Geronimo's portrait reported in amazement that he saw "at least fifty" bullet holes (probably an exaggeration) in his body. Geronimo never set foot in his native Southwest again. Miles had promised that he would be united with his relatives in Florida in five days and would be returned to Arizona after two years. But those promises were never honored. Along with the others, Geronimo was held in Florida and later at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, until he died in 1909. Throughout his long and dreary impris-onment, Geronimo never gave up hope of returning to his homeland. In a memorable plea to President Theodore Roosevelt, he wrote: "It is my land, my home, my fathers' land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried there among those mountains. If this could be, I might die in peace."

Roosevelt expressed his sympathy, and even invited Geronimo to ride at the head of his inaugural parade in 1905. But he would not let him return to Arizona. There was still too much hatred against him among the people of the Territory, the President explained.

"All I can say is that I'm sorry," Roosevelt declared.