His modest home at Fort Sill was always kept tidy.

He was a judge, a teacher, and everyone in the country knew his name.

But years before, when the American West began to fade, when railroads stitched the continent together and new borders were drawn in ink and blood, Geronimo lived in the nightmares of settlers and soldiers alike.

Well, no one knows exactly, but I've seen enough estimates of 300, 400, people that he probably killed.

He was born into a violent world where his people and their way of life were being wiped out.

To some, he was a renegade to others a hero to his own people, a protector fighting for survival.

He was the last warrior to surrender and spent his last years as a prisoner of war in Oklahoma.

Geronimo.

(Music) (Fire crackles and cricket chirps) His name was Goyaałé.

Goyaałé.

He who yawns.

That was what he was known by in his early, life.

It was June 1829 along the rugged waters of Turkey Creek in Mexican New Mexico.

Geronimo entered a world of contested lands, and clashing empires.

his birth was just the typical, Apache boy.

And they had to go through tests as they became youth, children, kids, run great distances, carry water in their mouth for great distances without swallowing it.

My father had often told me of the brave deeds of our warriors.

Of the pleasures of the chase and the glories of the warpath.

father died when he was very young, and then he moved in sort of with his mother and with another kind of, ancillary group, and was raised in that fashion.

His grandfather, so we understand was a leader, in his small band, the Bedonkohe, which is one segment of what we call Chiricahua Apaches.

They were mountain Apaches.

They hunted deer most of the time.

And it was, buffalo hunting was occasional, but deer were common.

And that was the big, target He was in a situation where the tribe was under siege.

the Mexicans had scalp bounties on Apaches, some for the scalps of men and women and children.

It was very dangerous to do much of anything.

He was never a chief.

So he was often called the chief.

He was a medicine man.

He was a military man.

He was a guerrilla.

He was many, many things.

Cochise and, Cochise’s son Naiches later, get the hereditary rights of being the chief because they were Chiricahua.

As a healer, he led a fairly peaceful life for 20 years.

But on March the 5th, 1851, a detachment of Mexican troops closed in on an Apache camp at Kas-Ki-Yeh, near Janos, Chihuahua, Mexico.

there was a, a lieutenant Carrasco, in the Mexican army who descended upon camp where Geronimo's family and many other people were, and wiped it out I found that my aged mother, a young wife and three small children were among the slain.

There were no lights in camp.

So without being noticed, I silently turned away and stood by the river.

How long I stood there?

I do not know.

I was never again contented in our quiet home.

But I had vowed vengeance upon the Mexican troopers who wronged me.

He went into mourning, went off alone, into the into the mountains, and was approached by a spirit that's so that he could get revenge on the people who had, killed his family and he would be protected, that he would not be able to kill or be killed by bullets.

If he would agree to do these ceremonies.

But, were in accordance with his spirit.

And that's where part of Geronimo’s power came from.

that was a devastating blow for him, and it set him on a lifetime revenge, cycle.

He hated Mexicans after that, and he took every effort to get revenge against Mexicans, he becomes quite famous.

And he and he, gradually draws people to his side because he's effective and he's brave.

there was just violence, very violent scalping, mutilation, children, women, as well as men.

killing your enemy was something that you were responsible to do.

story is that the Mexican soldiers were praying to Saint Jerome for their lives.

And this man, who's this madman, you know, obviously enraged by what had happened to him, he's inflicting this.

And they're they're praying, please, Saint Jerome, save me.

And this is the name Geronimo that's attached to him.

And so he becomes Geronimo in that moment and becomes identifiable.

Those who saw him fight said Geronimo walked unguarded into the storm of battle, passing through enemy ranks as if death itself made way for him, his own life.

An afterthought.

Geronimo was known as a fierce warrior.

He became.

There were lots of accounts they have running that straight into, danger Geronimo becomes like a true crime story.

And so his so his story becomes elevated, becomes enormous because the press is publishing.

And so there there are stories in Chicago and New York City and all over the country in the major newspapers, and they're following it.

he couldn't get enough revenge on the Mexicans who just constant, constant, constant.

When American settlers and commercial ambitions crossed into Apache territory.

Raid followed raid across the frontier.

The echoes of violence.

Carrying into the halls of Washington.

The United States laid claim to our territory, and some of their people started moving in And it was a problem for the Apaches because they could not move freely like they could before.

They couldn't go to the places they needed for hunting or for getting water.

all of the problems with the Apache Wars, that was all because they were trying to move us out of our home, our home territory.

They kept trying to move us away.

And even even when they were put on reservations and they were given starvation rations and blankets thinner than bed sheets, they tried as best they could to stay on the reservation and to, follow what rules they could.

That's the way they looked at it.

And of course, the army, looked at it in a different way.

They were held up on so many development projects from stagecoach to mining to, trade of all kinds, each officer, each commander, they got a lot of them got replaced.

Exasperated by General George Stillman's inability to capture or kill the Apaches, the army lost patience, and in 1885 handed the campaign to General George Crook.

5000 blue coats searched the scorched earth of New Mexico and Arizona.

Cannon, cavalry, and columns stretched across the desert.

Yet whenever they drew near, Geronimo and his people dissolved into the high country, leaving only dust where the army had hoped to find a man.

life magazine published this cartoon that ridiculed the army nationally.

And it shows classroom of officers at West Point being instructed by Geronimo and after that came out, the Army decided to put 50% of the American army in the field just to deal with Geronimo and the Apaches.

he avoided any idea of surrender for a long time.

they were basically fighting for their lives.

It was because they thought they were going to be killed, and they had probably a pretty good reason for believing that at the time.

he becomes more and more aware as time passes that he's losing his families all the time.

His wives are dying, are being killed.

His children are being killed.

And he goes through ten wives at least.

So it can account for maybe 12, He surrenders several times.

And and he surrenders, or at least reaches an accommodation.

The thing about surrender is, if you if you look through that Geronimo story of his life.

But he never says he surrendered.

He said he made a treaty.

a certain point in time, Geronimo realizes that what's likely to happen to him when he gets to New Mexico is he's going to be hanged as a criminal, not as a POW and so he assembles a group of a small group and they as the as the main groups heading north, they turn around and run into the run to the mountains again.

the problem went on and on and on in the southwest.

Apaches going back and forth across the border saying, well, we'll go to the reservation and San Carlos or we'll do this, we'll do that.

And then backing out, the, Army changing its promises, they're sort of out of options.

So they're trapped and they're starving.

And, and so he's brought in in 1877, then he's brought in an 1881, and then he again in 1884 and five.

And he escapes each of these times.

By April 1886, the curtain fell on George Crook's command.

In his place stepped General Nelson A. Miles ready to bring the long desert chase to its end.

But Miles did not rely on brute force alone.

He leaned heavily on Apache scouts and on the diplomacy of a lieutenant named Charles Gatewood.

Gatewood comes to Geronimo and offers a deal.

And the deal is that if you surrender, we're going to move you to Florida for two years, after which we'll bring you we can bring you back home.

So you'll be a P.O.W.. You'll serve your time, in the barracks, and then you'll come back On September 4th, 1886, Geronimo made his final surrender.

He and the others became prisoners of war.

That was the thing that becomes really, problematic.

Right.

Because if he's a P.O.W., then that's one set of rules.

But the civilian populations in New Mexico and Arizona Territory wanted him tried as a criminal, and then they would hang him.

if a state of war didn't exist, when you're brought Geronimo in or Sitting Bull in or any of those people, then what would we make of the actions of the soldiers who killed folk and native folks in their village?

And so it dawns on some of the generals like, hey, we don't really want to regard this as law enforcement, because then other kinds of, stipulations come in.

Can can we be tried for atrocities?

After a brief stop at Fort Bowie in Arizona, Geronimo and the other Chiricahua men were shipped to Fort Pickens in Florida.

After several months, the prisoners were transferred to Mount Vernon Barracks near Mobile, Alabama, and there they stayed for seven years.

In October 1894, Geronimo and the surviving Chriicahua Apaches were moved again, this time to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

There was a crowd when his train arrived at the station.

So the excitement is you have this wild Indian, this renegade, the person who at that time is regarded as the last Indian holdout, the last Indian war.

Geronimo is dressed in like suitcoat, you know, and or what they called in those days, civilian clothes.

And so they're he's got a hat and he shows up there and that in that moment.

there were guards.

He's getting pretty old by that time, but, you know, 1894, he's he's pushing 70.

And so he's he's an old man, you know, but there was always nervousness around him.

He was never permitted to travel anywhere without permission and without an escort, The army was, suspicious.

Didn't trust him.

Many of them didn't like him at all.

Old prejudice.

he was briefly in a cell.

He was, you know, he was he was briefly incarcerated, but ultimately he lived most of the time in a house that he had constructed, on, on the, the, the property.

And of course, there were lots of folklore that developed about him walking a path in the floor.

Well, it wasn't that at all.

He hardly ever stayed there more than 1 or 2 days over the weekend, His life at Fort Sill was had many parts to it.

So he was a rancher, learned how to learn how to manage cattle.

He was a farmer.

There are famous photographs of him in a, melon field.

And he's holding this giant melon with with one of his kids and and one and one of his wives.

And so he's growing these things.

They all lived on post.

But they were 12 villages scattered around the main complex of buildings of the post They had ten acres.

Each person had ten acres that they could put into cultivation, people don't know this, usually, but he became a he was made into a judge He was made a schoolteacher.

he loved games.

He was an inveterate gambler.

He was an inveterate card player.

He loved horse races.

they had competitions, horse racing, foot racing, baseball, etc.

Geronimo would go there a lot and put in appearances where his Apache bonnet, style bonnet, and he would, be a guest and be a celebrity appearing there.

Geronimo's fame grew, and ever the tactician, he turned it to his advantage.

The celebrity situation was growing about this time, you know, and always been that big.

But it was getting better and better known.

Not just as a fierce warrior, but as a showman, you know, as a business man, He sells autographed photographs.

He allows his picture to be taken for money.

He signs all kinds of things.

He he learns to write his name.

And we know what his signature looks like.

He does that.

He, cuts buttons off of his coats famously.

Right, and sells them.

And then he goes and buy some more and sews them back on.

and he has over 50 bullet wounds in his body.

And it, in his lifetime, when he was still, making the show circuits and such, he was show some of these wounds and he would take a bullet and fit it into the hole or the cavity and, and then sell it as a souvenir He is, briefly invited to be with, Pawnee Bill's show.

He doesn't travel with them.

He's not allowed to travel again.

He performs what's regarded as was called then as the last buffalo hunt up in Ponca City for the at the Miller 101 ranch.

there are two main images that come out of that experience.

One is him and other chiefs with the local Mobil.

the manufacturer of the car was using him for advertising purposes.

He was being exploited.

But people don't look at the picture and see it like that.

And the other was buffalo hunting, while the Apaches did hot buffalo occasionally and wasn't that frequent, they had a deer.

That was their thing in the mountains.

he was invited to, kill a buffalo on the 101 ranch.

I have been a prisoner now for many years.

I have been held in prison camps and in forts.

I am old and tired of war, but I still long to be free, In 1898, Geronimo was allowed to travel to the World's Fair in Omaha.

He was in Buffalo, New York for the 1901 Pan-American Exposition and at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis in 1904.

Geronimo was one of five Native American chiefs they called them who were in Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 inaugural parade, led the parade in Washington.

Quanah Parker was another one that was to show progress, the wild days to the modern days, success and education, success and transformation.

Why is Roosevelt doing this?

I mean, almost looks like a Roman triumph in a certain way.

And although, you know, Roosevelt has a fascination with the West and Geronimo agreed to do it, he was paid.

They were all paid and and but he agreed to do it because he wanted a one on one meeting with Roosevelt.

And he had it.

And his meeting was, please let me go home.

And Roosevelt said, no, he said, I can't.

And he said, well, the people there's hard feelings in Arizona, etc., etc.. And so he was always trying to go home.

He wanted to die among his ancestors.

After 20 years of being a prisoner of war and never given a chance to tell his side of the story, Geronimo asked for permission to let Lawton School Superintendent S.M.

Barrett record his autobiography.

he would dictate it.

And he didn't want to have any conversation.

That was you just said, you just write down what I say and write down.

And then he'd had them have them read it back to him a day later.

And that's when he started, you know, correcting it.

And that's when it was clear that he knew a lot more English.

They said he said, no, that's not what I meant.

Or add this.

So he was deeply engaged in the constructing of his autobiography.

On the night of February 10th, 1909, Geronimo was leaving an event at cache, Oklahoma and was on his way to his home East of Fort Sill.

he was, on a, on his horse coming back home.

He's an old man and evidently fell off his horse.

And it was a cold and rainy night, and he was not discovered till the next day.

And he'd been out all night soaking wet, in the rain.

And, doctors, examine him and do the best they can for him.

It's he's too far gone.

He's, going to die.

Geronimo died on February 17th, 1909. they took his body in, horse drawn ambulance from the hospital out to Beef Creek area near where his village was.

And the other villages were.

And, they had his funeral there.

in 1931, and the field Artillery School came and built a monument over this area, Even after his passing, 265 Chiricahua Apaches endured five more years as prisoners of war.

Finally, in 1914, they were freed In death, as in life, Geronimo was both enigmatic and controversial.

He was a complicated figure among Apaches, some of whom blamed him for the harsh treatment and said that because he held out so long, because he was associated with these atrocities, that the United States took it out on everybody else, from our perspective, most of the tribal members were not, particularly, concerned with him.

He had some people who were adamant supporters of him.

He had some people who really didn't like him at all.

But the vast majority of our tribe, he was just another another old guy.

Everything that happened would have happened whether he was there or not.

But once he.

Was with us as prisoners of war, he became looked upon by the people outside of our tribe as a person of significance who could be seen as a representative of our people.

ironically, this man who fought against America, comes to embody Americanism and he comes to embody the very thing that that was a conflict in his life.

I think he was a, person who had a great pride.

He had a great, sense of, allegiance to his people.

He was a great family man.

He was a true blue Apache.

He fought hard.

Like a real warrior.

So much so he was labeled a tiger, but he was always trying to do what he thought best for his people.

In that case, it meant hostility.

It meant vengeance.

It meant violence, because that was the name of the game.

From dime novels and newspapers to flickering screens of television and film.

The Modern Age has cast Geronimo in a likeness few of his own time would recognize.

The spotlight burned so fiercely upon him that the victories, sacrifices, and sorrows of other Apaches faded into shadow.

All because a hard forged reputation became a name that struck terror in strong men's hearts.

Geronimo.

You can watch this and other episodes of Back in Time on the PBS app or at OETA.TV/BackinTime.