Geronimo Was Never a Chief

In August 1940 a parachute test platoon at Fort Benning went to the pictures the night before their first jump. The film was a Western with Geronimo in it. Walking back to barracks, the others told Private Aubrey Eberhardt he would be too frightened to remember his own name on the way out of the aircraft.

He told them he would shout Geronimo loud enough for all of them to hear. He did. The 501st put the word on its insignia, and it has been falling out of aeroplanes ever since.

The man whose name that is had been dead for thirty-one years, in military custody.

He was never a chief

His name was Goyahkla. Geronimo was what Mexican soldiers started calling him during a battle, and in his own account of his life he says only that, with no explanation attached. The various stories about Saint Jerome and mispronounced Apache are later inventions by other people. He kept the name and never once explained it.

He held no hereditary or elected authority. He was a warrior with a reputation, which meant people followed him, typically in bands of thirty to fifty. That is the actual scale of the thing. A few dozen people, moving through the borderlands, pursued by thousands of soldiers, for years.

Five days

He surrendered at Skeleton Canyon in early September 1886. General Nelson Miles told him that if he came in, he would be taken to Florida and would see his family within five days.

Miles had no authority to promise it. President Cleveland had ordered that the surrender be unconditional, and the War Department declined to be bound by anything Miles had said. The men were sent to Fort Pickens in Pensacola. Their families went to Fort Marion in St Augustine, three hundred miles away. They were not brought back together until May 1888.

Five days became twenty months, and that was the first term to be broken rather than the last.

The arithmetic of it

About five hundred Chiricahua were deported as prisoners of war in 1886. Not only the people who had fought. The Apache scouts who had worked for the United States Army against Geronimo were loaded onto the same trains and imprisoned alongside the men they had helped catch.

The death figures are contested and worth stating carefully, because the official reports counted different places over different periods. The post surgeon at Fort Marion recorded twenty-four deaths in the first year, one man, seven women, sixteen children. An officer counted eighty-nine dead in Florida by the end of 1889. The Indian Claims Commission later put it at roughly a hundred and nineteen deaths among four hundred and ninety-eight prisoners in the first three and a half years.

The uncontested number is the bookend. Of the four hundred and ninety-eight taken in 1886, two hundred and seventy-one were alive when the prisoner-of-war status was finally lifted in 1913. Twenty-seven years.

Twenty-five cents, ten cents

From 1898 the army let him travel to fairs and exhibitions. At the St Louis World's Fair in 1904 he spent six months selling photographs of himself under supervision.

He set out the economics himself. The photographs went for twenty-five cents and he was permitted to keep ten. Signing his name he kept everything, ten or fifteen or twenty-five cents a time, and on a good day he made about two dollars. He left, in his own words, with more money than he had ever owned.

He also sold bows and arrows, buttons cut from his shirt, and on occasion his hat.

Take the ropes from our hands

On 4 March 1905 he rode on horseback in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade in Washington, one of six Native leaders invited to do it. Days later he was taken to the White House, where he asked the president to let his people go home.

Take the ropes from our hands, he said, through an interpreter.

Roosevelt refused. He told him there was a bitter feeling against him among the people of Arizona, and that he would have to wait and see how he behaved. He was seventy-six years old and had been a prisoner for nineteen years at that point. He died at Fort Sill in 1909, of pneumonia, still a prisoner, and was buried there. He never went home.

The book the army read first

The account of his life exists because a school superintendent named S. M. Barrett went over the War Department's head to Roosevelt directly for permission. The condition was that the army read it before anyone else did.

A brigadier general went through the manuscript and marked five pages as decidedly objectionable. It was cleared for publication anyway, on the reasoning that it showed the Indian side of a prolonged controversy, with Barrett required to disclaim responsibility for what Geronimo said about people by name.

Geronimo dictated it through Asa Daklugie, a fellow prisoner. He refused to work with stenographers, declined to answer questions he did not want to answer, and said only what he had decided to say in each session. A censored book, produced under guard, in which the prisoner still controlled the contents.

The name keeps going

In 2011 the United States military used Geronimo as the code word in the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The National Congress of American Indians objected immediately, for the obvious reason.

Seventy-one years after Fort Benning, the name of a man who defended his own country against an invading army was still being used by that army as shorthand for the enemy.

His remains are at Fort Sill. A long-running story holds that a Yale society took his skull in 1918; descendants sued in 2009 and the case was dismissed without a court ever reaching the question of whether anything was taken. There is no evidence connecting any remains to him, and the Fort Sill Apache Tribe opposes disturbing the grave. Even the argument about where his bones are is one other people are mostly having.

Why he ends up on a shirt

The Geronimo tee has him holding a lever-action rifle upright, neckerchief at his throat, under his own handwritten signature. The signature is deliberate. It is the one he sold for pocket change under guard, put back on him rather than on a souvenir.

The name is in the dictionary now as something you shout when you jump. It is worth knowing whose it was, and what was being done to him while it was turning into a punchline.

Related: the full catalogue.

More on words that got away from the people who owned them in Kill One Man and You Are a Murderer.