Geronimo's Surrender: The Last Resistance

September fourth, eighteen eighty-six. Skeleton Canyon in the Peloncillo Mountains of southeastern Arizona. The man sitting across from General Nelson Miles had been at war, in some form, for more than twenty-five years.

Geronimo was a Bedonkohe Apache leader who had spent a quarter century resisting United States and Mexican military campaigns across the region that is now Arizona and New Mexico. His final band, a few dozen fighters moving across hundreds of miles of mountain terrain, had eluded thousands of soldiers in a campaign that had consumed the careers of multiple Army generals. When he finally agreed to meet with General Miles, he did so under terms Miles had offered: a brief imprisonment, then return to the Chiricahua homeland.

Miles did not honor those terms. The Chiricahua Apache who surrendered with Geronimo were loaded onto trains and transported to Fort Pickens in Florida, then to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, holding them as prisoners of war in a category of federal captivity that had no defined endpoint and no legal framework. Many died in the humid southeastern climate, so different from the high desert where they had spent their lives. They were eventually moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

Geronimo lived as a prisoner for the remaining twenty-three years of his life. He became a celebrity of a certain kind: he rode in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade in nineteen oh five, sold autographs at fairs, was interviewed by journalists. He applied repeatedly to return to Arizona and was refused. He died at Fort Sill on February seventeenth, nineteen oh nine, at approximately eighty years of age, still classified as a prisoner of war. He never came home.

The federal government has never returned the Chiricahua Apache to their Arizona homeland on a formal land base. The Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona, named for the people who lived in those volcanic rock formations for generations, preserves the landscape of a homeland from which its people were removed and to which they have not been formally returned. Fort Bowie, the Army command post that tracked Geronimo through Apache Pass, is a National Historic Site. The monument and the site together hold the physical record of a twenty-five-year resistance and the broken terms of its end.