Geronimo at Fort Pickens

In October of eighteen eighty-six, a train pulled into Pensacola carrying sixteen Apache warriors, the most famous prisoner of war in American history among them. His name was Geronimo, and he had surrendered to General Nelson Miles in Arizona just weeks before, the last major Native leader to formally yield to the United States military.

The government's plan had been to send Geronimo's band to Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, but Pensacola business leaders lobbied Washington and won. The prisoners were ferried to Fort Pickens, which had sat mostly empty since the Civil War. There, on Santa Rosa Island, Geronimo and sixteen companions were put to work clearing brush, planting grass, and stacking cannonballs while the Army figured out what to do with them.

News of their arrival traveled fast. By February eighteen eighty-seven, tourist excursions were running from Pensacola by ferry to the fort. Admission was fifty cents for adults and twenty-five cents for children. On one recorded Sunday, four hundred fifty-nine visitors crossed the bay to stare at the prisoners. Newspaper accounts described the scene with a matter-of-fact cruelty that the era accepted without apparent discomfort.

The arrangement carried a particular brutality of its own. Geronimo's wife, children, and other women and children of his band had been sent separately to Fort Marion, hundreds of miles away in northeastern Florida. The family separation was official policy, not accident. The families were not reunited with the men until they were moved to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama in eighteen eighty-eight.

Geronimo never returned to his homeland. He died a prisoner of war in Oklahoma in nineteen oh nine, twenty-three years after surrendering. The Chiricahua Apache were not released from prisoner-of-war status until nineteen thirteen.