Merry Christmas Geronimo! Read online

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction

  PART I - THE APACHES

  Chapter 1 - ORIGIN OF THE APACHE INDIANS

  Chapter 2 - SUBDIVISIONS OF THE APACHE TRIBE

  Chapter 3 - EARLY LIFE

  Chapter 4 - TRIBAL AMUSEMENTS, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS

  Chapter 5 - THE FAMILY

  PART II - THE MEXICANS

  Chapter 6 - KAS-KI-YEH

  Chapter 7 - FIGHTING UNDER DIFFICULTIES

  Chapter 8 - RAIDS THAT WERE SUCCESSFUL

  Chapter 9 - VARYING FORTUNES

  Chapter 10 - HEAVY FIGHTING

  Chapter 11 - GERONIMO’S MIGHTIEST BATTLE

  PART III - THE WHITE MEN

  Chapter 12 - COMING OF THE WHITE MEN

  Chapter 13 - GREATEST OF WRONGS

  Chapter 14 - REMOVALS

  Chapter 15 - IN PRISON AND ON THE WARPATH

  Chapter 16 - THE FINAL STRUGGLE

  Chapter 17 - A PRISONER OF WAR

  PART IV - THE OLD AND THE NEW

  Chapter 18 - UNWRITTEN LAWS OF THE APACHES

  Chapter 19 - AT THE WORLD’S FAIR

  Chapter 20 - RELIGION

  Chapter 21 - HOPES FOR THE FUTURE

  Appendix - THE SURRENDER OF GERONIMO

  A Selected Bibliography

  “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 AMONG

  THOSE MOUNTAINS. IF THIS COULD BE I

  MIGHT DIE IN PEACE, FEELING THAT MY

  PEOPLE, PLACED IN THEIR NATIVE HOMES,

  WOULD INCREASE IN NUMBERS, RATHER

  THAN DIMINISH AS AT PRESENT, AND THAT

  OUR NAME WOULD NOT BECOME EXTINCT.”

  —Geronimo

  FREDERICK TURNER is the author of seven works of nonfiction and editor of three others. His books include Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit against the Wilderness; Rediscovering America: John Muir in His Time and Ours; and A Border of Blue: Along the Gulf of Mexico from the Keys to the Yucatán. He is the editor of the Viking Portable North American Indian Reader. His most recent book is 1946: When the Boys Came Back.

  Geronimo (1829-1909). From a photograph by A. Frank Randall, 1886. (COURTESY OF THE ARIZONA HISTORICAL SOCIETY, TUCSON)

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  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Published by Meridian, an imprint of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

  Previously published in a Dutton edition.

  First Meridian Printing (Newly Revised and Edited Edition), March 1996

  Introduction and Notes copynght © Frederick Turner, 1970, 1996

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Geronimo, 1829-1909.

  [Geronimo’s story of his life.]

  Geronimo : his own story / as told to S. M. Barrett.—Newly rev. and edited,

  with an introd. and notes / by Frederick Turner.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: Geronimo’s story of his life. New York: Duffield, 1906.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-12804-6

  1. Geronimo, 1829-1909. 2. Apache Indians—Biography. 3. Apache Indians—Kings and rulers.

  4. Apache Indians—Wars. I. Barrett, S. M. (Stephen Melvil). II. Turner, Frederick W. III. Title.

  E99.A6G3 1996

  973.8’092—dc20

  [B] 95-33574

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  Dedicatory

  Because he has given me permission to tell my story; because he has read that story and knows I try to speak the truth; because I believe that he is fair-minded and will cause my people to receive justice in the future; and because he is chief of a great people, I dedicate this story of my life to Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States.

  GERONIMO

  Preface

  The initial idea of the compilation of this work was to give the reading public an authentic record of the private life of the Apache Indians, and to extend to Geronimo as a prisoner of war the courtesy due any captive, i.e., the right to state the causes which impelled him in his opposition to our civilization and laws.

  If the Indians’ cause has been properly presented, the captives’ defense clearly stated, and the general store of information regarding vanishing types increased, I shall be satisfied.

  I desire to acknowledge valuable suggestions from Major Charles Taylor, Fort Sill, Oklahoma; Dr. J. M. Greenwood, Kansas City, Missouri; and President David R. Boyd, of the University of Oklahoma.

  I especially desire in this connection to say that without the kindly advice and assistance of President Theodore Roosevelt this book could not have been written.

  Respectfully,

  S. M. BARRETT.

  LAWTON, OKLAHOMA.

  August 14, 1906.

  Introduction

  I

  In the midst of what is currently called the Gila National Forest in New Mexico, the Middle Fork of the Gila River rushes down out of the Mogollon Mountains. Except during the high tide of spring’s runoff, it is a clear stream and, though not a wide one, it has through millennia cut a deep canyon. In places the canyon slopes are covered from summit to streamside with jumbled talus that makes walking slow and laborious. Where the soil is visible it is the color of baker’s chocolate, with here and there patches that look like ancient blood. All around tower the well-wooded slopes of the Mogollons with their heavy ponderosas, their
junipers, and groves of aspen. The light and air here are mercilessly clear, the shadows deep and razor-edged, so that the whole landscape has an almost photo-realist quality.

  This was once the heart of Chiricahua country, and historians of that division of the Apaches now believe Geronimo was born somewhere on the Middle Fork, perhaps in 1823. Readers of the narrative that follows here will quickly find, however, that Geronimo himself said he was born over in Arizona in 1829. Angie Debo, Geronimo’s most thorough biographer, suggests the birthplace might be near what is now Clifton, Arizona, though she is willing to concede that the Middle Fork of the Gila is also a possibility. This is not, as she rightly says, a merely academic matter even if at this point it can never be definitely settled, for a Chiricahua’s specific birthplace was a sacred spot to the child and his or her parents, and it was customary for the parents to bring the child back to it at some point and roll him on the ground in the four directions. Even when grown, an Apache would return to the spot and roll to the cardinal points, to maintain and revivify connection with the sources of his being. But historians incline to the New Mexican site for Geronimo’s birthplace because so many other tribal sources have insisted on it. Asa Daklugie, who translated for Geronimo in the making of the autobiography and who was his second cousin, was emphatic on this point and so were many of the Chiricahuas whom historian Eve Ball interviewed on the Mescalero Reservation.

  The discrepancy points up an important fact that must be borne in mind when reading this book, for we are dealing here with a preliterate and essentially prewhite narrative in which the dates and places on which white historiography depends are unimportant. To Geronimo the location of his birthplace was crucial; what the whites eventually came to call it was not. When he was born there wasn’t any such place as “Arizona,” or “New Mexico,” either. This was instead Apache territory to which the Mexicans had advanced some weak claims, but the Apaches honored neither the Mexicans nor their claims. Instead, they regarded them as a treacherous, untrustworthy people who often got the Apaches drunk on mescal and then attacked them. The few and scattered Mexican settlements in northern Chihuahua and Sonora were mainly considered legitimate targets for Apache raiders and warriors, stable sources of meat, guns, ammunition, blankets, and alcohol. These, Geronimo insists, were the only things Mexicans were really good for.

  II

  In fact, by the time of Geronimo’s birth the energy of Spain’s colonizing industry had long since been dissipated and the villages of northern Chihuahua and Sonora had become more outposts than outposts of progress. But to begin with, of course, it had been the Spanish who had brought the full force of Western Civilization to the New World, and when Columbus dropped anchor in the Antilles that autumn day in 1492, the lives of the Chiricahuas and all the other tribes had entered a fateful new phase—Arawaks, Aztecs, Pamlicos, Wampanoags, Mohawks, Shawnees, Lakotas, Bannocks, Yokuts....

  If Columbus was the essential mind of the West, gathering and synthesizing centuries of accumulated knowledge of navigation and exploration, then Cortés was its active arm, putting all that knowledge to practical use. On Good Friday 1519, he made his landfall near what is now Vera Cruz, burned his ships behind him, and then began on the long march toward the conquest of the Americas. In subsequently defeating the vastly superior forces of the Aztecs and then sacking their powerful empire, Cortés initiated a pattern repeated everywhere in the New World, for he succeeded partly by exploiting intertribal antagonisms; partly through the incidental spread of communicable diseases against which the natives were defenseless; and partly because of the imponderable advantages conferred by the possession of the horse and the gun.

  But there was something else that the Spanish packed along with them into Mexico, into Peru where they humbled the haughty Incas, and northward into the superb aridity of the American Southwest where they sought (vainly) other empires to conquer. This was no mightier cannon, no indefatigable charger capable of drinking the wind. Rather it was a hemispheric habit of mind, a fierce and unappeasable hunger for more: more gold, more precious gems, more slaves, more converts, spices, tribute, and more land—especially more land. The Aztecs and the Incas themselves had thought big, had built empires and enslaved their near neighbors, but, after all, their visions proved puny in comparison with those of the Spanish and other colonizing powers of the Old World, the Portuguese, the British, and the French. And in the perspective of history this difference between natives and newcomers was critical. Time and again native leaders from Moctezuma to Powhatan to Red Cloud thought they could buy off the newcomers with gold or land cessions or treaties, only to discover too late that it wasn’t possible to buy white men off: they were in this peculiar way incorruptible. At the same time, the tribes bought the whites’ promises that certain lands would be theirs forever—the Iroquois Confederacy lands, the whole of the trans-Mississippi West, the Black Hills, Indian Territory—only to learn too late that the whites wanted all of it, every acre. So, the Iroquois lands became New York State, the trans-Mississippi West became the appointed goal of Manifest Destiny, the Black Hills became South Dakota, and Indian Territory, Oklahoma. It was not, as so often charged, that the natives were stupid in their dealings with the whites, capable of selling huge tracts of land for a few dollars and a mirror. But there is no doubt they never really understood them.

  Native Americans never understood that unappeasable hunger for more that was the subtext of every one of the treaties, and the reason they didn’t was precisely because they themselves remained captive to those locales where, so they believed, the Great Spirit had so purposefully placed them. Here was the traditional Chiricahua method for the disposal of afterbirth: the mother wrapped it in the piece of cloth or blanket on which she had knelt in labor and placed it in the branches of a nearby fruit-bearing bush or tree. “May the child live,” she chanted to the tree, “to grow up and see you bear fruit many times.” Thus the site was doubly sacred and the landscapes of all the tribes were peppered with sacred spots, creating for them homelands whose hold on the people was multiple, mystical, and unbreakable. This captivity was expressed in rituals like the Chiricahua ones of birth; in elaborate, prolonged ceremonies like the Navajo Mountain Chant; in legends and myths that were always rooted in particular locales. In all of these and in the round of daily life the discrete phenomena of place spoke to the people, reminding them of who they were and from whence they had sprung. Trees, which to the civilizing whites seemed nuisances and gloomy reminders of a wilderness continent, had voices for the natives. Rocks that merely broke the boards and blades of white farmers’ plows were often for the tribes sources of Power.

  The Iroquois, for instance, told of a young hunter’s accidental encounter with the last of the Stone Giants, whose very glance could kill. When the young man sought shelter in a cave that happened to be the refuge of Ga-nus-quah, the monster spared his life because he had come in peace. But Ga-nus-quah did so on condition: that the young man dedicate his life to honoring the trees and the animals of the forest. Go, Ga-nus-quah told him at last, and teach the human beings the language of the forest and about the brotherhood of all things. The same people told of a Seneca orphan boy who was bird-hunting in the forest when he happened into a clearing where there sat a high, smooth stone with a flat top. The boy clambered up to this natural seat and was sitting there making repairs on an arrow, when the stone spoke, asking if he would like to hear some stories. So began a long saga, continued over many days and that eventually drew the entire village out to the clearing to listen. The stories the stone told were of the long ago, and in hearing them the people came to understand who they were and why they had been placed here. Thereafter, they called themselves the People of the Stone.

  With such sources of attachment to place, how could the Iroquois (the closest to imperialists North America ever fostered) have even conceptualized the conquest of far-off peoples like the Blackfeet or the Chiricahuas? What out on the Great Plains or in the Southwest would have sp
oken to them like the basswood tree from which they carved the masks of Ga-nus-quah or the granite boulders of the forest clearings? How could their gods speak to them out of alien landscapes, and where would they look to find the sources of orenda, or Power?

  This was not a problem for the whites. For many centuries their religion had been strenuously weaning them from intimate attachment to any locales, encouraging them instead to regard themselves as but sojourners on the long road that led to that point at which this chimerical earth would disappear and they would shuck it off for Heaven. They were similarly encouraged to regard as devilish any religious practices founded on natural phenomena. Thus in a real sense the drama of the conquest of the Americas was prefigured for them in the Old Testament, where they read of the wandering Israelites’ defeat of the nature-worshipping tribes who opposed them with their false gods whose feet were both of and in the clay of the ancient Near East.

  That drama seemed the more obvious and clearly defined once the English established a beachhead on the Outer Banks and the Northeast. Despite their ruthless subjugation of the tribes on the islands of the Caribbean and then in Mexico and portions of South America, the Spanish did have a Latin-Catholic kind of tolerance for heathenism and, taking the long view, believed that in time truth would triumph over error. They allowed the persistence therefore of certain aboriginal practices within the True Faith. Not so with their Protestant adversaries in North America, for whom everything had to go and no last vestiges of aboriginal ways could be suffered to endure. And as Latin-Catholic tolerance allowed some remnant tribal units to remain and even looked the other way when some Spanish began to intermarry with Indians, in North America, Protestant intolerance mowed down the tribes and their once-sacred landscapes with the indiscriminate efficiency of clear-cutting loggers. The Spanish built their cathedral directly atop the ruins of the great temple of Tenochtitlan, but behind its altar the native gods still dispensed a shadowy power to the increasingly mixed-blood parishioners. There weren’t any temples in North America, only the lands themselves, and the whites transformed these as quickly and thoroughly as they were able.