Geronimo died, 1909

17 February 2027

Fort Sill in Oklahoma in February: low stone buildings

Geronimo died on 17 February 1909 in the hospital at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He had been a prisoner of war of the United States for 22 years, and he died one. The cause was pneumonia.

He was born in June 1829 in No-Doyohn Canyon, in what was then Mexico and is now New Mexico. He was a Bedonkohe Apache of the Chiricahua, and he fought Mexican and American expansion in the Southwest for decades. His last surrender came in Skeleton Canyon in southern Arizona in the summer of 1886, to General Nelson Miles. The terms his people understood were that they would see their families and eventually go home. Instead they were shipped to Florida, and Geronimo’s band was kept apart from their families for more than two years. Many Chiricahua died of malaria in confinement. When the survivors were moved to Oklahoma in 1894, only 119 were left after eight years as prisoners of war.

At Fort Sill, Geronimo farmed and joined the Dutch Reformed Church, which expelled him for gambling. He was by then famous: he sold buttons from his coat and photographs of himself at fairs. In 1905 he rode in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade and asked the president to let his people return to the Southwest. Roosevelt refused, saying there was still too much hatred for the Chiricahua there.

In February 1909 Geronimo fell from his horse into a ditch and lay there until morning. The New York Times reported his death from Lawton, Oklahoma, on 17 February 1909, noting that he had “been held at the Fort as a prisoner of war for many years” and putting his age at “nearly 90”. Modern sources give 79. The Chiricahua were finally released in 1913, twenty-seven years after they were taken.

Sources

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