Biography: Geronimo | the last great apache Chief, Geronimo.

(Go-Hhla-Ye; Arizona, 1829 - Oklahoma, 1909) Chief of the apaches. When in 1609 a few English immigrants founded the city of Jamestown, in Virginia, among them and the remote Pacific stretched a vast territory occupied by approximately half-million Indians of various tribes.

Geronimo

Just three hundred years later, when in 1909 died the last great apache Chief, Geronimo, genocide had virtually finished and just were reduced to near slavery conditions of degradation and misery, two hundred thousand Indians confined in inhospitable reserves. They had been defeated by millions of immigrants, rude settlers coming from all over the world, protected by the army with the blue coats, they occupied their lands.

Geronimo was born in the Arizona territory, near the border of Mexico, ancient land of the apaches, which towards 1846 passed through Washington soldiers heading south. With this occasion, a called mimbrenos Apache Chief, a peaceful Indian Dasodahae, servant near the Mimbres River in the vicinity of a hispanomexicana mission, took contact, without the slightest dislike, with a people that did not know.

Later they reach those places miners attracted by the gold of Palo Alto, and Dasodahae, a friar had put who as nickname sleeves red and which would be known by the American as Mangus Colorado, went to visit them amicably. Miners was insulted and threatened him with their arrogant revolvers and rifles in the course of a second visit, cruelly whipped him and left him half dead.

Mangus Colorado revenge was swift; in an ambush he reaped the life of ten of the miners, unleashing this all-out war which had concluded with an irreversible and definitive defeat of his people some forty years later. The different Apache tribes extended by the region (chiricauas, mescaleros, coyoteros, pinals) understood that its territory would be progressively invaded by merchants, farmers, and soldiers who abused the superiority of their weapons; then, two large heads of the same nation joined the challenge of Mangus Colorado: Shi-Ka-She, known as Cochise, and Go-Hhla-Ye, Geronimo.

Together they fought against Colonel James Carleton and his California volunteers in 1863. After a first victory of the apache, Mangus Colorado met with the enemy, without taking into account the advice of allies. Violation of the white flag of peace, officers did stop and handed him to the troop. During the night, one of the soldiers who guarded it heated to fire his machete and punctured the prisoner half asleep, which contained his pain, understanding the game of his attackers.

However, another Sentinel threw to the knees an on leno, Mangus mechanically rose and a burst of bullets, legitimised by the pretext of attempt to escape, riddled her helpless body.

During the following ten years, until 1873, was Cochise who led the fight, but the looting and the fires aimed to reduce the pride of the invader were unsuccessful. He got some significant victories, but his people also suffered bloody reprisals. For example, on April 30, 1871, eight hundred elderly, women and children apaches were exterminated at Camp Grant, taking advantage of a day in which no useful to the war man was at the camp for having left all to hunt the mountains.

Geronimo (right) with other Apache warriors

In 1873, the general Cook managed to sign a treaty with the apaches to cease hostilities, which underwent Cochise and by which some tribes found asylum in the reserve of San Carlos, in the lands that stretch along the White River, but others, such as the chiricahuas, fled to Mexico. The latter, among whose leaders emphasized the vigorous Geronimo, occupied impregnable positions in the mountain massif of Candelaria and for a time were allies to the mescaleros, directed by Vittorio, who would die in combat in 1880, brother moment that Geronimo also took the leadership of the people.

His bands increased violence by the territory of Sonora in March 1883, while another Indian Chief, Chato, imposed the white terror in Arizona. In this way, the Rio Grande border became a living hell and general George Cook decided to intervene again, this time aided by a deserter chiricahua, Panayotishn, which offered to serve as a guide to the secret refuge of the apaches. On May 8, 1883, the company of the 6th Cavalry, reinforced by two hundred Indian guides, penetrated in Sierra Madre. A month later, Geronimo and Chato were ordered to surrender. In July, they went to the reserve of San Carlos where they would two peaceful years.

Exhausted by a war without hope, the apaches seemed resigned to costly and precarious lifestyle imposed by the victors, who at first paid at a reasonable price fodder and firewood that Indians cut down forests. However, in May 1885, hundreds of dissidents agglutinated around the valiant Geronimo, Nachez, second son of Cochise, and Chihuahua sleeves, fled from the reservation and took refuge in the nearby mountains New Mexico.

For some time they arreciaron attacks, but the U.S. Government did not hesitate to send their troops, under the command of Captain Crawford, to reduce the rebels. Months later, Geronimo and Nachez requested an interview with the military enemy as Chihuahua, resentful Mangus Colorado stem, stood in front of a dozen warriors irreducible and oblivious to any negotiations.

Still, Crawford accepted the conditions of surrender of Geronimo and Nachez, but then something no one expected happened. It was at this time when came into scene unexpectedly Mexicans, who surrounded the camp of the Indian guides employed by the army and were handed over to a real orgy of blood in which perished even Captain Crawford. The Indian chiefs were unable to flee, but this incident cost out the military responsible for highest in the area, general Cook, who was immediately dismissed and had to cede his post to general Nelson A. thousands.

After a frantic pursuit of the resistant, new responsible for repression, less sensitive to the sufferings of the apaches than its predecessor, attained that Geronimo and Nachez surrendered for the second time in June 1886 and did not grant to the vanquished another statute that the delivered to plunder wrongdoers, therefore condemned to forced labour.

Captured Geronimo along with
other Apache warriors (1886)

The village of Geronimo, which if the figures don't lie had 20,000 members in 1871, had been reduced to a few hundred by 1890. There was no for the proud apache Chief no engage in battle and no hope for the future. The twenty-three years of life remaining you should serve only so it apurase to the dregs the Goblet of the defeat and that its new owners escarneciesen it turning it into object of curiosity and unscrupulous hacks pasture.

The survivors were malviviendo initially in the reserve of San Carlos, where in 1888 Frederick Remington described them thus: "apaches were always the most dangerous of all the Indians of the West. In the burning desert and rocky vast extensions of his country, no white man could never catch them during a Chase". But there, in San Carlos, they fed half of their meager crops and half of the Government rationed charity, dressed in rags and his honor lay by the floor, broken and sore memory for its dead heroes.

Two humiliating episodes remaining you by living to Geronimo before his death in 1909. The first, his opportunistic presence in the parade which was organized in Washington because of the election as President of Theodore Roosevelt; the second, at the age of seventy-seven, the resignation to the gods of their ancestors to embrace Christianity.

Geronimo, an old red skin harassed since her youth by the most powerful invaders, became in the last years of his life to become a symbol for brand new American national consciousness. Harsh terms imposed by Hollywood was responsible for dispossessing him of the last vestiges of their dignity and thus went to swell the epic of the pioneers, both more glorious the more fearsome, wild and courageous had been enemies who had had to face. The strange fate of Geronimo was finally reach an undesirable universal popularity and feed one of the most misleading mythologies of 20th century.

The film, following the precedent of the circus and other popular shows, became mere object of mass and morbid curiosity of a fair public Indians. From Edison, which already in 1884 used them in pre-cinema productions such as Sioux Ghost Dance, until the current telefilms, a fallacious mythology has been erected to coast his secular humiliation. However, their ranks always brave warriors, jealous of its independence, which resisted the violent invasion of those lands were found by them, far reaching their memory, their ancestors had always ridden free and proud. It was Geronimo, which in fiction was feared by travelers of diligence it (John Ford, 1939) and starred in numerous films such as Geronimo (Paul Sloan, 1939) and savage (George Marshall, 1951), but in reality was last and noble a village chief edging by history, abolished by a new episode of the relentless Chronicle of infamy.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas