Geronimo To Surrender example essay topic

... wn until May 1883, when Crook located his base camp and took the women and children hostage. The last of Geromino's band finally gave themselves up in March 1884. In May 1885 Geronimo and other leaders were caught consuming home-brewed corn beer, a violation of army rules. While the authorities debated his punishment, Geronimo cut the telegraph wires, killed a ranching family, and slipped back into his old haunts in Mexico's Sierra Madre with 134 warriors.

In March 1886, Crook finally managed a two-day parley with Geronimo in Mexico's Canon de los Embudos. Geronimo agreed to surrender and accept a two-year imprisonment at Ft Marion, 2,000 miles away in Florida. But along the way, while being led to Ft Bowie by Apache scouts, Geronimo and a handful of his followers broke free again. The army at this point replaced Crook with Gen. Nelson Miles, who committed 5,000 troops and 400 Apache scouts to the recapture of Geronimo. Even when confronted by a force of this magnitude... Geronimo's band of 38 men, women, and children still eluded their pursuers for six months.

When Apache scouts finally talked Geronimo into laying down his gun in early September 1886, the surrender was bloodless and strangely anticlimactic. Recounted Geronimo's cousin Jason Betzinex:' Kayitah [an Apache scout] delivered General Miles' message. The general wanted them to give themselves up without any guarantees. The Indians seemed stunned. Finally Geronimo's half-brother, White Horse, spoke out. 'I am going to surrender.

My wife and children have been captured. I love them, and want to be with them. ' Then another brother said that if White Horse was going, he would go too. In a moment the third and youngest brother made a similar statement. Geronimo stood for a few moments without speaking. At length he said slowly, 'I don't know what to do.

I have been depending heavily on you three men. You have been great fighters in battle. If you are going to surrender, there is no use in my going without you. I will give up with you. ' ' Almost immediately Gen Miles had Geronimo's band taken into custody-along with the Apache scouts who had tracked him down-and put on a train for Florida.

The destination was Ft Marion, the old Spanish fortress in St. Augustine where the army imprisoned its most dangerous Indians. There Geronimo would spend the next eight years. Released from confinement in 1894, the old guerilla accepted an offer from the Kiowa and Comanche to share their reservation in Indian Territory and spent his final years as a farmer outside Oklahoma's Ft Sill. He joined the Dutch Reformed church, where he taught Sunday school. Later, with government approval, Geronimo spent a year with a Wild West show and appeared in Omaha, Buffalo, New York, and at the St. Louis World's Fair, where he made money selling his photographs and bows and arrows. In 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt invited him to Washington DC to ride in the inaugural parade.

But to the day of his death in 1909, Arizona never considered Geronimo safe enough to let him set foot in his homeland again. Around 1917 after the Selective Service Act was passed, many Native Americans had rushed to join the armed forces. By war's end, about 17,000 were in uniform-close to 30% of adult Indian males, double the national average. Commanding General John J. Pershing authorized an Apache company of scouts: some of them were descendants of warriors Pershing himself had fought on the Southwestern frontier 30 years earlier.

In protest of Nazi Germany's aggression in Europe, the Apache along with the Navajo, Papago and Hopi, banned the swastika, an ancient native symbol, from their blanket and basket designs. Apache Miguel Flores and Hopi Fred Kabotie signed the document proclaiming the ban in February 1940. To the Apaches, Geronimo embodied the very essence of the Apache values, aggressiveness, courage in the face of difficulty. These qualities inspired fear in the settlers of Arizona and New Mexico. The Chiricahuas were mostly migratory following the seasons, hunting and farming. When food was scarce, it was the custom to raid neighboring tribes.

Raids and vengeance were an honorable way of life among the tribes of this region. By the time American settlers began arriving in the area, the Spanish had become entrenched in the area, they were always looking for Indian slaves and Christian converts. It was the Spanish who raided and killed Geronimo's young wife and child and reportedly caused such a hatred of the whites that he vowed to kill as many as he could. In 1876, the U.S. Army tried to move the Chiricahuas onto a reservation, but Geronimo fled to Mexico eluding the troops for over a decade. Sensationalized press reports exaggerated Geronimo's activities, making him the most feared and infamous Apache. The last few months of the campaign required over 5,000 soldiers and 500 scouts to track down Geronimo and his band.

Geronimo finally surrendered on the urging of his followers in September after the Army promised that after a period of time he would be able to return to Arizona. Geronimo and his followers were shipped to St. Augustine, Florida where many died from malaria or tuberculosis. Geronimo never again saw his beloved Arizona and died a prisoner many years later on a reservation in Oklahoma. In 1874, some 4,000 Apaches were forcibly moved by U.S. authorities to a reservation at San Carlos, a barren wasteland in east-central Arizona. Deprived of traditional tribal rights, short on rations and homesick, they turned to Geronimo and others who led them in the depredations that plunged the region into turmoil and bloodshed. In the early 1870's, Lieutenant Colonel George F. Crook, commander of the Department of Arizona, had succeeded in establishing relative peace in the territory.

The management of his successors, however, was disastrous, and spurred by Geronimo, hundreds of Apaches left the reservation to resume their war against the whites. In 1882, Crook was recalled to Arizona to conduct a campaign against the Indians. Geronimo surrendered in January 1884, but took flight from the San Carlos reservation in May 1885, accompanied by 35 men, 8 boys and 101 women. Crook, along with scouts Tom Horn and Mickey Free (the white child Cochise was falsely accused of abducting) set out in pursuit, and 10 months later, on March 27, 1886, Geronimo surrendered at Ca~n'on de Los Embudos in Sonora, Mexico.

Near the border, however, fearing that they would be murdered once they crossed into U.S. territory, Geronimo and a small band bolted. As a result, Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles replaced Crook as commander on April 2. During this final campaign, at least 5,000 white soldiers and 500 Indian auxiliaries were employed at various times in the capture of Geronimo's small band. Five months and 1,645 miles later, Geronimo was tracked to his camp in the Sonora mountains. At a conference on Sept. 3, 1886, at Skeleton Canyon in Arizona, Miles induced Geronimo to surrender once again, promising him that, after an indefinite exile in Florida, he and his followers would be permitted to return to Arizona.

Before he died at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, Feb. 17, Geronimo has the distinction of being the last American Indian to formally surrender to the United States government -- but only after a long struggle. Geronimo was the leader of the Chiricahua band of the Apache tribe in what is now southwest New Mexico, southeast Arizona, and northern Mexico. He grew up in a time of intense regional conflict between Mexicans, Americans, and Indians. In 1858 Mexican soldiers killed his mother, wife, and children, and Geronimo vowed to take revenge. No settler on either side of the border -- and no fellow Indian -- was immune to his attacks.

Both the Mexican and the American armies, aided by rival Apaches, pursued him for more than ten years. Though they captured Geronimo twice, he escaped both times. In 1886 Geronimo surrendered for the last time, but on his own terms. He remained in the custody of the army, and after a brief imprisonment, he worked as an army scout in Oklahoma. Later in life, with few other resources available, Geronimo capitalized on his fame, selling souvenirs and appearing at public events such as Teddy Roosevelt's 1905 inaugural parade. Said a judge who presided at his trial, 'There is not, probably, in the history or tradition or myths of the human race another instance of such prolonged resistance against such tremendous odds.

' Geronimo (1829-1909), Native American, chief of the Chiricahua Apache tribe, born in present-day Clifton, Arizona. After his wife, children, and mother were killed by Mexicans in 1858, he participated in a number of raids against Mexican and American settlers, but eventually settled on a reservation. In 1876 the U.S. government attempted to move the Chiricahua from their traditional home to San Carlos, New Mexico; Geronimo then began ten years of intermittent raids against white settlements, alternating with periods of peaceful farming on the San Carlos reservation. In March 1886, the American general George Crook captured Geronimo and forced a treaty under which the Chiricahua would be relocated in Florida; two days later Geronimo escaped and continued his raids. General Nelson Miles then took over the pursuit of Geronimo, who was chased into Mexico and captured the following September. The Native Americans were sent to Florida, Alabama, and finally to Fort Sill, Oklahoma Territory, where they settled as farmers.

Geronimo eventually adopted Christianity. He took part in the inaugural procession of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. Geronimo dictated his memoirs, published in 1906 as Geronimo's Story of His Life. He died at Fort Sill on February 17, 1909.