page_title: Geronimo
section_title: Prisoner of war
hierarchical_section_title: Geronimo / Life after the massacre at Kas-Ki-Yeh / Prisoner of war
caption_attribution_description: English: Geronimo in a 1904 Locomobile Model C, taken at the Miller brothers' 101 Ranch, located southwest of Ponca City, Oklahoma, USA
context_page_description: Geronimo was a prominent leader and medicine man from the Bedonkohe band of the Apache tribe. From 1850 to 1886, Geronimo joined with members of three other Chiricahua Apache bands—the Tchihende, the Tsokanende and the Nednhi—to carry out numerous raids, as well as fight against Mexican and U.S. military campaigns in the northern Mexico states of Chihuahua and Sonora and in the southwestern American territories of New Mexico and Arizona. Geronimo's raids and related combat actions were a part of the prolonged period of the Apache–United States conflict, which started with American settlement in Apache lands following the end of the war with Mexico in 1848.
  While well known, Geronimo was not a chief of the Chiricahua or the Bedonkohe band. However, since he was a superb leader in raiding and warfare, he frequently led large numbers of men beyond his own following. At any one time, he would be in command of about 30 to 50 Apaches.
  During Geronimo's final period of conflict from 1876 to 1886, he "surrendered" three times and accepted life on the Apache reservations in Arizona.
context_section_description: Geronimo and other Apaches, including the Apache scouts who had helped the army track him down, were sent as prisoners to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. The Army held them there for about six weeks before they were sent to Fort Pickens, in Pensacola, Florida, and his family was sent to Fort Marion (the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida). This prompt action prevented the Arizona civil authorities from intervening to arrest and try Geronimo for the death of the many Americans who had been killed during the previous decades of raiding.
  "In that alien climate," the Washington Post reported, "the Apache died 'like flies at frost time.' Businessmen there soon had the idea to have Geronimo serve as a tourist attraction, and hundreds of visitors daily were let into the fort to lay eyes on the 'bloodthirsty' Indian in his cell."
  While the POWs were in Florida, the government relocated hundreds of their children from their Arizona reservation to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. More than a third of the students quickly perished from tuberculosis, "died as though smitten with the plague", the Post reported.
  The Chiricahuas remained at Fort Pickens in Florida until 1888 when they were relocated to Mt. Vernon Barracks in Alabama, where they were reunited with their families. After 1/4 of the population died of tuberculosis, the Chiricahuas, including Geronimo, were relocated to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894; they built villages scattered around the post based on kindred groups. Geronimo, like other Apaches, was given a plot of land on which he took up farming activities.
  On the train ride to Fort Sill, many tourists wanted a memento of Geronimo, so they paid 25 cents for a button that he cut off his shirt or a hat he took off his head. As the train would pull into depots along the way, Geronimo would buy more buttons to sew on and more hats to sell.
  In 1898 Geronimo was part of a Chiricahua delegation from Fort Sill to the Trans-Mississippi International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska. Previous newspaper accounts of the Apache Wars had impressed the public with Geronimo's name and exploits, and in Omaha he became a major attraction. The Omaha Exposition gave Geronimo celebrity status, and for the rest of his life he was in demand as an attraction in fairs large and small. The two largest were the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, New York, in 1901, and the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Under Army guard, Geronimo dressed in traditional clothing and posed for photographs and sold his crafts.
  After the fair, Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show brokered an agreement with the government to have Geronimo join the show, again under Army guard. The Indians in Pawnee Bill’s show were depicted as "lying, thieving, treacherous, murderous" monsters who had killed hundreds of men, women and children and would think nothing of taking a scalp from any member of the audience, given the chance. Visitors came to see how the "savage" had been "tamed", and they paid Geronimo to take a button from the coat of the vicious Apache "chief". (Geronimo was not a chief.) The shows put a good deal of money in his pockets and allowed him to travel, though never without government guards.
  In President Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 Inaugural Parade Geronimo rode horseback down Pennsylvania Avenue with five real Indian chiefs, who wore full headgear and painted faces. The intent, one newspaper stated, was to show Americans "that they have buried the hatchet forever." They created a sensation and brought the crowds along the parade route to their feet.  Later that same week Geronimo met with the President and made a request for the Chiricahuas at Fort Sill to be relieved of their status as prisoners of war, and allowed to return to their homeland in Arizona. President Roosevelt refused, referring to the continuing animosity in Arizona for the deaths of civilian men, women, and children associated with Geronimo's raids during the prolonged Apache Wars. Through an interpreter, Roosevelt told Geronimo that the Indian had a "bad heart
caption: Geronimo in a 1905 Locomobile Model C, taken at the Miller brothers' 101 Ranch located southwest of Ponca City, Oklahoma, June 11, 1905.
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