NewMexiKen just posted this last year, but I believe in recycling to help protect the planet.
NewMexiKen has been reading Angie Debo’s excellent 1976 biography of Geronimo. I recommend it. Here’s a couple of trivial items I thought were interesting.
When Geronimo’s and Naiche’s (son of Cochise) bands were consolidated at Mount Vernon Barracks, Alabama, in 1887 and 1888, the post doctor was Walter Reed. Yes, THE Walter Reed.
A school was eventually set up at the Alabama camp, where the Apaches were prisoners of war — men, women and children. Geronimo reportedly monitored the children’s attendance and deportment, walking up and down the aisles with a stick.
I’m thinking many of our schools today could use Geronimo patrolling their classrooms.
The Apaches were relocated to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894.
Update: Finishing the biography, amused to learn when that Geronimo traveled he would sell photos and autographs and even the buttons off his coat. He’d sell the buttons to people gathered to see him come by at the train station, then before the next station he’d sew on a new set of buttons.
Geronimo also rode in Teddy Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in March 1905. The Apache would have been about 75, nearly 76. It was said he could still vault onto his pony. This NewMexiKen post has a photo of Geronimo taken at the St. Louis Fair in 1904. He died in 1909, about age 80.
Nino Chochise, one of Naiche’s sons, lived to be 101. He co-owned a cafe in Tombstone in the 1950s, when he and my grandpa–his business partner- were both relatively young men who had left Oklahoma as boys and settled in southeast AZ.
Grandpa outlived him, but just barely, and we visited him in his trailer in the Huachucas several times a year. Interesting guy. Had a lot of stories about that school and his grandpa keeping order throughout the settlement.