Geronimo

Geronimo (c. 1829–1909) was a leader of the Bedonkohe band of the Chiricahua Apache and the most famous Native American resistance figure of the late nineteenth century. Born near the headwaters of the Gila River in the present-day Arizona–New Mexico borderlands, he turned to war against Mexico after Mexican soldiers killed his mother, wife, and three children in 1858. For nearly three decades he led raids across the Southwest and deep into Mexico, slipping repeatedly out of the grasp of both armies and earning a reputation for cunning and endurance that made his name a byword for defiance.

After the United States confined the Chiricahua to the arid San Carlos reservation, Geronimo broke away several times, leading small bands of warriors and their families through the mountains. His final surrender to General Nelson A. Miles in September 1886—ending a campaign in which thousands of soldiers had pursued a few dozen Apache—closed the Apache Wars and the era of armed Native resistance in the Southwest. Held as a prisoner of war for the rest of his life in Florida, Alabama, and finally Oklahoma, he became a national curiosity, appearing at world's fairs and in Theodore Roosevelt's 1905 inaugural parade. He died at Fort Sill in 1909, never permitted to return to his homeland.