After prolonged resistance against tremendous odds, Geronimo, the Apache shaman and war leader, and Naiche, the hereditary Chiricahua chief, surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles near the Mexican border on September 4, 1886. It was the beginning of a new day for white settlers in the Southwest and of bitter exile for the Indians. In Geronimo and the End of the Apache Wars Lieutenant Charles B. Gatewood, an emissary of General Miles, describes in vivid circumstantial detail his role in the final capture of Geronimo at Skeleton Canyon. Gatewood offers many intimate glimpses of the Apache chief in an important account published for the first time in this collection. Another first-person narration is by Samuel E. Kenoi, who was ten years old when Geronimo went on his last warpath. A Chiricahua Apache, Kenoi recalls the removal of his people to Florida after the surrender. In other colorful chapters Edwin R. Sweeney writes about the 1851 raid of the Mexican army that killed Geronmio's mother, wife, and children; and Albert E. Wratten relates the life of his father, George Wratten, a government scout, superintendent on three reservations, and defender of the rights of the Apaches.

In the tradition of Empire of the Summer Moon, a stunningly vivid historical account of the manhunt for Geronimo and the 25-year Apache struggle for their homeland. They called him Mickey Free. His kidnapping started the longest war in American history, and both sides--the Apaches and the white invaders—blamed him for it. A mixed-blood warrior who moved uneasily between the worlds of the Apaches and the American soldiers, he was never trusted by either but desperately needed by both. He was the only man Geronimo ever feared. He played a pivotal role in this long war for the desert Southwest from its beginning in 1861 until its end in 1890 with his pursuit of the renegade scout, Apache Kid. In this sprawling, monumental work, Paul Hutton unfolds over two decades of the last war for the West through the eyes of the men and women who lived it. This is Mickey Free's story, but also the story of his contemporaries: the great Apache leaders Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, and Victorio; the soldiers Kit Carson, O. O. Howard, George Crook, and Nelson Miles; the scouts and frontiersmen Al Sieber, Tom Horn, Tom Jeffords, and Texas John Slaughter; the great White Mountain scout Alchesay and the Apache female warrior Lozen; the fierce Apache warrior Geronimo; and the Apache Kid. These lives shaped the violent history of the deserts and mountains of the Southwestern borderlands--a bleak and unforgiving world where a people would make a final, bloody stand against an American war machine bent on their destruction.

During the westward settlement, for more than twenty years Apache tribes eluded both US and Mexican armies, and by 1886 an estimated 9,000 armed men were in pursuit. Roberts (Deborah: A Wilderness Narrative) presents a moving account of the end of the Indian Wars in the Southwest. He portrays the great Apache leaders—Cochise, Nana, Juh, Geronimo, the woman warrior Lozen—and U.S. generals George Crock and Nelson Miles. Drawing on contemporary American and Mexican sources, he weaves a somber story of treachery and misunderstanding. After Geronimo's surrender in 1886, the Apaches were sent to Florida, then to Alabama where many succumbed to malaria, tuberculosis and malnutrition and finally in 1894 to Oklahoma, remaining prisoners of war until 1913. The book is history at its most engrossing. —Publishers Weekly

Parallels the lives of Gatewood and Geronimo as events drive them toward their historic meeting in Mexico in 1886--a meeting that marked the beginning of the end of the last Apache war.

"Realizing that he had more experience dealing with Native peoples than other lieutenants serving on the frontier, Gatewood decided to record his experiences. Although he died before he completed his project, the work he left behind remains an important firsthand account of his life as a commander of Apache scouts and as a military commandant of the White Mountain Indian Reservation. Louis Kraft presents Gatewood's previously unpublished account, punctuating it with an introduction, additional text that fills in the gaps in Gatewood's narrative, detailed notes, and an epilogue."--BOOK JACKET.

Britton Davis's account of the controversial "Geronimo Campaign" of 1885–86 offers an important firsthand picture of the famous Chiricahua warrior and the men who finally forced his surrender. Davis knew most of the people involved in the campaign and was himself in charge of Indian scouts, some of whom helped hunt down the small band of fugitives Robert M. Utley's foreword reevaluates the account for the modern reader and establishes its his torical background.

In the decade after the death of their revered chief Cochise in 1874, the Chiricahua Apaches struggled to survive as a people and their relations with the U.S. government further deteriorated. In From Cochise to Geronimo, Edwin R. Sweeney builds on his previous biographies of Chiricahua leaders Cochise and Mangas Coloradas to offer a definitive history of the turbulent period between Cochise's death and Geronimo's surrender in 1886. Sweeney shows that the cataclysmic events of the 1870s and 1880s stemmed in part from seeds of distrust sown by the American military in 1861 and 1863. In 1876 and 1877, the U.S. government proposed moving the Chiricahuas from their ancestral homelands in New Mexico and Arizona to the San Carlos Reservation. Some made the move, but most refused to go or soon fled the reviled new reservation, viewing the government's concentration policy as continued U.S. perfidy. Bands under the leadership of Victorio and Geronimo went south into the Sierra Madre of Mexico, a redoubt from which they conducted bloody raids on American soil. Sweeney draws on American and Mexican archives, some only recently opened, to offer a balanced account of life on and off the reservation in the 1870s and 1880s. From Cochise to Geronimo details the Chiricahuas' ordeal in maintaining their identity despite forced relocations, disease epidemics, sustained warfare, and confinement. Resigned to accommodation with Americans but intent on preserving their culture, they were determined to survive as a people.

After the end of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, the Southwest Borderlands remained hotly contested territory. Over following decades, the United States government exerted control in the Southwest by containing, destroying, segregating, and deporting indigenous peoples—in essence conducting an extended military campaign that culminated with the capture of Geronimo and the forced removal of the Chiricahua Apaches in 1886. In this book, Janne Lahti charts these encounters and the cultural differences that shaped them. Wars for Empire offers a new perspective on the conduct, duration, intensity, and ultimate outcome of one of America's longest wars. Centuries of conflict with Spain and Mexico had honed Apache war-making abilities and encouraged a culture based in part on warrior values, from physical prowess and specialized skills to a shared belief in individual effort. In contrast, U.S. military forces lacked sufficient training and had little public support. The splintered, protracted, and ferocious warfare exposed the limitations of the U.S. military and of federal Indian policies, challenging narratives of American supremacy in the West. Lahti maps the ways in which these weaknesses undermined the U.S. advance. He also stresses how various Apache groups reacted differently to the U.S. invasion. Ultimately, new technologies, the expansion of Euro-American settlements, and decades of war and deception ended armed Apache resistance. By comparing competing martial cultures and examining violence in the Southwest, Wars for Empire provides a new understanding of critical decades of American imperial expansion and a moment in the history of settler colonialism with worldwide significance.

On September 5, 1886, the entire nation rejoiced as the news flashed from the Southwest that the Apache war leader Geronimo had surrendered to Brigadier General Nelson A. Miles. With Geronimo, at the time of his surrender, were Chief Naiche (the son of the great Cochise), sixteen other warriors, fourteen women, and six children. It had taken a force of 5,000 regular army troops and a series of false promises to "capture" the band. Yet the surrender that day was not the end of the story of the Apaches associated with Geronimo. Besides his small band, 394 of his tribesmen, including his wife and children, were rounded up, loaded into railroad cars, and shipped to Florida. For more than twenty years Geronimo’s people were kept in captivity at Fort Pickens, Florida; Mount Vernon Barracks, Alabama; and finally Fort Sill, Oklahoma. They never gave up hope of returning to their mountain home in Arizona and New Mexico, even as their numbers were reduced by starvation and disease and their children were taken from them to be sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.