Somewhere in the mountains of northern Mexico, in the spring of 1886, a photographer set up his heavy camera equipment and pointed the lens at the most wanted man in the American Southwest. Geronimo knelt with a rifle, his eyes fixed on something beyond the viewfinder. The photograph that resulted would be the first of only a handful ever taken of Apaches still at war—the last free warriors of their people, captured on glass plates before the conflict that had consumed two nations finally closed around them. The campaign against Geronimo had run for years across the deserts and sierras of Arizona, New Mexico, Sonora, and Chihuahua.

Two armies hunted him—American and Mexican—and the chase would not end until he surrendered, for the final time, later that same year. His people called him Goyahkla, and the name Geronimo, it has long been said, came from Mexican soldiers who could not pronounce his Apache name. He was a Bedonkohe Apache, a band of the Chiricahua, and by the spring of 1886 he had been fighting longer than most men could remember. To understand the war that brought him to that canyon in Mexico, one has to go back more than three decades, to the year 1851, when troops from the Mexican state of Sonora killed his mother, his wife, and his three children.

Geronimo came out of that loss a leader. His people knew him by the name Goyahkla, but the white men and the Mexicans who feared him called him Geronimo. It was a war shared by others, too—chiefs whose names would become legends in their own right. Victorio, chief of the Warm Springs Apache, loomed as large as Geronimo in the eyes of the army, and he never surrendered.

He died fighting in Mexico, killed by Mexican troops, while Geronimo surrendered in the end and lived to appear at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, a prisoner of war on public display. Look at the eyes in those photographs, the presenter of the archive urges. The lines in those faces were real.

In 1861, at Apache Pass in present-day Arizona, an episode unfolded that set the Chiricahua on a war path that lasted more than a decade. Lieutenant George Bascom accused the great Chiricahua chief Cochise of kidnapping a rancher’s boy. Cochise had come to talk in the army’s tent, and the lieutenant tried to hold him prisoner instead. Cochise, it is said, cut through the tent wall and escaped.

Hostages died on both sides. After Apache Pass, the Chiricahua War began, and it would last more than ten years. Cochise’s father-in-law and ally in that war was Mangas Coloradas, chief of the Mimbreño Apache. According to tradition, he stood almost two meters tall.

In January 1863, past seventy years old, Mangas Coloradas was taken prisoner by American soldiers under a flag of truce while meeting with them. He died that same January in the custody of soldiers at Fort McLane. Witnesses later wrote that his head was boiled and his skull sent east to a phrenologist in the United States. The son of Mangas Coloradas, also named Mangas, survived and appears in a photograph from 1884.

For Cochise, the war with the Americans eventually ended in peace. In 1872, he made a treaty with General Oliver Otis Howard, one of the generals who had fought in the Civil War and who came west to negotiate. Cochise died two years later, in 1874, and his son Naiche carried on the line. Of Cochise himself, there is no proven photograph at all.

But his son Naiche, who posed for a photographer named Randall around 1884 with his wife, survives in images, and Naiche would live to wear the uniform of the army that had once hunted his father. The war passed through the hands of several chiefs. In 1879, Victorio took the Warm Springs people off the reservation and went to war. The Warm Springs band, under Victorio, launched raids that ran along both sides of the border, crossing freely between Arizona, New Mexico, Chihuahua, and Sonora.

At his side rode men and women who would become part of the legend—Nana, a Chiricahua subchief who had been born around 1800 and was already an old man when he rode with Victorio, and Lozen, Victorio’s sister, a warrior and healer. By tradition, Victorio called her the shield of his people. A blurred photograph in the archive is believed to show her face. Victorio’s war came to its end in October 1880.

Mexican troops under Colonel Joaquin Terrazas trapped his people at Tres Castillos, a small mountain in Chihuahua. About seventy-eight Apaches died in the fight and its aftermath, and sixty-eight women and children were taken prisoner. Some accounts say Victorio died by his own knife rather than be captured. Others say a Rarámuri man named Mauricio Corredor killed him.

The uncertainty has never been resolved. The war did not end with Victorio’s death. The following year, 1881, his old ally Nana—past seventy years old—rode on a raid of about a thousand miles in six weeks, striking across New Mexico and Texas before returning to Mexico. Meanwhile, Geronimo, who had a speech impediment, found that in the councils of the Sierra Madre he spoke for the man called Ju, who stuttered.

Geronimo’s voice carried the words of others, and his own. In the spring of 1882, Mexican troops caught another Apache band at Alisos Canyon, and more than seventy of Loco’s people died. Loco, chief of the Warm Springs band, had tried for years to keep his people on the reservation, but the pressures of the time kept pulling them back to war. The United States Army, fighting a guerrilla war that conventional tactics could not win, had learned a bitter lesson: it needed Apaches to hunt Apaches.

Apache scouts served the army, tracking and fighting their own people. A treaty of 1882 allowed American troops to cross into Mexico in hot pursuit, and General George Crook, the army’s most experienced Indian fighter, led scouts deep into the Sierra Madre in 1883. In July of that year, soldiers and Indian scouts had fought the Battle of Big Dry Wash in Arizona, the last significant fight between the army and Apache warriors on American soil. By 1885, Geronimo and Naiche had broken out of the reservation and fled to Mexico once more.

With them went a small band of men, women, and children—maybe three dozen people in all, moving through the mountains with terrifying speed. The army sent columns after them. Among the scouts who rode under the army’s flag was Captain Crawford, a cavalry officer who had earned the respect of both his men and his Apache scouts. In January 1886, Mexican militia killed Crawford in the mountains of Chihuahua, an accident of confused fighting that left the American expedition without its most effective leader.

Two months later, in March 1886, the chase finally seemed to have produced results. Geronimo, Naiche, and their followers agreed to meet General Crook, and on March 25, 1886, at a place in Chihuahua, the war leaders sat down with the general. Two days later, on March 27, at a remote spot known as Canyon de los Embudos, Crook and his staff met Geronimo and his people for surrender talks. The photographer C.

S. Fly carried his camera into the canyon to document the event. His photographs, taken in March 1886, are the only ones of Apaches still at war. The images show Geronimo armed, on horseback, posing with his people alongside Crook’s staff.

In one group stands a boy of eleven named Jimmy McKinn, taken by Geronimo’s band in 1885. In March 1886, when the army came to take him home, the boy fought not to be sent back. He had been with the Apaches for a year, and he wanted to stay with them. The surrender talks with Crook were recorded on Fly’s glass plates.

Geronimo’s camp before the surrender was small—about eighteen men, women, and children, gathered in the rough country of the canyon. They had agreed to come in, to lay down their arms and return to the reservation. They did not stay. On March 30, 1886, three days after posing for the photographer, Geronimo, Naiche, and a small group of their followers slipped away in the night.

Drunk on mescal sold to them by a trader, according to some accounts, and suspicious of the promises made to them, they fled back into the Sierra Madre. Crook, who had reported the surrender as a success, was humiliated. General Nelson Miles took over the hunt, and he named Geronimo the human tiger. The final chase ran through the summer of 1886.

Miles used a tactic that had been building for years: he sent Apache scouts to find Geronimo and convince him to surrender. Two Chiricahua scouts, Kayitah and Martine, tracked the band into Mexico and carried messages back and forth. On September 4, 1886, at Skeleton Canyon in Arizona, Geronimo surrendered to General Miles for the last time. He was one of the last Apache leaders to lay down arms.

The war that had begun with Cochise’s escape from an army tent in 1861, and had continued through the deaths of Mangas Coloradas and Victorio, was over. The surrender did not bring peace in the way the Apaches had hoped. The army rounded up the Chiricahua—including the scouts who had served the army so faithfully—and in two years, sent them east as prisoners of war to Florida. The families went to Fort Marion.

The warriors went to Fort Pickens. Even the scouts who had risked their lives tracking Geronimo were shipped to Florida with the rest. Naiche, hereditary chief of the Chiricahua and son of Cochise, ended up in an army scout’s coat and hat, a prisoner in uniform. The prisoners were moved again in 1894, to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where they would remain for years.

Photographs from the captivity show them in front of fences, in groups, in posed portraits. A card from 1900 shows Geronimo seated between his two nieces in Oklahoma City. The archive notes, matter-of-factly, the dates on the card: 1829 to 1909. Even in captivity, Geronimo remained a figure of public fascination.

He appeared at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901, standing between two men in suits, a prisoner on display. At the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, he drew a bow for photographers, presented as an exhibit in the anthropology section. Men and women posed in a row for visitors in front of a teepee—not the brush wickiups of their own people, but a staged backdrop.

In 1905, at the 101 Ranch in Oklahoma, he sat at the wheel of a locomobile. He posed with other chiefs—Little Plume, Buckskin Charlie, Quanah Parker, Hollow Horn Bear, and American Horse—in a photograph taken for a show, six leaders on horseback, old enemies of the army side by side. In 1906, Geronimo told the story of his life to Stephen Barrett, with Asa Daklugie as translator. The book appeared that same year, Geronimo’s Story of His Life.

By then he was seventy-eight years old, an Apache war chief in a print from 1906, and still a prisoner of war. The book noted the last of the Bedonkohe Apache, Geronimo’s own band: a handful of names remained—Lonon, Nadesta, Nat Ah Neil, and Porico. In his last years, Geronimo never went home to Arizona. He died at Fort Sill, a prisoner of war, on February 16, 1909.

He had been in army custody for nearly 23 years. Others shared his fate. The Apache Kid, a sergeant of the Army Scouts, became a convict and escaped in 1889, vanishing into the Sierra Madre. Legend says he lived in Mexico until 1910 or later, and nobody ever caught him.

Small bands in the Sierra Madre never surrendered and kept raiding ranches in Sonora and Chihuahua. In 1927, a free band killed a rancher’s wife in Sonora and took her son. An expedition went after them in 1930. The Chiricahua prisoners at Fort Sill, meanwhile, were never allowed to go home to Arizona.

Some, like the Mescalero, kept their reservation, and later a number of Chiricahua joined them there. But the people who had been sent to Florida, then to Alabama, then to Oklahoma, had been severed from their land. In 1913, more than forty years after Geronimo’s last war, many of the Chiricahua gave up their claims to return to the Southwest and accepted allotments in Oklahoma. Others went to the Mescalero Reservation in New Mexico, far from the mountains they had known.

Howard Scott Gentry’s archival photographs, gathered from studios like Rinehart’s in Omaha, Irwin’s in Chickasha, and the field cameras of Edward Curtis and C. S. Fly, preserve the faces that the wars could not erase. There is Josh, chief of the San Carlos Apache, with a wide hat and medals on his chest, looking straight into the lens.

There is Chah-do, Chiricahua with a rifle, in an 1884 photograph. There are the unnamed—an Apache man in Phoenix in 1880, an Apache in profile in Tucson in 1881, an old Apache woman photographed by George Addison in the early 1890s. There are the named—Loco, Nana, San Juan, a Mescalero Apache chief with a spear and a painted shield, Gorgonia the Mescalero medicine man, Ta-az-slath, wife of Geronimo, with his son in the early morning light of a reservation camp, Emily and Eva, niece and daughter of Geronimo, in fringed dresses from an early-1880s album. The lines in those faces were real.

Edward Curtis posed his portraits, staged them for the camera with costumes and careful composition. The archivist who assembled these photographs makes that clear. But the faces themselves were not staged. The lines were the record of lives lived in a war that lasted decades and crossed two nations.

The archive keeps their faces, and the story they told through the lens, so that the people who were hunted and imprisoned and photographed would not be forgotten.