It is late afternoon in the early spring of 1851, outside the Mexican town of Janos in Chihuahua. A young Apache man, about twenty-one years old, is walking back from town with the other men of his band after a day of trading. There is peace between his people and this town; that is why they came. The camp lies just outside, where his mother waits, along with his young wife, Alopee, and their three small children.

On the road, they meet women and children running toward them. Soldiers came while the men were gone, they say. Mexican soldiers from another state. They killed the guards, took the horses and guns, burned the supplies, and killed many of the women and children.

The men scatter and hide until dark. Then, one by one in silence, they slip into a thicket by the river, the meeting place. Sentries are posted, and everyone is counted. Years later, as an old man, he will describe that moment in his own words: he found that his aged mother, his young wife, and his three small children were among the slain.

At that moment, his name is Goyakla. It means the one who yawns. The world will come to know him by another name, one the Mexican soldiers gave him: Geronimo. He was born in June 1829 near Turkey Creek, a branch of the Gila River in the mountains of what is now New Mexico.

At the time, the land was claimed by Mexico. The Apaches never accepted that claim. His people were the Bedonkohe, one of the bands of the Chiricahua Apaches. His grandfather, Maco, had been their chief.

He had three brothers and four sisters. His parents gave him the name Goyakla, the one who yawns—not a warrior’s name, but the kind of name you give a sleepy baby. He grew up the way Apache boys grew up: running long distances with water in his mouth so he would learn to breathe through his nose, learning to hunt, ride, track, and survive in some of the harshest country on earth. When his father died, his mother took him to live with the Chiahenne, the band of Victorio and Lozen.

When he was about seventeen, he married a woman named Alopee. Over the next few years, they had three children. The world those children were born into was defined by war. The Apaches and the Mexicans had been fighting on and off for more than a century.

Apache bands raided Mexican villages for horses, cattle, and captives. Between 1820 and 1835 alone, by one estimate, around five thousand Mexicans died in Apache raids, and a hundred settlements were destroyed. Mexico answered with something just as terrible: in 1835, the state governments began paying bounties for Apache scalps—men’s, women’s, children’s. Professional scalp hunters roamed the borderlands, where an Apache scalp was money.

But the war was not the same everywhere. Mexico was not a single government on the frontier. The states of Sonora and Chihuahua had different policies. In 1851, some Apache bands were at peace with towns in Chihuahua, coming in to trade and camping nearby.

That was where Goyakla’s family was at peace outside Janos. On March 5, 1851, a column of about four hundred soldiers from Sonora under Colonel José María Carrasco crossed into Chihuahua and struck the Apache camp outside Janos while the men were in town trading. Carrasco later claimed he had followed a band of raiders who had attacked Sonora, stolen livestock, and beaten the local militia. Maybe some of the raiders were there.

But the people in that camp when the soldiers came were mostly women, children, and a few guards. The Apaches remembered the place as Kaskiyeh. Back in the thicket by the river, the men counted their dead in the dark. A young husband learned, one name at a time, that everyone he loved was gone: his mother, his wife, his three children.

In his autobiography more than fifty years later, he described what came after. The band had no weapons and no horses, and it was deep in enemy country. Their chief, Mangas Coloradas, ordered them to start for home that same night. Goyakla stood there until everyone had passed.

He had no weapon. He did not pray. He did not decide anything. He had, as he put it, no purpose left.

When they reached their home country, he did what Apache custom required when someone died: he burned everything that had belonged to his family—their lodge, his wife’s things, the children’s toys. Then, he said, he made a vow to take revenge on the Mexicans. He kept that vow for the rest of his life. Revenge among the Apaches was not something one man did alone.

Mangas Coloradas sent the young widower to other bands to ask for help. One of the leaders he went to was a Chiricahua chief named Cochise. The bands agreed, and the next year they rode south into Sonora to answer Kaskiyeh. Somewhere in the battle that followed, the young man did something the Mexican soldiers never forgot.

Ignoring a storm of bullets, he charged them again and again with nothing but a knife. The soldiers began to cry out a name: Geronimo. Some historians believe they were calling on Saint Jerome to save them. Others think it was simply the closest they could come to pronouncing his Apache name.

Either way, the name stuck. Goyakla, the one who yawns, became Geronimo. The most famous Native American name in history was not given to him by his own people. It was given to him by the soldiers he was killing in revenge for the soldiers who had killed his family.

His own people came to believe he had something more than courage: they believed he had power. Other Apaches said he could know about events far away as they were happening, and that he could sense what was going to happen before it did. He was a medicine man as much as a warrior. He was never a chief.

He led raids and war parties, often thirty to fifty warriors at a time, but many Apaches did not even like him much. They respected him, feared him a little, and did not always want to follow him. But when Geronimo said the soldiers were coming, they believed him. For the rest of his life, Geronimo hated Mexicans with a hatred that never cooled.

He and his followers attacked almost any group of Mexicans they met. He said so himself without apology in his autobiography: he had killed many Mexicans, did not know how many, because often he did not count them, and some of them were not worth counting. They had always been treacherous and malicious, he said. He had reasons for saying that.

In 1873, after months of fighting, his people made a peace treaty with the Mexicans at Casas Grandes. Once the terms were agreed, the Mexican troops brought out mescal and shared it with the Apaches. When the Apaches were drunk, the soldiers attacked, killing around twenty of them. Another peace, another betrayal.

Then the Americans came. In 1861 at Apache Pass, a young lieutenant named Bascom tried to take Cochise hostage over a kidnapped boy that Cochise did not have. Cochise’s relatives were hanged, and the Chiricahua turned the hatred they had always saved for Mexicans on the Americans as well. Geronimo had been there.

Years later, he remembered that he had once shaken hands with the soldiers at Apache Pass and promised to be brothers. About a year later, he said, came the attack in the tent. After that, they went into the mountains and came back to fight. For the next twenty-five years, Geronimo would fight both countries.

By the 1870s, the government was forcing the Chiricahua onto reservations. The worst of them was San Carlos in Arizona: hot, flat, crowded, full of malaria. Rations were often short because corrupt agents stole them. For people who had lived free in the mountains for generations, it was a slow death.

Three times Geronimo broke out—in 1878, in 1881, and in 1885. Each time he led his followers across Arizona and New Mexico and into the Sierra Madre of Mexico. Each time, the breakouts left a trail of dead behind them: ranchers, miners, travelers, families. The raiders often killed everyone they met so no one could report which way they had gone.

In 1883, while Geronimo raided in Sonora, a war party under Chato rode north into Arizona and New Mexico for guns and ammunition. On the Lordsburg road, they killed a judge and his wife and carried off their six-year-old son. Geronimo himself explained why he kept leaving. Years later, General Crook asked him why he had left the reservation.

Geronimo reminded him what he had been promised: that he could live on the reservation the same as white people lived. One year, he said, he raised a crop of corn and stored it. The next year he planted oats. When the crop was almost ready to harvest, he heard that the soldiers had orders to put him in prison and to kill him if he resisted.

If they had left him alone, he said, he would have been doing well. Instead, the Americans and the Mexicans were hunting him with soldiers. That was probably not the whole truth—Geronimo also loved the old life of raiding and never stopped—but it was not a lie either. In May 1885, Geronimo broke out for the last time.

At the end, his band was tiny: thirty-eight people, men, women, and children. One of them was Lozen, the woman warrior. Against them, the governments of two countries put thousands of soldiers into the field. For more than a year, those thirty-eight people evaded them.

They became the most famous Native Americans of their time. American newspapers called Geronimo the worst Indian who ever lived. The governor of Sonora claimed that in the last five months of the campaign, Geronimo’s band of sixteen warriors had killed between five and six hundred Mexicans. That number is almost certainly inflated, but nobody on the border doubted that the killing was real.

In January 1886, Apache scouts working for General Crook found the band’s camp in the Sierra Madre and captured their horses. The exhausted Apaches agreed to talk. Then, of all things, Mexican militia attacked the American scouts by mistake and killed their commander, Captain Emmet Crawford. In March 1886, at a place called Cañon de los Embudos—the canyon of the funnels, just south of the border—Geronimo met General Crook to discuss surrender.

A photographer from Tombstone named C. S. Fly was there. Over three days, he took about fifteen photographs, the only known photographs ever taken of American Indians who were still at war with the United States.

In one of them, at his own request, Geronimo stands with two of his sons. Geronimo agreed to Crook’s terms. Then that night, a man sold the Apaches whiskey and told them they would be murdered as soon as they crossed the border. Geronimo, Naiche, and their followers slipped away into the dark.

Crook was humiliated. He asked to be relieved of his command. His replacement, General Nelson Miles, sent five thousand soldiers into the field. But it was not soldiers that ended the war.

It was two Apache women, Lozen and Dahteste, carrying messages back and forth. And it was a lieutenant named Charles Gatewood, who spoke some Apache, whom Geronimo knew and trusted, and who walked into the band’s camp with almost no escort. Gatewood gave them the news that broke them: the rest of the Chiricahua, their families, had already been rounded up and sent away to Florida. If they wanted to see their wives and children again, they would have to go, too.

On September 4, 1886, at Skeleton Canyon in southern Arizona, Geronimo surrendered to General Miles for the last time. To this day, historians argue about what Geronimo was promised there. Geronimo insisted for the rest of his life that his surrender had been conditional: that he and his people had been told they would be sent to join their families, held for a time, and then allowed to return to their homeland in Arizona. He said there were witnesses.

The Army’s official position was different. General Oliver Howard said the surrender was accepted as that of a dangerous outlaw, with no conditions at all. Whatever was said, here is what happened. The Army rushed Geronimo and his band onto a train out of Arizona so fast that the civil authorities who wanted to put him on trial and hang him had no chance to stop it.

They were held for about six weeks at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Then the men were sent to Fort Pickens, an old brick fortress on an island off Pensacola, Florida—not with their families, who were sent somewhere else. And the Apache scouts, the men who had served the Army loyally and tracked Geronimo through the Sierra Madre, making the surrender possible, were sent to Florida as prisoners too. In Florida, the Apaches died, as one newspaper put it, like flies in the frost.

Local businessmen quickly realized there was money to be made: hundreds of tourists a day were led into the fort to stare at the bloodthirsty Geronimo in his cell. Meanwhile, hundreds of Apache children were taken from their families and sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. More than a third of them quickly died of tuberculosis. In 1888, the prisoners were moved to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, where at least the families were reunited.

There, in the damp low woods, about a quarter of them died of tuberculosis. Lozen, the woman who had carried his peace messages, was one of them. She died in Alabama in 1889 and was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1894, the surviving Chiricahua were moved one more time, to Fort Sill in Oklahoma.

On the train ride west, tourists crowded around the famous prisoner, wanting a souvenir. Geronimo figured out very quickly what they wanted. He would cut a button off his shirt and sell it for twenty-five cents, or take off his hat and sell that. When the train pulled into the next depot, he bought more buttons, sewed them on, and bought more hats to sell.

The most feared warrior on the continent was selling pieces of his clothing to strangers on a train. At Fort Sill, he was given a plot of land and he farmed. But he was still a prisoner of war, and the government had discovered that Geronimo was worth something. In 1898, he was taken to the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in Omaha, where he became one of the biggest attractions.

After that, for the rest of his life, he was in demand: the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901, the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. Always under Army guard, he wore traditional clothing, posed for photographs, and sold his crafts and his autographs. He even joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, where Indians were presented to the audience as lying, treacherous, murderous monsters so that paying customers could see how the savage had been tamed.

And here is the strangest part: Geronimo seemed to enjoy some of it. In his autobiography, he said he had not wanted to go to the St. Louis fair, but that he was glad he went. He saw many interesting things and learned much about white people.

They were kind and peaceful, he said. During the whole fair, no one had tried to harm him. If he had been among the Mexicans, he added, he would have had to defend himself often. Even at the World’s Fair, at the age of seventy-five, he was still thinking about the Mexicans.

In March 1905, Geronimo rode a horse down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D. C. , in the inaugural parade of President Theodore Roosevelt, alongside five other famous Native American leaders. The crowds went wild.

A few days later, he got a meeting with the president and asked for the one thing he had wanted for nineteen years: to free the Chiricahua from their status as prisoners of war and to let them go home to Arizona. He told the president that his people were living in an unhealthy place where they sickened and died. “Great Father, my hands are tied as with a rope,” he said. Roosevelt said no.

He told Geronimo through an interpreter that he had a bad heart, that he had killed many of Roosevelt’s people and burned villages, that he had not been a good Indian, that the people of Arizona still remembered, and that they would have to wait and see. Geronimo went back to Fort Sill. That same year, a local school superintendent named S. M.

Barrett offered to help Geronimo tell his life story. The Army commander at Fort Sill tried to stop it, saying Geronimo deserved to be hanged, not celebrated. Barrett appealed directly to Roosevelt, who allowed it. Geronimo told his story in Spanish, his way, refusing to answer questions or change a word.

He dedicated the book to President Roosevelt and ended it with one more plea to be allowed to go home. He was never allowed. In February 1909, Geronimo was about seventy-nine years old. One cold night, he was riding home and was thrown from his horse.

He lay on the frozen ground all night. Some accounts say he had been drinking. A friend found him the next morning, very sick. Pneumonia set in.

On his deathbed, he told his nephew that he regretted his decision to surrender. His last words, as they were later reported, were: “I should have never surrendered. I should have fought until I was the last man alive. ”

On February 17, 1909, Geronimo died in the hospital at Fort Sill, still a prisoner of war—twenty-three years after the promise at Skeleton Canyon.

He was buried at Fort Sill among the graves of other Apache prisoners of war. The Chiricahua were finally freed in 1913, four years after his death. Some stayed in Oklahoma. Others went to the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico.

Almost none were ever allowed to go back to Arizona. But even death did not end the story. During World War I, six members of Yale University’s famous secret society, Skull and Bones, served as Army volunteers at Fort Sill. One of them was Prescott Bush, the grandfather of a future president.

In 2006, a historian found a letter written in 1918 by one Skull and Bones member to another. It claimed that the skull of Geronimo the Terrible, along with some of his bones and other items from his grave, had been dug up by members of the club and was now safe inside their headquarters at Yale, a building the members called the Tomb. Is it true? Nobody knows.

The man who wrote the letter was not at Fort Sill himself. A local historian has pointed out that Geronimo’s grave was unmarked in 1918. The Army says there is no evidence his remains are anywhere but in the grave. The chairman of the Fort Sill Apache tribe has called the story a hoax.

In 1928, the Army covered the grave in concrete and put up a stone monument, which makes it almost impossible to check. In 2009, a hundred years after his death, people claiming descent from Geronimo sued the U. S. government and Skull and Bones, asking for his remains to be returned.

In 2010, a court dismissed the case. The honest answer is that we do not know for certain whether Geronimo’s skull is under the concrete at Fort Sill or sitting in a glass case in a secret building in Connecticut. The horrifying truth about Geronimo is not that he killed. He did, many times, and so did the soldiers who hunted him.

That was the war on that border for two centuries, on every side. The horrifying truth is what was done with him. Mexican soldiers killed his mother, his wife, and his children in a camp that was at peace, and then gave him the name the whole world would remember him by. The Americans took that name and turned it into a monster.

Then, when he finally surrendered on the promise of going home, they kept him in captivity for twenty-three years. They sold tickets to look at him. They paraded him for a president. When he asked to go home, they told him he had a bad heart.

And after he died, they kept using his name. Paratroopers shouted it as they jumped out of planes. In 2011, the U. S.

military used “Geronimo” as a code word during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, outraging many Native Americans, including Geronimo’s own descendants. Go back to that thicket by the river near Janos one more time. A young man counting his dead in the dark: a mother, a wife, three small children. He spent the next fifty-eight years trying to get back to the country where he had once been happy—fighting for it, breaking out of reservations for it, begging a president for it.

He never got there.