Geronimo

Chokole was about to close her eyes when a swift shadow shot over the ledge. The shadow alarmed the buzzards. They stumbled away, jumping and hopping, flapping into the air. Chokole looked up from the shadow. It was a great eagle. He was tilting, turning against the wind and coming back. This time, he stretched taloned feet and braked against the air, landing close to Chokole. She saw him turn his head, looking at her. He kicked at the sand on the ledge. Chokole blinked her eyes. It was Geronimo.

This is the Geronimo we all know, the once-notorious Apache, transformed and transfigured by the imagination of novelist Forrest Carter. He has become, for Carter, an Indian George Washington who battles the United States Army to a standstill with a handful of warriors; an Apache Moses who, under instructions from Jesus Christ to Chokole just before the eagle arrives, leads the remnants of his band to a Promised Land - a hidden valley in the mountains of Mexico. His people suspect that he is "a Shaman of War returned from the past" and credit him with the ability to predict future events and to know about other happenings going on far away.

Carter goes even farther. When Mexican troops surround the band, hiding in a thicket, and light a circle of fires, Geronimo summons a whirlwind to put the fires out so the Indians can escape. His extraordinary powers come into play on one of his flights from the reservation. Wanting to know if he is being pursued, he sits down under a bush and watches the plants around him.

To Forrest Carter, Geronimo is an Indian Messiah. The Apache wars are a "heroic struggle" by "a small group of people resisting the attempts of two powerful governments to enslave and exterminate them," and Geronimo is a great leader "fighting for his people's right to live free." The white men are the villains, their cause is "thievery, plain and simple."

Carter's novel is the culmination of a process which has been going on for a full century - a process in which Geronimo has undergone a desert change and become a symbol of heroic resistance. In the 1880s he was a symbol of just the opposite, of murderous bloodlust and ruthless cruelty. Strangely enough, the two Geronimos have existed side by side almost from the beginning, and they still so exist, but Geronimo the Wicked is barely alive in the second half of the twentieth century, and Geronimo the Good is having things pretty much his own way. How could such a reversal have taken place? This is how it happened.

In the 1880s, when Geronimo and his braves were terrorizing southern Arizona and northern Mexico, the man was evil personified. General Nelson A. Miles, who eventually accepted his surrender, ranked him chief among the "worst, wildest and strongest" of the Indians. General George Crook, a friend of the Apaches, branded him as a "human tiger." John P. Clum, Indian agent at San Carlos and the only man who ever "captured" Geronimo, thought the country would be better off if Geronimo were hanged. In Oklahoma a generation or two later, according to a pioneer's granddaughter, "When my mother was growing up, people said to their children, 'If you don't behave, Geronimo will get you.'"

The image of the Apache as a perfidious, ruthless, bloodthirsty savage endured, though eventually with diminishing emphasis, until the third quarter of our century. In the early years books written by Army personnel and by their wives and daughters kept the negative image of the Apache alive. All the important people involved in the pursuit and surrender of Geronimo left their memoirs - Crook, Miles, Britton Davis, John G. Bourke, and even Anton Mazzanovich, an enlisted man with a long memory. To all of them the Apaches were "the hostiles," and Geronimo was the great enemy, though they respected him as a resourceful field commander, a "wily savage" who kept several thousand troops, several hundred Indian scouts, and numerous civilians busy and frustrated until relentless pursuit wore him out.