Geronimo

For more than a decade after most Apache bands had accepted confinement to the San Carlos Reservation in Arizona, Geronimo — a Bedonkohe Apache shaman and war leader named Goyaałé, meaning "one who yawns" — continued to raid, escape, surrender, and raid again across the borderlands of Arizona and the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora. He broke out of the reservation four times. By the third breakout, in 1885, he led a band of 36 Apache fighters — men, women, and children — that tied down 5,000 U.S. Army troops and 500 Mexican soldiers for more than a year. The arithmetic of that pursuit became, in the telling, a kind of tribute.

Geronimo finally surrendered to General Nelson Miles in September 1886 in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona — on the condition, he believed, that his people would be returned to their homeland after two years in the East. The condition was not honored. He and his band were shipped first to Florida, then to Alabama, then to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where he spent the last 23 years of his life as a prisoner of war. He became, in American popular culture, a celebrity: he sold signed photographs at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, rode in Theodore Roosevelt's inaugural parade in 1905, and dictated his autobiography to a sympathetic editor — all while formally classified as an enemy of the United States.

The word "Geronimo" entered American slang during World War II when paratroopers began shouting it before jumping — a story that traces to a single soldier at Fort Benning who had watched a Geronimo film the night before a practice jump. The Apache Nation objected formally when the U.S. military code-named its 2011 operation to kill Osama bin Laden "Operation Geronimo" — raising the question of what it means to take the name of a man who resisted colonization and use it as a synonym for the enemy. Geronimo died of pneumonia at Fort Sill in 1909, still a prisoner of war at 79, still asking to go home.