Today in Manhunting History -- March 27, 1886: Geronimo's "Surrender"

Following the battles at The Devil's Backbone, General Crook could do nothing but await the passage of “two moons.” Finally, on March 16 Lieutenant Maus – who was encamped near the border – reported that four Chiricahua warriors had visited him and told him Geronimo and the renegades were ready to meet Crook at Canon de los Embudos, a short distance across the border in Mexico. Crook departed immediately. As agreed, he was escorted only by his aide Captain John G. Bourke, seven men who could serve as interpreters, and the newly reformed Kaytennae, recently released from Alcatraz.

When they arrived at Canon de los Embudos, they found Geronimo had set up his rancheria “in a lava bed, on top of a small conical hill surrounded by steep ravines, not five hundred yards in direct line from Maus, but having between the two positions two or three steep and rugged gulches which served as scarps and counter-scarps.” Bourke marveled that “A full brigade could not drive out that little garrison,” and Crook noted that Geronimo had selected such an impregnable defensive position “that a thousand men could not have surrounded them with any possibility of catching them.”

On March 25 Geronimo, Chihuahua, Naiche, and a few other Chiricahua approached the American camp. The rest of the warriors cautiously fanned out around them, watching for any sign of treachery. After Crook finished his lunch, they met under a stand of large cottonwood and sycamore trees, on the bank of a stream just west of the largest funnel. Geronimo sat across from Crook, wearing a simple shirt, vest, and breechcloth, with a bandanna about his head. Twenty-four warriors sat just beyond the inner circle. Crook observed that Geronimo and his men “were in superb physical condition, armed to the teeth, with all the ammunition they could carry.”

Crook opened the conference, tersely asking: “What have you to say? I have come all the way down from Bowie.” Geronimo responded by stating a long list of grievances to explain why he left the reservation. Crook had decided to assume a hard line in the negotiations, and listened quietly. His face betrayed no clue about his thoughts, and throughout Geronimo’s hour-long speech he stared at the ground, refusing to even look at the old warrior.

Crook’s intransigence was having its intended effect. Bourke observed that as Geronimo spoke, “perspiration, in great beads, rolled down his temples and over his hands; and he clutched from time to time at a buckskin thong which he held tightly in one hand.” The general and the warrior went over the same topics repeatedly, neither willing to yield, when finally Crook delivered his ultimatum: “You must make up your own mind whether you will stay out on the warpath or surrender unconditionally. If you stay out, I’ll keep after you and kill the last one, if it takes fifty years.”

In a sense, Crook was bluffing, as he knew Geronimo could escape into the mountains again at any time, and that the Americans would have to pay a high price to catch him by force. Thus he moderated his terms, shifting from unconditional surrender to confinement in the East with their families for two years, followed by a return to the reservation.

C.S. Fly's iconic photo of the Canon de los Embudos conference. 
Geronimo is seated, third from the left; General Crook is seated second from the right.

Crook and Geronimo agreed to adjourn for two days so the Apaches could debate the American offer amongst themselves. Upon returning to his tent, Crook summoned Alchise – another son of Cochise – and Kaytennae to him. Alchise was Crook’s staunch friend and supporter, and Kaytannae’s incarceration and tour of San Francisco had converted him to a pro-American outlook. No formal session was held the next day, but Crook sent these two men into Geronimo’s camp to stir dissent among the renegades and to influence them to thoughts of surrender if possible.

Crook’s gambit appeared to have paid off when on the morning of the 27th he received word from Chihuahua that he was willing to surrender his own band, regardless of what Geronimo did. But Crook wanted to bring in all the Chiricahuas, and recognized that Chihuahua’s submission could be used to demoralize Geronimo. At last, in the afternoon the conference continued. Sensing a change in mood, Geronimo kept to himself, sitting with another warrior under a mulberry tree, blackening his face with pounded galena while the others once again convened under the sycamores.

Chihuahua, whose speech to Lieutenant Davis ten months ago harkened the beginning of the outbreak, surrendered by declaring: “If you don’t let me go back to the Reservation, I would like you to send my family with me wherever you send me.”

Naiche followed: “What Chihuahua says I say. I surrender just the same as he did. . . . I throw myself at your feet. You now order and I obey. What you tell me to do I do.”

Finally, Geronimo rose to speak. “Two or three words are enough,” he said. “I have little to say. I surrender myself to you.” He paused to shake hands with Crook, then continued. “We are all comrades, all one family, all one band. What the others say I say also. I give myself up to you. Do with me what you please. I surrender. Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.”