The name Geronimo has become deeply etched in the American mind as a stirring symbol of exceptional courage, daring, and selfless dedication to the preservation of the Apaches and their way of life — a hero who led his people in a glorious last stand to defend their homeland. The U.S. Army has embraced this image.  American paratroopers in World War Two yelled “Geronimo” to steel themselves as they jumped into combat. The operation to kill Osama Bin Laden was code-named “Geronimo.”

As Robert M. Utley conclusively demonstrates in this deeply-researched, definitive biography, the Geronimo of popular imagination is based solely on legend. The real-life Geronimo was the antithesis of the legendary figure. He was not even a chief.

Geronimo was born in 1829, a member of the Chiricahua Apaches who ranged from southern New Mexico and Arizona deep into the Sierra Madre region of northern Mexico. Theirs was a culture of raiding. They raided for plunder and supplies to augment the limited resources of their harsh environment and to wreak havoc on their longtime Mexican enemies. In a warrior culture known for its brutality, Geronimo stood out as particularly cruel. He was a notorious liar, a habitual drunkard, and an unimaginative war leader who never held the loyalty of more than three dozen warriors. “I have known Geronimo all my life up to his death and have never known anything good about [him],” recalled one Apache. But Geronimo had one attribute that all Apaches stood in awe of: he possessed strong medicine, which was a surreal potency that could be used to harm or help, to predict victory in battle and ward off defeat, to cure or kill.

Not until 1886, when he was well past his prime as a warrior, did Geronimo come to the notice of white people. His singular achievement was to hold out with a small band of twenty warriors and sixteen women and children in the rugged vastness of the Sierra Madre in northern Mexico for six months. Geronimo not only eluded capture, but also penetrated the cordon of 5,000 soldiers, nearly a third of the Regular Army, which Brig. Gen. Nelson A. Miles had assembled to prevent him from re-crossing the border. He then staged a series of lightning raids across southern Arizona.  Those exploits caught the attention of the American press. The Plains and Rocky Mountain tribes had been subjugated for several years, and the vast majority of Apaches lived quietly if unhappily on Arizona reservations. Geronimo was the only game in town. He was portrayed as a clever and resourceful underdog, whose violence both horrified and enthralled the American public.

After several sharp clashes, Geronimo and his warriors dropped back into Mexico.  Miles sent an expeditionary force comprised of soldiers and Apache scouts under Capt. Henry W. Lawton to run down the renegades. Geronimo eluded them handily.  For three months Lawton roamed the Sierra Madre, travelling 1,500 miles without seeing a single Apache. Miles turned to diplomacy. He sent Lt. Charles Gatewood, an officer whom Geronimo trusted, and two friendly Apaches to try to talk Geronimo into surrendering. Gatewood delivered Miles’s terms: Geronimo and his followers were to be sent to Florida until the president decided their fate. Geronimo dismissed the offer until Gatewood told him that family and friends back on the reservation already had been shipped there.

Despondent, Geronimo agreed to give up, but only to General Miles in person. On September 4, 1886, he surrendered to Miles near Fort Bowie, Arizona. Three days later Geronimo and his band was marched out of the fort and put on a train to Florida. Geronimo died in 1909, passing the last fifteen years of his life on a reservation at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. Although technically a prisoner of war until his death, Geronimo was given considerable freedom of movement in his later years. Geronimo proved a talented self-promoter who thrived on celebrity. He appeared at fairs, including the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and rode in President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1905 inaugural parade.

For nearly five decades, Utley, a former chief historian of the National Park Service, has been the preeminent authority on the military struggle for the American West. He brings to bear his lifetime of writing and research to methodically strip away the layers of the Geronimo legend to reveal “a not very likeable man – neither the thug of some accounts nor the great leader fighting to save his homeland [who] seized the American imagination in the late twentieth century…and still prevails.”  Utley is handicapped by the dearth of Apache accounts; Geronimo’s Autobiography, which he dictated in 1905, is a self-serving mix of lies and half-truths. But Utley makes expert use of what is available and exhaustively mines military records, newspaper accounts, and other white primary accounts to present a balanced history from both the Apache and white perspectives.

Yet, as Utley concedes, the Geronimo legend is too deeply engrained in American culture to be supplanted by historical truth. And “legend or reality,” he concludes, “Geronimo remains the dominant Indian name in the American memory.”

Peter Cozzens is a retired Foreign Service Officer and the author or editor of sixteen books on the Civil War and the Indian Wars of the American West.  His most recent work, Shenandoah 1862: Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley Campaign, was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a selection of the History and Military Book Clubs.