Five thousand soldiers. Five hundred scouts. Three thousand Mexican troops. The newest signal network in the world. All of it deployed to catch about thirty-five people — and they never caught him.

In the summer of 1886, the United States Army committed roughly a quarter of its fighting force to the pursuit of one small band of Chiricahua Apaches led by a Bedonkohe shaman in his sixties. For five months, the most powerful military on the continent could not catch him. In the end, no one did. Geronimo negotiated his surrender — and the government broke nearly every term before his train cleared Texas.

Geronimo is one of the most famous names in American history and one of the least understood men. He was not a chief — he said so plainly himself. He was not the bloodthirsty terror of the newspapers, nor the romantic icon of later retellings. He was a man whose mother, wife, and three children were killed by Mexican soldiers in 1851, and who spent the rest of his fighting life inside a war that was generations old before he was born — a two-front war against two nations, fought across a border that meant everything to the armies and nothing to the Apaches.

Drawing on the recorded Apache testimony — including Geronimo's own dictated account — this book tells the whole documented arc, with atrocities on all sides reported plainly and glorified never. It ends where most tellings stop short: the twenty-three years as a prisoner of war who became a national celebrity, selling autographed photographs at the World's Fair and riding in Roosevelt's inaugural parade — while still, legally, a captive who was never allowed to go home.

What you'll discover:

The Apache world as it actually worked — and why "chief" misdescribes everything
The Mexican scalp-bounty era, and the 1851 massacre that made Geronimo's war
The Bascom Affair: the lieutenant's blunder that ignited a decade of war
San Carlos, the concentration policy, and why every breakout traces to documented broken promises
Crook versus Miles: the general who kept his word, and the one who didn't
The great pursuit of 1885-86 — and how thirty-five people outran an army
Skeleton Canyon: the surrender, and the betrayal, item by item
The celebrity captive: the World's Fairs, Roosevelt's refusal, and the deathbed regret

This book is for you if:

You know the name — from the paratrooper's cry to the codename — and want the man
You loved Empire of the Summer Moon and want the Apache story at the same standard
You want frontier history that takes the Native testimony seriously without romanticizing anyone

The last free man in America, from the documented record. Start reading today.

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