This guy's always been one of my heroes. He was never defeated, he never surrendered and no bullet could kill him. He was a Mescalero-Chiricahua Apache and I think he was probably the greatest war chief in American history.
It's kind of funny, but Geronimo wasn't even his real name. People started calling him that after he fought a bunch of Mexican soldiers with nothing but a knife. Man, they had muskets and bayonets and he just cut his way through them. The soldiers were so scared they were appealing to Saint Jerome to save them, yelling 'Geronimo!
Geronimo!' And afterward, that's what everyone outside the tribe thought his name was.
He wasn't really a chief in the way we usually think of that term. At least not at first. He was more like a medicine man and a prophet. He had visions, and the chiefs relied on that spiritual power and his wisdom to help guide the tribe. And, of course, the fact that he seemed invulnerable to bullets gave him huge standing.
Then a bunch of Mexican soldiers attacked his camp while he was away and murdered his wife and his mother and his three little kids. When he came back and found them, he swore revenge and that's how he became a war chief. After that, he just laid waste Northern Mexico and a lot of the American Southwest. He'd hit and run and hit and run and they just couldn't stop him.
At one time, they had like 5,000 U.S. troops chasing him, which was about a quarter of the entire Army, plus several thousand Mexican soldiers. And he outthought and out-fought them all for a hell of a long time.
They finally stopped him by attacking the women and children and old people of his tribe. He could have continued to fight a hit and run war from the White Mountains forever, but he had a vision of leaving for the east on an iron horse, and he knew that in order to save his people, he had to lead them onto a reservation.
There's a picture of him and his warriors sitting in front of a train waiting to take them to captivity, and you can still see the character in his face. No matter what they did to him, they never broke his spirit. He gave up his own freedom and lifestyle for his people. That's courage, man. That's honor. That's a warrior!
He was the last of his kind. The last great Native warrior of the West. And I think in a lot of ways, he's a model for our times. You know, the paratroopers in World War Il used to yell his name when they went out the door of the plane into combat. It was like a talisman. 'No bullet can kill me!' Like, 'Hail Mary, here we go!'
That kind of courage is what we need today with all the crazy stuff going on in the world around us.