Geronimo by Robert Utley (review)

Rumor has it that Yale University’s secret society, Skull and Bones, possesses Geronimo’s skull. While this frat-house desecration of physical remains lingers as a dubious part of secret society mythology, Robert Utley’s recent biography, Geronimo, published by Yale University Press, represents a more substantive scholarly claim for the metaphorical possession of this Apache icon’s head.

As with most scholarly acts of revision, appropriation, or colonization, Utley does not act alone. In fact, Geronimo has seen tough years. The resistance and violence of this enigmatic icon have been under revision since Angie Debo’s landmark biography, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place (1976), a work that Utley references and contrasts considerably. More recently, Bud Shapard’s biography of Chief Loco emphasizes that Chihenne prisoners of war thought Geronimo was “untrustworthy, dangerous, and unhinged.”¹ Edwin Sweeney detailed the violent attrition of leadership that gave rise to Geronimo’s influence in From Cochise to Geronimo: The Chiricahua Apaches (2010). Fondly indebted to Sweeney’s diligent foundation, Utley provides finality to the deconstruction of Geronimo’s legend, an act thirty-six years in the making.

“Geronimo was not a Chief,” Utley states in both the preface and prologue to his biography (ix, 1). Nowhere so clearly stated in existing histories, Utley’s endorsement sets the authoritative tone for Geronimo. Geronimo’s subordinate status within community leadership is best detailed through his deference to Chief Naiche, the youthful heir of Cochise who grew into the role only years after assuming leadership. Although not a chief nor a hero fighting for his homeland, Geronimo becomes an influential combat sergeant and strategist due to his “power” to navigate raids and violence.

“Chiricahua” histories typically focus on the violence of the 1880s Apache Wars or on the unjust victimization and subjugation of the Apache prisoners of war by the US government. Utley’s Geronimo is a “classic” in that violence, raid, and war are of primary concern. It sparkles as a chronicle of the American military’s hunt for Geronimo. And it is Utley’s way of crisply detailing military decision making, action, and geographic movement that really propels Geronimo.

This book brings new information to light. Utley draws heavily from classic resources, including Geronimo’s own autobiography, Jason Betzinez’s I Fought with Geronimo, anthropologist Morris Opler’s work, and (to a lesser extent) Gillete Griswold’s Fort Sill Apaches: Their Vital Statistics, Tribal Origins, Antecedents. Yet, this Geronimo is valuable for its use of Sam Kenoi’s oral histories in Morris Opler’s collection at Cornell and, most importantly, for Utley’s thorough use of military correspondences detailing the politics and strategy of American officials seeking to subdue the famed Apache.

Utley’s narrative follows an established arc dating from Debo, tracing Geronimo’s life from a youth to a warrior/raider, prisoner of war, celebrity, and entrepreneur. Yet, his activities at war are central to the book: twenty-two chapters address conflict with Mexicans and Americans. In contrast, two chapters are dedicated to his early life, and four brief chapters provide only the broadest brushstrokes of his peaceful twenty-three years in imprisonment (glossed in fifty pages). The wartime slant of Utley’s writing as a result emphasizes a dogged narrative of violence and potentially reinforces the Geronimo stereotype Utley seeks to dispel: Geronimo as the Everyman Apachean warrior.

Utley might have emphasized more emphatically that Geronimo was not Chiricahua but Bidanku. No matter, since Utley performs important service by repeatedly noting that Geronimo was never tribal chief—his allegiance therefore has little bearing on tribal nomenclature. But as both Griswold and Sweeney point out, unity among the Bidanku, Cókánén, Chíhénne, and Nédnaí was never so strong as it was under Mangas Coloradas. Were we to more appropriately name these peoples as a unified nation, we would do so by calling them Bidanku, after Coloradas. His successors are best spoken of in plural, as the Cókánén, or Chiricahua leader Cochise could never...