To the left of Geronimo’s is the grave of the sixth of his nine wives, Zi-Yeh, who died in 1904 at the age of 35, of tuberculosis. When Roosevelt was asked why he chose this “greatest single-handed murderer in American history” to join his parade, the president replied: “I wanted to give the people a good show.” And he was one of six indigenous men to ride horseback in Teddy Roosevelt’s inaugural parade through the streets of Washington in 1901. With Pawnee Bill’s Wild West Show, which advertised his cameo as “The Worst Indian That Ever Lived,” Geronimo hawked his legend at county fairs. Some Apache got to travel outside the wire. One couple lost three children in five years. Or watch them die: many headstones have only one date (stillborn? dead of fright at being born in prison?). What was it like to be a POW of the United States back then? Different than Guantanamo: the Apache prisoners could set up villages within the perimeter of the army base. It had begun in 1851, when Mexican soldiers massacred more than a hundred women and children in Geronimo’s encampment, among them his mother, his first wife, and all three of his young children. Here, in the foothills of the Wichita Mountains, the Apache man’s campaign against white colonists came to an end. The Beef Creek Apache Cemetery was established in 1894, the year Geronimo and a band of 341 other surrendered Chiricahua Apaches were transferred from a prisoner of war camp in Florida to Fort Sill under military escort. Under “purpose of visit” I check “other.”
Do not stand at my grave and weep tattoo full#
I enter my full name, date of birth, driver’s license number, social security number, gender, race. Inside the visitor center, a jovial military policeman hands me a Form 118a, Request for Unescorted Installation Access to Fort Sill. I have seen structures and parking lots exactly like this on American bases in Iraq and Afghanistan I imagine many of those are now gone. The United States staked out Fort Sill in 1869, as a staging ground for punitive raids against the Native Americans who had survived deportation to Indian Territory, but its visitor center bears the ubiquitous hallmarks of US military efficiency that scream temporariness: insulated white metal wall panels mounted on a concrete foundation and facing a parking lot paved with ankle-breaker gravel. Geronimo’s grave is inside Fort Sill, a US army base, so I must first stop at the visitor center to obtain a pass.
There, three Mexican sisters who recently traced their ancestry to this famous Apache medicine man are about to hold a Ceremonia del Perdón-a Ceremony of Forgiveness.
I will carry this soil, by car and bus, to Guachochi, a provincial Mexican town in the Sierra Madre Occidental. On a Monday in early August I find myself spooning soil from Geronimo’s grave at a prisoner of war cemetery in Oklahoma into a double ziplock bag I bought at Target.