Recollections of Geronimo

It was 120 years ago today that Geronimo and his band of Apache warriors surrendered at Skeleton Canyon (on the Arizona / New Mexico border) to General Nelson Miles. According to the account of one of the scouts, it wasn’t so much the might of the US army that finally convinced Geronimo to put an end to what had been the longest guerilla war ever, but rather the information that it was American civilians who were likely to hound him & his men to death (read more here):

With the Army were Indian scouts under command of Lieut. Charles B. Gatewood. One of these old scouts, known as Sgt. Smiley, who later lived on the Yavapai-Apache Indian Reservation in the Verde Valley, told this story to William Loy (now deceased), a white man whose ranch adjoined the reservation.…

William Loy: “The Indian scouts were near Geronimo’s band, in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico. Lieut. Gatewood gave permission to Sgt. Smiley and another Indian scout, both of whom knew Geronimo personally, to make contact with the renegades, which they did. They went into Geronimo’s camp and talked all night with him and his band.

“Sgt. Smiley said that they advised the band to surrender to General Miles or they would all be killed by the American civilians, and those would include rancheros, miners, freighters, mail contractors, along with others.

“Sgt. Smiley stated he had advised Geronimo that while he and his band might out-travel or elude the Army, whose slow travel and loud bugle calls handicapped them, it would be different with the civilians who were determined to get him and his band, and would surely do it because their methods were very different.

“Geronimo and his band talked it over, and because of the all-night meeting with the two courageous scouts and a long powwow with Lieutenant Gatewood, decided to surrender at a place designated as Skeleton Canyon in the Peloncilla [sic] Mountains. This place was near the Arizona-New Mexico line, but in Arizona.”

All of which gives occasion to reread and cite, here, above and below, this morning, one of the essential poem sequences of the seventies, Ed Dorn’s Recollections of Gran Apacheria (still available in its original comic-book look edition from ABEbooks for $10 — a bargain!).

Reservations

This material yields
only insofar as the reality
was digested at the occurence.

This material, and this
includes the famous greatness
of the B.A.E.
is the dung & piss
of Warfare invariants.

There is the Arabness
of the subject.

And it Is the supreme form
of the argument that foeign Policy
has always been an Internal policy
at the heart of the american Inability
to propagate a Central Thought.

At the base of it
One finds the Northern Europeans
marked inability
to live on earth with othere kinds
and certainly
not with kinds other than themselves.

But that this manicness
is directed like a death ray
even to their own kind
is the ultimate difference.

For instance, in our terrain,
Bandeliers wretched, derisive
reception at Fort Apache
riding on a halfass
halfhorse, or Cushing indistinguishable
among the Zuni fruit selelrs.

They are so far from home.

It now looks as if
their strategic mistake
was in not interbreeding
with the native blood
in the first days
and extensively thereafter.

Their enforcement of The
Dispersion of the slave blood
of course doesn’t count, that use
is only a marriage of convenience;
derived from industrial
and technically social considerations.

And includes none of the innateness
in which the conqueror joins the conquered

Love is mistaken by Whiteye policy
throughout the hemisphere
where it is taken for necessity
and where it must contend in
a soil of distractions, always
the conqueror waiting for the spaceship
at the edge of the page
and whose biggest footnote
is an apocalypse prior to themselves.

Those who have seen in this
some higher drier destiny
of the Person
have seen it in the small alienations
of the color coded wires of the culture
but it isn’t there.

In this case it is poco a poco
in the fabrications of the aer
turning back the sunlight
promoting the early return of the glacier
and it is Also possibly,
in line with our habitual crazyness
absolutely nowhere.

We do not even yet
know what a crisis is.