Great thread Mick and a most interesting article too from Frontier Partisans. Thank you!
The wife and I visited Fort Pickens near Pensacola, Florida back in the late 80's. It was very interesting and yet sad that he had become merely a tourist attraction.. I snipped this from Santa Rosa Island Authority website.
"By February 1887, tourists from all across the country were arriving in Pensacola by train to visit the fort and see the prisoners. Admission was 50 cents for adults and 25 cents for children. On one recorded Sunday, 459 tourists visited the fort. Geronimo had become a sideshow spectacle.
Geronimo and his warriors spent nearly two years at Fort Pickens working manual labor. In May 1887, the wives and children of Geronimo’s band were returned to them, but many had died of malaria while in confinement. Eventually the imprisoned Apaches were moved to Mount Vernon, Ala., due to a yellow fever scare, and then later on to Fort Sill in the Oklahoma Territory. Geronimo spent the last 23 years of his life as a prisoner of war until his death from pneumonia in 1909. In 1913, after 27 years of imprisonment, the Chiricahua Apaches were finally set free and were no longer prisoners-of-war. One-third opted to stay at Fort Sill, while two-thirds moved to the Mescalero Apache Reservation, in New Mexico.
Geronimo and the Chiricaua Apache’s resistance came at a steep cost. The Chiricahua lost loved ones, their lands, their traditional ways of life, and for 27 years their freedom. During Geronimo’s prime, the Chiricahua Apache had numbered 1,200. At the end of the war, in 1886, they numbered 500. By their release in 1913, they numbered only 261.
Historians would later come to define Geronimo’s legacy as one of the most legendary warriors in American history.
Today, Geronimo’s story of continued resistance against tremendous odds continues to inspire thousands of visitors to Fort Pickens every year. There are now over 850 Chiricahua Apache living in the U.S., and the descendants of Geronimo and his band still live on."
