Geronimo Campaign, between May 1885 and September 1886, was the last large-scale military operation of the Apache wars. It took more than 5,000 U.S. Army Cavalry soldiers, led by the two experienced Army generals, in order to subdue no more than 70 (only 38 by the end of the campaign in northern Mexico) Chiricahua Apache who fled the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation and raided parts of the surrounding Arizona Territory and adjacent Sonora state in Mexico for more than a year.
Geronimo (original name Goyahkla, meaning One Who Yawns) was a Chiricahua Apache: he was never a chief, but only a warrior. In the summer of 1858, he lost his entire family (mother, wife and three children) when some Mexican troops attacked the Apache camp near the town of Janos, while warriors were in town, bartering with the Mexicans. Geronimo made a name for himself shortly after, when he burned the Mexican town of Arispe in retribution, with the support of the great Apache chief Mangas Coloradas.
In the following years, Geronimo led regular raids into Mexico, and he was present at the Bascom Incident (1861) and the Battle of Apache Pass (1862), which were the beginning of the Apache wars with the US. After Mangas Coloradas was captured and executed by the US Army in 1863, Geronimo took part in his son-in-law Cochise's war of vengeance against the American settlers and miners in Arizona and New Mexico (1863-1872).
When Cochise surrendered to the US authorities in 1872 in return for a large reservation in southeastern Arizona, Geronimo settled on the reservation, occasionally raiding in Mexico, but keeping peace on the US side of the border.
However, in 1875, all the Apache tribes were resettled in a much smaller single reservation, San Carlos, nicknamed "Hell's Forty Acres", on unproductive land in the rocky desert. Although Apaches were expected to support themselves by farming, the land given to them was too unproductive for that purpose. The life on the overpopulated reservation was troubled by starvation, disease (like smallpox and malaria) and inter-tribal dispute, made worse by the corruption of the local US traders who charged exorbitant prices to Indians, and Indian agents who routinely mishandled the government funds allotted to help Indians settle in a new, farming way of life.
In 1876, Geronimo and some of his followers escaped the reservation for the first time and fled to Mexico, but were captured in March 1877 when they returned with a herd of stolen horses and forcibly returned to San Carlos. Geronimo stayed in the reservation till 1881, taking no part in the Victorio's War (1879–1880).
The Indian Wars encompass more than three centuries of armed conflict between the United States government, American settlers, and Indigenous nations — from the Powhatan Wars of the 1620s through the final Plains campaigns of the late 19th century. The eastern conflicts — King Philip's War (1675–1676), the Tuscarora War (1711–1715), and the Creek and Seminole Wars — largely ended organized Indigenous resistance east of the Mississippi by the 1840s. On the Great Plains, the Sioux Wars (1854–1890), Red River War (1874–1875), and Nez Perce War (1877) followed the displacement wrought by the transcontinental railroad and the near-extinction of the American bison — an estimated 30 to 60 million animals reduced to fewer than 1,000 by 1890. The Ghost Dance religious movement and the massacre at Wounded Knee (December 29, 1890), in which US cavalry killed approximately 250 Lakota men, women, and children, marked the effective end of armed resistance. The Dawes Act (1887) allotted reservation land to individual families, opening millions of acres to white settlement and reducing Indigenous landholdings by about two-thirds over the following decades.
This page covers Geronimo's First Escape – San Carlos 1878. A full Aubrey report for the area pulls together this battle alongside historic sites, land records, and everything else the record holds within a few miles:
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