Geronimo Surrenders to General Miles.
On April 2, 1886, Gen. Miles, superseding Crook, took command of the Department of Arizona, and in his “Personal Recollections” he speaks of finding here, stationed at Fort Huachuca, a “fair-haired, blue-eyed young man of great intellect, manly qualities and resolute spirit, a splendid type of American manhood”. This “fair-haired, blue-eyed young man” of 1886 was at the time Assistant Surgeon in the Army. He is now Major General Leonard Wood, late Chief of Staff, U. S. Army.
On the 4th of September following Miles’s assuming command, Geronimo and his band surrendered to him, and on September 8th they left Fort Bowie for Fort Marion, Florida. The point of surrender to Miles was at Skeleton canyon, in Mexico, about 65 miles south of Fort Bowie. The surrender of Geronimo may be fixed as the date of the termination of the many years of warfare between the whites and the Apaches as a tribe, a warfare marked with a cruelty on the part of the Apaches probably unparalleled in the history of the four hundred years of strife between the whites on the one side and the redman on the other.