In this segment, Les Sinclair talks with historian Rick Britton about: Today in U.S. History –One hundred and thirty-four years ago today, on September 4, 1886, Geronimo—the wiliest and most dangerous Apache warrior of all time—surrendered in Skeleton Canyon, Arizona.

Geronimo was born in 1829 near a tributary of the Gila River in the modern-day state of New Mexico, then part of Mexico. His grandfather had been an Apache chief. His birth name was Goyalkla, roughly translated to “the one who yawns,” but non-Indians knew him by his Spanish nickname, Geronimo. When he was a young man, Mexican soldiers murdered his wife and children during a brutal attack on his village in Chihuahua, Mexico. He later remarried and fathered other children.

Operating in the border region of southern Arizona and New Mexico, Geronimo and his band of 50 Apache warriors succeeded in keeping white settlers off Apache lands for decades. His raids and related combat actions were a part of the prolonged period of the Apache–United States conflict, which started with American settlement in Apache lands following the end of the war with Mexico in 1848. Geronimo never learned to use a gun, yet he armed his men with the best modern rifles. He was a brilliant strategist who used the Apache knowledge of the arid desert environment to his advantage. For years Geronimo and his men successfully evaded two of the U.S. Army’s most talented Indian fighters, General George Crook and General Nelson A. Miles. But by 1886, the great Apache warrior had grown tired of fighting and further resistance seemed increasingly pointless: there were just too many whites and too few Apaches. On September 4, 1886, Geronimo turned himself over to Miles, becoming the last American Indian warrior in history to formally surrender to the United States.

After several years of imprisonment, Geronimo was given his freedom, and he moved to Oklahoma where he converted to Christianity and became a successful farmer. He even occasionally worked as a scout and adviser for the U.S. army. As a romantic symbol of the already vanishing era of the Wild West, he became a popular celebrity at world’s fairs and expositions and even rode in President Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade in 1905. He died at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1909, still on the federal payroll as an army scout.