In 1906 Geronimo published his autobiography recounting the fascinating story of his life, from his years as a resistance fighter, to his capture and subsequent period of celebrity in which he appeared at the 1904 St Louis World Fair and met President Roosevelt. Edward Rielly, author of Legends of American Indian Resistance, tells of the tragic massacre which underpinned his life.

Photograph of Geronimo kneeling with his rifle, taken in 1887 by Ben Wittick (1845–1903)

Geronimo (1829-1909), whose given name was Goyahkla, sometimes spelled Goyathlay, is one of the most famous figures in the history of the American Indian resistance effort. His name is virtually synonymous with that of a warrior, so much so that his name has been appropriated for a wide range of military (or simply adventuresome) endeavors. Geronimo’s reputation is well deserved, for his very name excited fear in settlers both north and south of the U.S-Mexican border. He was hated by Euro-Americans and even by some Apaches, who blamed him for continuing to stoke the fires of warfare after ultimate defeat of the Apaches seemed inevitable. In addition, he lacked the social and political leadership skills of a Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce and the multidimensional qualities (including the spiritual character) of a Sitting Bull, the great Lakota leader who served as the magnet attracting huge numbers of Plains Indians to him, a force that would secure the most famous resistance victory ever against the U.S. military – at Little Bighorn in 1876.

Geronimo was primarily a fighter, a lasting reputation that led American paratroopers in World War II to call out the name “Geronimo” before plunging from their planes. Schoolchildren, for decades after Geronimo’s death, would similarly yell his name before undertaking a real or imagined feat of bravery, such as leaping from a swing into a river. A much more recent, and highly controversial, use of Geronimo’s name was its employment by the U.S. military as a code name linked to the 2011 operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.

Geronimo (right) with his warriors in 1886. (Source: Arizona Historical Society)

The association of Geronimo’s name with that of the hated terrorist elicited considerable resentment by a wide range of organizations and individuals, including the National Congress of American Indians, the Onondaga National Council of chiefs, Native American publications, Fort Sill Apache Tribal Chairman Jeff Houser, and Geronimo’s great-grandson Harlyn Geronimo. Their response was so intense that the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs took up the issue at a hearing previously scheduled to discuss use of Indian names and images as sports mascots and in other areas of popular culture. Defense Department officials argued that they had intended no disrespect to Geronimo and had named the total operation against bin Laden Operation Neptune Spear, further naming each step alphabetically. The “G” step involved the capture or killing of bin Laden and was coded with the Indian leader’s name, an explanation that did not do much to satisfy those who had raised objections to the use of Geronimo’s name.

So what led Geronimo onto the path that would lead from the battlefields of Mexico and the Southwest to a raid into Pakistan? Although it would be serious oversimplification to reduce all of Geronimo’s public life to one incident, certainly his life as a warrior was deeply influenced by a very personal event — an attack on an Apache camp by a Mexican general, José María Carrasco.

For years, Apaches had been both trading with and fighting Mexicans. As soon as he reached adulthood, at about the age of seventeen, Goyahkla, who was not yet known as Geronimo, was accepted as a warrior and entered into this dual relationship with Mexicans. About two years earlier, around 1844, Goyahkla’s father, Taklishim, had died of an illness, and Goyahkla assumed responsibility for his mother, Juana (Juanita). Geronimo’s autobiography – dictated to Stephen M. Barrett, superintendent of schools in Lawton, Oklahoma, with Asa Adklugie, a former student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, translating, and published in 1906 – shows a son deeply committed to his mother.

Geronimo with Stephen M. Barrett and Asa Adklugie dictating his auto-biography, as pictured in the book itself.

Shortly after becoming a warrior, Goyahkla married a young Nednai Apache, Alope, giving a herd of ponies — a substantial sum — to her father, Noposo, for the privilege of wedding her, the price, according to his autobiography, set so high because she was a good daughter and her father perhaps wanted to keep her with him. Goyahkla and Alope had been lovers for some time, and he records in the autobiography that his greatest joy upon arriving at adulthood was that he could marry her. Goyahkla took Alope to live near his mother. His bride decorated their tipi with beads and pictures drawn on buckskin. She was a good wife, he notes, and they were happy together with their three children.

When Goyahkla crossed into Mexico again around 1850 (Geronimo in his autobiography cites 1858 but is often off in his dating), he had no reason to suspect anything out of the usual. Traveling in a large group under Mangas Coloradas, the Apaches — including members of the Bedonkohe band to which Goyahkla belonged and the Nednai band, both subdivisions of the Chiricahua Apaches — passed through Sonora on their way to Casas Grandes. They camped at what is generally believed to be Janos (but referred to as Kaskiyeh in the autobiography), and many of the men went into town to trade. This went on for several days, each time a guard of men staying behind to protect the women, children, and supplies.

One afternoon, however, as the men were returning to camp, they met some women and children fleeing from Mexican troops who had attacked the camp, killing the guards as well as many of the women and children, destroying supplies, and stealing the Apaches’ ponies. When Goyahkla reached the camp, he discovered his wife, mother, and three children all dead. He tells in his autobiography of going off by himself and standing by a river. Geronimo, so many years after the event, does not say what he was feeling at that river, but his understated description clearly speaks powerfully to a great grief and sense of loss.

Photograph of Geronimo taken by Frank A. Rinehart in 1898. (Source: Rinehart Indian Photographs collection, Haskell Indian Nations University)

Without supplies and with most of their weapons and ponies lost, the survivors turned back toward Arizona. The elderly Geronimo recalls how he was unable to pray or devise any plan of action at the moment — devoid of purpose, he followed his comrades silently, staying by himself just within hearing of the now much smaller group.

Arriving at his home, Goyahkla gazed, certainly with great sorrow, at Alope’s decorations and their children’s toy before burning them, along with his tipi and his mother’s. Never again, Geronimo notes in his autobiography, would he feel content in his own home. Then, turning from his immediate grief, he vowed revenge on the Mexicans. A year later, Goyahkla returned to Mexico within a large war party and began to exact that revenge. It reportedly was during this excursion into Mexico that his enemies began calling him Geronimo, although no definitive explanation for the naming has ever been given. The name stuck, and Geronimo would continue his battles against Mexicans and, before long, settlers and soldiers of the United States who invaded his homeland, earning the warrior’s reputation that would stay with him throughout his life and into the twenty-first century, even into places that Geronimo could never have imagined, such as Pakistan.

Left: Photo taken by WH Martin of Geronimo as a US prisoner in 1905 (Source: American Memory from the Library of Congress). Right: Photo by Edward S. Curtis of Geronimo at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1905, the day before the inauguration of President Roosevelt, and the inaugural parade of which Geronimo was to take part (Source: Northwestern University Library, The North American Indian: the Photographic Images, 2001)

At first glance, Geronimo seems an unlikely candidate to compose his life story and be willing to share it with those whom he had been fighting for most of his adult life. There is a great desire, however, in many people, perhaps in most, to want to set the record straight and be understood and Geronimo seems to have been no different in this regard. He also expressed his hope that his story might persuade the government to allow him and other Apaches to return to their native Southwest to live. In addition, Geronimo saw his autobiography as a way to make money; during his late years as a prisoner, he had learned the power of money and had taken to selling photographs, buttons, and other souvenirs. Consequently, when Barrett raised the possibility of telling his story, Geronimo insisted that he be paid for doing so. Geronimo’s occasional suspicions that Superintendent Barrett may have wanted his story in order to do him harm were softened by the presence of translator Asa Adklugie, who was a son of Juh (also spelled Whoa), a longtime Geronimo friend, ally, and cousin by marriage. Fully aware that he was hated by many and at the mercy of the government, Geronimo was politically astute as he narrated his exploits, focusing in detail on his battles with Mexicans but remaining generally reticent concerning encounters with the U.S. military.

Still, the autobiography probably would never have been published without the support of President Theodore Roosevelt. Barrett’s request to write Geronimo’s life was rejected by the military, but an appeal to the president brought the desired permission. Responding later to the complete manuscript, President Roosevelt again offered his support but with the suggestion that Barrett clarify that opinions expressed in the book were Geronimo’s alone. Roosevelt was not hard to convince. Prior to Barrett¹s request, Roosevelt had himself made a request that Geronimo ride in his inaugural parade in March 1905, which the Apache leader did. Before leaving Washington, Geronimo met with the president and made a plea to be permitted to return to his homeland. Roosevelt listened compassionately but refused, explaining that he feared reprisals against the Apaches by area residents if they returned. When the autobiography was published in 1906, Geronimo, still trying, and apparently believing that the president might relent, dedicated his narrative to President Roosevelt.

Edward Rielly is a professor of English at Saint Joseph¹s College of Maine. He has published about two dozen books, including several volumes of his own poetry. His nonfiction works include Sitting Bull: A Biography (Greenwood, 2007) and Legends of American Indian Resistance (ABC-CLIO, 2011). The latter includes a chapter on Geronimo.

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• Geronimo’s Story of his Life (1906)
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With its novel vignettes and its use of a camera obscura in the production of the plates, William Cheselden’s Osteographia, is recognized as a landmark in the history of anatomical illustration. Monique Kornell looks at its unique blend of accuracy and elegance.

A lavishly illustrated and particularly elegant book of human and comparative osteology in large folio size, Osteographia, or the Anatomy of the Bones, was published in London in 1733 by William Cheselden (1688-1752). However highly it is esteemed today, it was a financial failure for its author, unlike his earlier, less expensive and more general work, The Anatomy of the Humane Body (1713), which went through numerous editions.

Cheselden, a successful surgeon based in London, first won fame for his perfection of the lateral method of lithotomy, or “cutting for the stone”. At the time of publication of the Osteographia, he was already well established in his career. Surgeon to Queen Caroline, to whom the book is dedicated, he was also a Fellow of the Royal Society, surgeon at St. Thomas’s hospital and the first foreign member of the newly founded Royal Academy of Surgery in Paris.

Work was under way for the Osteographia already by 1726 when Cheselden states in the preface to the Anatomy of the Human Body that he would have replaced illustrations from the first edition:

if I had not been so much engaged about an Osteology in which every plate is twenty one inches long, and fifteen broad. All the bones will be done so large as the life, and the bones of the limbs and trunk, with sceletons as large as the plates will admit of; And besides these there will be some plates of the cartilages, ligaments and diseased bones; and every chapter will have a distinct head-piece and tail-piece, which will be chiefly made of the sceletons of different animals.

The Osteographia eventually appeared in 1733 with a double set of plates, 56 lettered and 56 unlettered, “to shew them in their full beauty” (ch. 8). Part of the delay was that the initial drawings for the plates were abandoned when Cheselden, in his desire for the greatest accuracy in the rendering of the skeleton, had his artists, Gerard Vandergucht and Jacob Schijnvoet, employ a camera obscura, the use of which is illustrated in a vignette on the title page. As described in chapter VIII, the artist drew upon a roughened glass set six inches inside; a sliding lens allowed him to adjust the scale. The resulting image was then traced on to paper. Many of the preparatory drawings survive in the collection of the Royal Academy, London.

Camera obscura vignette, Title page, Osteographia, 1733

In the production of the plates, Cheselden took a markedly active role. He chose the poses for the skeletons and oversaw each stage of the production, stepping in when necessary to correct both drawings and plates: “where particular parts needed to be more distinctly expressed on account of the anatomy, there I always directed; sometimes in the drawings with the pencil, and often with the needle upon the copper plate.” Cheselden was also attuned to the different effects that could be brought about in the engraving, and he comments that the use of unhatched, single lines to evoke the smoothness of the ends of the bones “was also my contriving”. Cheselden’s close involvement in making the plates and his desire for accuracy through mechanical means, as well as in the great expense incurred, parallel the contemporaneous efforts of the Dutch anatomist, Bernhard Siegfried Albinus, who had his artist, Jan Wandelaar, view anatomical preparations through a grid system of ropes.

An early influence upon Cheselden’s attention to illustration was the surgeon and anatomist William Cowper, with whom Cheselden resided while studying anatomy. Cowper was also a remarkable draftsman and provided illustrations for his own works and those of others. Cheselden then attended the first St Martin’s Lane Academy of Art in 1720 and would himself later contribute accomplished plates for his addendum to the translation of Le Dran’s Operations in Surgery (London 1749).

Much of the charm of the Osteographia lies with the vignettes of the animal skeletons, which are frequently depicted in lifelike poses. A cat with an arched back is startled by a dog; a young, antlered deer stops suddenly and turns to the viewer; a crane picks up a fish with its beak, yielding the conceit of a skeleton bird seeking nourishment from the bones of a fish. Cheselden’s comment concerning the skeleton of a bear indicates the care he took in the poses of the animal skeletons: “This skeleton being put together with stiff wires, I could not alter it into a properer posture” (ch. VIII). The pose of the chameleon skeleton, set on a branch with its tail wrapped around a twig, seen at the head of the fifth chapter, was adapted from an illustration first published by Charles Perrault in 1669.

The inventiveness seen in the vignettes is likewise found in the decorated initials and the plates of entire human skeletons. Inspired by the meditative skeletons of Vesalius, Cheselden offers a lateral view of a skeleton kneeling in prayer (Tab. XXXVI), the pose chosen in order “to represent the figure in a larger scale.” In the Anatomy of the Human Body of 1740, the figure has been adapted for Tab. X and is shown with his arms tied behind his back.

Skeleton praying, tab XXXVI, Osteographia, 1733, and Skeleton bound, tab. X, The Anatomy of the Human Body, 1740

The influence of Vesalius is also evident in the low-set Italianate landscape seen in some of the full-size skeleton plates, such as Tab. XXXII. Here the viewpoint manages to confer a monumental sense of scale to the skeleton of a year-and-a-half-old child, who is shown walking toward the viewer while brandishing an adult humerus. This bone serves as a comparison of scale but fails, nevertheless, to dwarf the skeleton in any way. The print that follows offers a comparison of scale and of species as well, as a skeleton of a boy of nine years is seen leaning against the skull of a horse, almost half his height. The frontal views of a male and a female skeletons are both after classical statues, the Apollo Belvedere and the Medici Venus. Cheselden has altered the pose of the latter, turning her head and placing her left arm out to the side rather than in the original “pudica” position, thus allowing for a better view of the pelvic bones.

Skeleton of a year-and-a-half-old child holding an adult humerus, tab. XXXII, and Skeleton of a 9-year-old child leaning on a horse's skull, tab. XXXII

In addition to developmental plates of the bones, there are several excellent plates with cross-sections of the bones and depicting cartilages and ligaments. The seventh chapter and the last nine plates of the book are devoted to diseased bones, dealing with cases from Cheselden’s own practice and those of his colleagues. The preparation of the bones of the left arm, showing a congenital ankylosis of the elbow joint, which was sent to Cheselden by “Mr Goodwin” and survives today in the Hunterian Museum, London, is depicted in Tab. LXV, fig. 2. The fused “crooked skeleton” of Tab. XLIII is described as having been “dug out of a grave”.

In the Osteographia as well as in his other works, Cheselden favored a reliance on the image for elucidation rather than lengthy description: “I thought it useless to make long descriptions, one view of such prints shewing more than the fullest and best description can possibly do” (Address to the Reader). For example, in discussing the intricate bones of the foot he concludes the fifth chapter by saying that “for what remains see the plate, which makes a farther description needless”. The brevity of the text is certainly one valid criticism of the many made by John Douglas, a rival lithotomist, in his querulous pamphlet, Animadversions on a late pompous book, intituled, Osteographia…by William Cheselden (London 1735). Curiously, his brother James Douglas, the anatomist and physician, was a valued friend and collaborator of Cheselden’s.

The brevity of the text, the decorative vignettes and the luxurious production of the Osteographia was aimed at attracting a wealthy, general audience for the book. It is for this same potential market that Cheselden had earlier designed a course of anatomy, given with Francis Hawksbee, which was advertised in The Daily Courant of 21 March 1721 as, “chiefly intended for Gentlemen, Such Things only will be omitted as are neither Instructive nor Entertaining and Care will be taken to have nothing Offensive.”

From an advertisement in Cheselden’s Anatomy of 1740, we learn that only 97 of the 300 copies of the Osteographia printed had been sold. In an attempt to recoup his expenses, 83 of the remaining copies were cut apart so that the prints could be sold separately. In addition, 100 prints had been struck for a projected Latin or French edition. Some of these were used for an undated edition of the unlettered plates, issued without the text.

The plates of the Osteographia are magnificent and worthy of their fame. They are of a far finer quality than the crude depictions of skeletons, originally made for James Douglas, that appeared in Cheselden’s first edition of his Anatomy of 1713. Cheselden’s original plan, laid out in To the Reader, was for a three-volume work on human anatomy, all similarly decorated with plates of comparative anatomy. It is regrettable that the Osteographia did not meet with the financial success necessary to allow the completion of the project.

(All images are in the public domain, courtesy of the National Library of Medicine)

Monique Kornell (Ph.D. Warburg Institute) is an independent scholar of anatomical illustration and of the study of anatomy by artists. She has written on works from the 16th to the 19th centuries and has previously published on Cheselden’s Osteographia in the catalogue to the exhibition she co-curated, The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1996, pp. 190-193.

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• Osteographia (1733)
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• Scanned images from Osteographia (1733)
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• The Anatomy of the Human body (1750)
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• Cheselden’s Plates of the human bones: correctly reduced from the original copy, accompanied with explanations (1811) (NB: some plates not actually from Cheselden)
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