I Fought with Geronimo

the long version

The cousin and lifelong associate of Geronimo, Jason Betzinez relives his years on the warpath with the Apache chief. He participates in Geronimo's eventual surrender to the U.S. Army, goes to Florida as a prisoner of war, attends the Carlisle Indian school in Pennsylvania, and in 1900 joins his people at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where they had been moved by the government six years earlier. Trained as a blacksmith, he describes daily life on the reservation until the resettlement of many Apaches in Arizona. For Betzinez, there was a happy ending. When this memoir was first published in 1959, he was nearly a century old, settled on a farm in Oklahoma with his devoted wife and esteemed by his community.