Geronimo

            My muscle discomfort persisted on Friday morning but it really wasn’t worse after having ridden my bike to Bathurst and Bloor and back than it had been the previous morning.

Around midday I tried to open my computer to dust it but after undoing the screws on the left side the side plate still wouldn’t come off. I tried to pry it but ended up slightly bending it enough that it was hard to get the screws back in after I gave up. Maybe it’s the right side that comes off but now I'm worried about screwing that up as well.

I weighed 89.5 kilos after a siesta.

I trimmed the beginning of the video for my July 27, 2017 song practice up to the start of “Young Women and Older Men”.

            I thought about going up the street to pay for my June phone service but decided I didn’t need to call anyone. I still receive calls for a couple of days into the next month and I could pay when I was dressed and out on Saturday.

            I did some exercises for my butt muscles.

            I searched up until November 2013 in the first year of my journal for references to alleys to add to a poem on the topic.

            I boiled a potato, steamed some broccoli, heated some short ribs and gravy for dinner and watched the fourth and fifth episodes of Stories of the Century.

            The fourth was about Geronimo, the Apache leader. The story begins with a raid by Geronimo’s men on a shipment of rifles meant for the US military. Niche, one of Geronimo’s war chiefs is captured. Fictional railroad detectives Matt Clark and Frankie Adams help to escort Niche to trial by wagon train but Geronimo sneaks in to try and free Niche. He is discovered and gets away but later he returns with a raiding party and frees Niche. Geronimo raids the local fort, which is almost defenceless until the troops arrive and Geronimo retreats. Geronimo lost a lot of men and so he negotiates his surrender. He says the land is big enough for the Indians and the animals but the world isn’t big enough for the white man. The Apaches move to a reservation in Florida where Geronimo dies in his 70s of pneumonia.

            Surprisingly they didn’t use a white actor to play Geronimo but Chief Yowlachi. Yowlachi was also known as Daniel Simmons but he was of the Yakima tribe of Washington State. He started out as an opera singer. 

            Geronimo’s real name was Goyaalé (the one who yawns). He was raised and married in New Mexico, which was then part of Mexico. A raiding party of Mexican soldiers killed his wife and children, causing him to hate all Mexicans for the rest of his life. Any group of Mexicans he and his men found were attacked and killed. Between 1820 and 1835 5000 Mexicans were killed by Apaches and 100 settlements were destroyed. There were many attacks and counter attacks against the United States and Mexico and a lot of daring escapes. Gradually his men were being lost. Geronimo surrendered and rose up a few times before finally ending his life as a prisoner of war. He was allowed to make money with public appearances and sales of memorabilia because it helped the United States show they were powerful by displaying what a great man they’d defeated. He claimed to convert to Christianity but he told his tribesmen that he still held to the spiritual beliefs of his people. He was also a gambler. Most of the Apaches were moved to Florida, which is a long way from their homeland but Geronimo died in Oklahoma.

Over his life Geronimo had seven wives, but only through one of them does he have living descendants. Ih-tedda was a Mescalero Apache. Geronimo apparently divorced her so she would not have to live as a prisoner of war and sent her and her daughter Lenna back to Mescalero. She married and had a baby named Robert whom she later gave the last name Geronimo and so she may have been pregnant with her second of Geronimo’s children when she left him. Lenna had a son named Thomas Dahkeya. Robert Geronimo had a son named Robert who has a degree in math and computer science and works in human resources in the tribe’s resort in Mescalero.

            The second story was about Quantrill’s Raiders. William Charles Quantrill leads a unit of renegade Confederate soldiers. He wants to set himself up as leader of his own section of territory but he is also loyal to the south. Fictional railroad detectives Matt Clark and Frankie Adams infiltrate his organization and try in vain to stop him from massacring the town of Lawrence Kansas. Quantrill was declared an outlaw by the Confederate army. Most of his gang were gradually worn away until he was cornered on a ranch outside Louisville, Kentucky. Quantrill was arrested and died in military prison just before the end of the Civil War.

            The real story is that William Clarke Quantrill started out as a schoolteacher and then joined a group of bandits that rounded up escaped slaves. He learned Cherokee war tactics from a half Cherokee friend. When the Civil War broke out the band became guerrilla soldiers for the south and Jesse and Frank James were among them. Quantrill married 14-year-old Sarah Katherine King. In the attack on Lawrence Kansas Quantrill had any boys and men capable of carrying a rifle killed and the death toll amounted to 150. Quantrill and what was left of his men was captured a day after the Civil War ended. He was shot in the back and paralysed. He died a month later when his wife was 17. Sarah Quantrill changed her last name to Clarke to avoid the persecution and sometimes rape that was inflicted on women that had sympathized with the south. She used money from the sale of things that Quantrill had looted to open a boarding house in a small town in Missouri.

The James Gang used Quantrill’s guerrilla tactics in their train and bank robberies.