Lenna Geronimo

Lenna Geronimo was born in 1886 inside Fort Marion, the old Spanish fortress at St. Augustine, Florida, where the Chiricahua Apache were imprisoned after her father's surrender — by several accounts the first baby born to the prisoners there. Army medical staff named her Marion, after the fort. Her mother, Ih-tedda, was a Mescalero Apache whom Geronimo had married shortly before the final campaign. With the other prisoners the family was moved to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama, where records describe Ih-tedda and little Lenna sharing one room of Geronimo's quarters in a lowland camp where so many prisoners sickened and died.

In 1889 Geronimo made a choice he describes plainly in his autobiography: because so many of his people were dying, he consented to let one of his wives go. As a Mescalero, Ih-tedda could leave prisoner-of-war status and return to her own people in New Mexico; by Apache custom the parting was a divorce, and the children remained with their mother. In New Mexico the girl took the name Lenna, and her brother Robert was born soon after the journey. She grew up free at Mescalero while her father remained a prisoner of war at Fort Sill until his death in 1909.

The photograph behind this painting was made around 1900, when Lenna was in her early teens — a seated portrait, long hair loose, a cross-shaped pendant at her chest — attributed to William E. Irwin, whose studio in Chickasha, Indian Territory, photographed Geronimo's family in those years; prints survive at the University of Michigan and in the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives. Family and genealogical records say she married and raised children at Mescalero, and that she died there in 1919, in her early thirties. Her brother Robert, Geronimo's last surviving son, remained at Mescalero until his death in 1966.