He married young and began a family.

In 1851, Mexican soldiers attacked his village while the men were in town trading.

His mother, wife, and three children were killed.

This event is described in his own autobiography — dictated through an interpreter in 1905 and published in 1906 — as the turning point of his life.

The grief and rage it produced were permanent.

He devoted himself to raiding and fighting the Mexicans, and eventually the Americans, with an intensity that became legendary.

The Spanish name Geronimo — a version of the name Jerome — was reportedly applied to him by Mexican soldiers during raids, possibly because they called on Saint Jerome (San Gerónimo) in fear or prayer during his attacks.

The etymology is not perfectly documented, and other explanations have been offered, but the Mexican soldiers connection is the most commonly cited account.

Whatever its origin, the name followed him into American documents, history books, and popular consciousness.

Over the following decades, Goyahkla — Geronimo — became one of the most tenacious and elusive fighters on the Southern Apache frontier.

He was not a hereditary chief in the formal sense; his status came from his effectiveness as a war leader and from the spiritual powers he claimed to possess.

Apache oral tradition describes Geronimo as having specific abilities: the power to walk without leaving tracks, to predict the future, to render himself and his followers invisible to enemies.

Whether these were literal beliefs or metaphorical descriptions of practical skills — uncanny reading of terrain, extraordinary situational awareness, the ability to move through country in ways that trained soldiers could not replicate — they expressed something real about his effectiveness.

He was never easy to catch.