The government did not honor those terms.

He and the other Apache prisoners were sent to Florida — first to Fort Pickens in Pensacola, then to Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama — where the climate was so foreign to people from the desert Southwest that many died from respiratory illness and tuberculosis.

A Prisoner In His Own Land

By the time Geronimo was transferred to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894, he had been a prisoner of war for eight years.

He would remain one for the rest of his life.