The skull mystery, dramatic as it is, risks reducing Geronimo to a mystery rather than a historical figure.

He was one of the most significant Indigenous leaders of the nineteenth century, and his life and the history of the Apache resistance deserve to be understood on their own terms.

Geronimo’s significance is not primarily military.

He was an important war leader, but there were other Apache war leaders of comparable or greater military significance.

His significance is partly symbolic: he became, in American culture, the emblem of Indigenous resistance, the face that appeared on trading cards and in newspaper illustrations and eventually on postage stamps and in popular culture references so numerous that his name became a word — a word shouted by paratroopers jumping from planes, a word that entered multiple languages as a general exclamation.

That symbolism has complex dimensions.