Omaha, Oct. 10.--"The Minnesota Indians will see that they have made a great mistake going on the warpath," said Geronimo, the famous Apache chief, who is one of the Indians now in camp at the Indian congress. "I have never been to Minnesota, but I hear that up there and for hundreds of miles beyond the white men are as many as the blades of grass. If that is so, what can a few poor Indians do in a fight?
    "They are making a great mistake and are fools. For years I fought the white men, thinking that with my few braves I could kill them all, and that we would again have the land that our great father gave us and which he covered with game.
    "I thought that the great spirit would be with us, and that after we had killed the white men, the buffalo, deer and antelope would come back. After I fought and lost, and after I traveled over the country in which the white man lives and saw his cities and the work he had done, my heart was ready to burst.
    "I knew that the race of Indians were done."
    Asked what he thought would eventually become of the Indians, Geronimo hesitated, and pointed to the west and said: "The sun rises and shines for awhile and then it goes down, sinking out of sight and and it is lost. So it will be with the Indians.
    "When I was a boy, my father told me that the Indians were as many as the leaves on the trees and that off in the north they had many horses and fields. I never saw them, but I know that if they were there then they have gone now and the white man has taken all they had.
    "It will be only a few years more until the Indians will be heard of no more except in the books that the white man has written. They are not the people that the great father loves, for if they were, he would protect them.
    "They have tried to please him, but they do not know how. Schools are good things for Indians, but it takes many years to change the nature of the Indian. If an Indian boy goes to school and learns to be like a white boy, he comes back to the agency and there is nothing for him to do but put on a blanket and be like an Indian again. This is where the government is to blame. When it takes our children away and educates them, it should give them something to do, and not turn them loose and wild on the agency. Until that time comes, educating the Indian is throwing money away.
    "What can an educated Indian do out in the sagebrush and cactus? There will be no more big Indian wars. The Indian's fighting days are over and there is nothing left for him to do but be a beggar and live on charity around the agency."
Daily Independent, Helena, Montana, October 11, 1898, page 6