ell ill. The army moved the remaining adults to Fort Vernon, in a humid, swampy partof Alabama; their TB promptly became worse. Meanwhile, the children were sentaway to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.There were 116 children initially removed from their parents. They lived in veryclose dormitory quarters. Of the 116 Apache children at Carlisle, 37 died fromtuberculosis. Captain Henry Pratt who was the superintendent of Carlisle at thetime devised a plan and that was to put terminally ill Apache children on trainsand send them back to the prison camp at Mt. Vernon, Alabama to die and bydoing that, he avoided the statistics that were alarming government officials. Someof the children were so ill that they died en route. When the train arrived at theMt. Vernon prison camp, those children who managed to survive the trip wouldunload the corpses of their friends and put them into the arms of the waitingparents who buried them. This was the case of Chappo who was at the Carlisleschool. He was sent home and Geronimo took him off the train, three days laterChappo, the son of Geronimo, died.Out of a population of 519 Chiricahua who were first imprisoned, approximately300 died as victims of tuberculosis during their 27 years as American prisoners ofwar. ...
