Geronimo

After prolonged resistance against tremendous odds, Geronimo, the Apache shaman and war leader, and Naiche, the hereditary Chiricahua chief, surrendered to General Nelson A. Miles near the Mexican border on September 4,1886. It was the beginning of a new day for white settlers in the Southwest and of bitter exile for the Indians.

The surrender of the great Apache leader Geronimo to U.S Army Lieutenant Charles B. Gatewood in August of 1886 brought to an end a struggle that had begun in the early years of the century, and had figured prominently in the western campaign of the Civil War. The words addressed by Gatewood to Geronimo as they met along the banks of Mexico's Bavispe River echoed those spoken in many such a meeting between victorious American commander and vanquished Native American. "Accept these terms or fight it out to the bitter end," said Gatewood. The terms were forced relocation to Florida and the ceding of the ancestral homeland of the Apaches to white settlers; the bitter end was, quite simply, annihilation. In The Geronimo Campaign, Odie B. Faulk, a leading historian of the American Southwest, offers a lively and often chilling account of the war that raged over the deserts and mountains of Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico in the mid 1880's, and traces its legacy well past the ultimatum delivered to Geronimo on August 25, 1886. Faulk is especially concerned with the campaign's wider historical setting and significance, and with the sad record of betrayal of the Native American by the U.S. Government. In a very real sense, it is the stuff of Greek tragedy. Here among the mesas of the Southwest was inevitable conflict and inevitable defeat, with both sides losing and yet surviving their loss. The Apaches were forced to endure years of captivity and humiliation, and--like the Sioux, Comanche, and Nez Perce before them--the obliteration of their traditional way of life. The Army, seemingly the winner, was torn by conflicting claims of glory by its hubristic leaders. And Americans lost much that Apache culture might have contributed to their country, as well as more than a measure of American self-respect. Few emerge from Faulk's riveting account with their dignity and stature intact: only the titanic figure of Geronimo, and to a lesser extent the two men he knew and trusted among his opponents, Gatewood and General George Crook, retain a semblance of honor. Faulk shows that neither side wanted war, that both sides believed in the righteousness of their cause, and that the real instigators of the conflict were rapacious American settlers--the "Tucson Ring" of merchants--who sold grain, hay, and other provisions to the troops as well as to those living on the Indian reservations. Faulk's realistic and colorful narrative highlights many of the campaign's ironies as well as its dangers and vicissitudes. In addition, it vividly recreates life in an Army command post on the western frontier, offers an exceptionally clear and sympathetic life history of Geronimo, and sheds new light on the conflict through many hitherto unknown documents originally collected by Gatewood's son. Also included is a brief history of the Apache people, a full bibliography and notes, and many vintage photographs which lend a rare immediacy to this tragic story. The Geronimo Campaign ends with the great chief hundreds of miles away from his ancestral home, Crook relieved of his command, and Gatewood largely forgotten in the honors and awards bestowed by the Army in recognition of Geronimo's capitulation. A true American saga, this is a book for anyone who wishes to understand the roots of, and the reasons for, the tragic Indian Wars of the nineteenth century, a tragedy whose repercussions are still felt today.

This book examines for the first time the military campaigns on both sides of the border against Apaches and other native peoples in the late nineteenth century. Mexico and the United States pursued similar objectives in their Indian policies. Railroad, mining, and agricultural interests grew at the expense of native peoples. Indian resistance in Mexico was often met with forced labor and relocation or extermination based upon scalp bounties. U. S. Indian policy in the Southwest dictated isolating native peoples on reservations. The social ills their policies created persist today in both nations.

In the 1940s and 1950s, long before historians fully accepted oral tradition as a source, Eve Ball (1890-1984) was taking down verbatim the accounts of Apache elders who had survived the army's campaigns against them in the last century. These oral histories offer new versions -- from Warm Springs, Chiricahua, Mescalero, and Lipan Apache -- of events previously known only through descriptions left by non-Indians. A high school and college teacher, Ball moved to Ruidoso, New Mexico, in 1942. After winning their confidence, Ball would ultimately interview sixty-seven Apache people.

Nelson A. Miles began his military service as a volunteer officer in the Civil War. He later earned the appellation "the idol of the Indian fighters" and capped his controversial career by serving as Commanding General of the Army from 1895 to 1903. Without the benefit of a college education, Miles attained the rank of major general of volunteers two months after his twenty-sixth birthday. At the close of the Civil War, he was Jefferson Davis's military jailer; he then served with the Freedmen's Bureau in North Carolina. On the frontier, he won a series of victories against the Kiowa-Comanches, Sioux, Nez Perce, Bannocks, and Geronimo's band of Apaches. His skillful management of the Messiah outbreak of 1890 ended the Indian Wars. Miles also commanded the Army during the Spanish-American War and was involved in the late-nineteenth-century Army reforms. During his long and distinguished career, Miles made numerous enemies, including Theodore Roosevelt. Peter DeMontravel contends that the comments made by these enemies influenced the way historians have viewed Miles's career. This reassessment of that career restores him to a degree of prominence.

"The last great folk tale of the last American frontier" - that's how Jay Monaghan describes the crimson career of Tom Horn, defender of property rights, soldier of fortune, range detective, professional killer. Tom Horn, who had chased after Geronimo and ridden the trains as a Pinkerton operative, was drawn to wherever the action was - ultimately to Wyoming as a hired gun for the cattle barons. Finally he went too far - and paid at the end of a rope in 1903. For years afterward, whenever a man was found murdered on the high plains, people said, "Somebody tom-horned that fellow".