"Realizing that he had more experience dealing with Native peoples than other lieutenants serving on the frontier, Gatewood decided to record his experiences. Although he died before he completed his project, the work he left behind remains an important firsthand account of his life as a commander of Apache scouts and as a military commandant of the White Mountain Indian Reservation. Louis Kraft presents Gatewood's previously unpublished account, punctuating it with an introduction, additional text that fills in the gaps in Gatewood's narrative, detailed notes, and an epilogue."--BOOK JACKET.
Lt. Charles B. Gatewood (1853-96), an educated Virginian, served in the Sixth U.S. Cavalry as the commander of Indian scouts. Gatewood was largely accepted by the Native peoples with whom he worked because of his efforts to understand their cultures. It was precisely this connection between Gatewood and the Indians, and with Geronimo and Naiche in particular, that led to his involvement in the last Apache war and his work for Indian rights. Realizing that he had more experience dealing with Native peoples than other lieutenants serving on the frontier, Gatewood decided to record his experiences. Although he died before he completed his project, Lt. Charles Gatewood & His Apache Wars Memoir is an important firsthand account of Gatewood's life as a commander of Apache scouts and as a military commandant of the White Mountain Indian Reservation. Louis Kraft presents Gatewood's previously unpublished account, complementing it with an introduction, additional text that fills in the gaps in Gatewood's narrative, detailed notes, and an epilogue. Kraft's work offers new background information on Gatewood and throws the manuscript into new relief as a fresh account of how Gatewood viewed the events in which he took part.
Parallels the lives of Gatewood and Geronimo as events drive them toward their historic meeting in Mexico in 1886--a meeting that marked the beginning of the end of the last Apache war.
Britton Davis's account of the controversial "Geronimo Campaign" of 1885–86 offers an important firsthand picture of the famous Chiricahua warrior and the men who finally forced his surrender. Davis knew most of the people involved in the campaign and was himself in charge of Indian scouts, some of whom helped hunt down the small band of fugitives Robert M. Utley's foreword reevaluates the account for the modern reader and establishes its his torical background.
General George Crook planned and organized the principal Apache campaign in Arizona, and General Nelson Miles took credit for its successful conclusion on the 1800s, but the men who really won it were rugged frontiersmen such as Al Sieber, the renowned Chief of Scouts. Crook relied on Sieber to lead Apache scouts against renegade Apaches, who were adept at hiding and raiding from within their native terrain. In this carefully researched biography, Dan L. Thrapp gives extensive evidence for Sieber’s expertise, noting that the expeditions he accompanied were highly successful whereas those from which he was absent met with few triumphs. Perhaps the greatest tribute to his abilities was paid by a San Carlos Apache who, no matter how miserable life might become, because, he said, Sieber would find him even if he left no tracks.
Winner of a National Council on Public History Book Award On April 30, 1871, an unlikely group of Anglo-Americans, Mexican Americans, and Tohono O’odham Indians massacred more than a hundred Apache men, women, and children who had surrendered to the U.S. Army at Camp Grant, near Tucson, Arizona. Thirty or more Apache children were stolen and either kept in Tucson homes or sold into slavery in Mexico. Planned and perpetrated by some of the most prominent men in Arizona’s territorial era, this organized slaughter has become a kind of “phantom history” lurking beneath the Southwest’s official history, strangely present and absent at the same time. Seeking to uncover the mislaid past, this powerful book begins by listening to those voices in the historical record that have long been silenced and disregarded. Massacre at Camp Grant fashions a multivocal narrative, interweaving the documentary record, Apache narratives, historical texts, and ethnographic research to provide new insights into the atrocity. Thus drawing from a range of sources, it demonstrates the ways in which painful histories continue to live on in the collective memories of the communities in which they occurred. Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh begins with the premise that every account of the past is suffused with cultural, historical, and political characteristics. By paying attention to all of these aspects of a contested event, he provides a nuanced interpretation of the cultural forces behind the massacre, illuminates how history becomes an instrument of politics, and contemplates why we must study events we might prefer to forget.
Western Heritage Award, Best Western Nonfiction Book, National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum Nothing can change the terrible facts of the Sand Creek Massacre. The human toll of this horrific event and the ensuing loss of a way of life have never been fully recounted until now. In Sand Creek and the Tragic End of a Lifeway, Louis Kraft tells this story, drawing on the words and actions of those who participated in the events at this critical time. The history that culminated in the end of a lifeway begins with the arrival of Algonquin-speaking peoples in North America, proceeds through the emergence of the Cheyennes and Arapahos on the Central Plains, and ends with the incursion of white people seeking land and gold. Beginning in the earliest days of the Southern Cheyennes, Kraft brings the voices of the past to bear on the events leading to the brutal murder of people and its disastrous aftermath. Through their testimony and their deeds as reported by contemporaries, major and supporting players give us a broad and nuanced view of the discovery of gold on Cheyenne and Arapaho land in the 1850s, followed by the land theft condoned by the U.S. government. The peace treaties and perfidy, the unfolding massacre and the investigations that followed, the devastating end of the Indians’ already-circumscribed freedom—all are revealed through the eyes of government officials, newspapers, and the military; Cheyennes and Arapahos who sought peace with or who fought Anglo-Americans; whites and Indians who intermarried and their offspring; and whites who dared to question what they considered heinous actions. As instructive as it is harrowing, the history recounted here lives on in the telling, along with a way of life destroyed in all but cultural memory. To that memory this book gives eloquent, resonating voice.
The first full-length biography of the Western legend Tom Jeffords, immortalized by Jimmy Stewart in 1950’s Broken Arrow. This book tells the true story of a man who headed West drawn by the lure of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush in 1858; made a life for himself over a decade as he scouted for the army, prospected, became a business man; then learned the Apache language and rode alone into Cochise’s camp in order to negotiate peaceful passage for his stagecoach company. In his search for the real story of Jeffords, Cochise, and the parts they played in mid-nineteenth century American history and politics, author Doug Hocking reveals that while the myths surrounding those events may have clouded the truth a bit, Jeffords was almost as brave and impressive as the legend had it.
