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American Indian Books Gatewood & Geronimo Louis Kraft University of New Mexico Press, 2000 $75.00 hard cover - $22.95 soft cover The two pre-eminent warriors of the Apache Wars between 1878 and 1886, Lieutenant Charles B. Gatewood of the Sixth United States and Chiricahua leader Geronimo, respected one another in peace and feared one another in war. Within two years of his posting to Arizona in 1878, Gatewood became the army's premier "Apache man," as both a commander of Apache scouts and a reservation administrator, but his equitable treatment of Indians aroused the enmity of civilian and military detractors, and the army shunned him. In the late 1870s Geronimo, a medicine man, emerged as a brilliant Chiricahua leader and fiercely resisted his people's incarceration on inhospitable federal reservations. His fight for freedom, often bloody, in New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico triggered the deployment of hundreds of United States and Mexican troops and Apache Scouts to hunt him and his people. In the end, the United States Army recalled Gatewood to Apache service, ordering him into the Sierra Madre of northern Mexico to locate Geronimo and negotiate his band's surrender. Showing the depravity and desperation of the Apache wars, Louis Kraft dramatically recreates Gatewood's final mission and poignantly recalls the United States government's betrayal of the Chiricahuas, Geronimo, and Gatewood at the campaign's end. Soft cover available, $19.95. Louis Kraft, a western historian, lives in North Hollywood, California. He is the author of Custer and the Cheyenne: George Armstrong Custer's Winter Campaign on the Southern Plains.

The Fox and the Whirlwind: General George Crook and Geronimo - A Paired Biography.
Peter Aleshire. 1st edition. John Wiley & Sons, 2000. Dust jacket. $35.00

Geronimo and General George Crook were born to destroy each other.

And they did - the perfect enemies, perfectly embodying the tragic strengths and weaknesses of their respective cultures. No confrontation more powerfully captures the relentless, irreconcilable struggle between Native Americans and whites than the Apache Wars - the final and longest running of the North American Indian wars. At the heart of that bitter and violent conflict lies the intriguing story of two of history's most brilliant strategists - united by their fierce loyalty to their peoples, yet divided by their warring bloods.

A shaman and a merciless warrior, Geronimo made a religion of revenge and fought on long past hope and reason, becoming both the whites' most hated foe and a romanticized symbol of Indian resistance. The slaughter of Geronimo's wife, mother, and children set him on his deadly path. For more than thirty years, his cunning, reputation for supernatural power, and determination exacted a terrible revenge on his enemies.

The nation's most effective Indian fighter, Crook combined a paradoxical sympathy with a relentless antipathy toward his foe. He became both the Apaches' best friend and their worst enemy. The taciturn, introverted, and adventurous Crook learned his trade in the Indian wars in the Pacific Northwest. He proved a gifted, courageous, irascible cavalry commander in the Civil War, then played a lead role in both the Sioux and Apache Wars, including the disastrous campaign that resulted in the destruction of General George Armstrong Custer's command. Plainspoken, unassuming, honest, informal yet disciplined, Crook was ultimately confounded by Geronimo's refusal to surrender.

Shifting from one distinct voice and viewpoint to the other, this interwined biography achieves a novelistic sweep while taking full advantage of transcripts and negotiations, newspaper accounts, journals, and primary sources, as well as each man's autobiography. From the early days that shaped them to the battle that consumed them, and the politics that ultimately betrayed them both, their quests for victory and immortality offer great insight into some of the most important events in American history - and a unique persective of the cultures from which they sprang.

Until quite recently Southwest prehistory studies have largely missed or ignored evidence of violent competition. Christy and Jacqueline Turner's study of prehistoric violence, homicide, and cannibalism explodes the myth that the Anasazi and other Southwest Indians were simple, peaceful farmers. Using detailed osteological and forensic analyses, plus other lines of evidence, the Turners show that warfare, violence, and their concomitant horrors were as common in the ancient Southwest as anywhere else in the world.

The special feature of this massively documented study is its multi-regional assessment of episodic human bone assemblages (scattered floor deposits or charnel pits) by taphonomic analysis, which considers what happens to bones from the time of death to the time of recovery. During the past thirty years, the authors and other analysts have identified a minimal perimortem taphonomic signature of burning, pot polishing, anvil abrasions, bone breakage, cut marks, and missing vertabrae that closely matches the signature of animal butchering and is frequently associated with additional evidence of violence. More than seventy-five archaeological sites containing several hundred individual remains are carefully examined for the cannibalism signature. Because this signature has not been reported for any sites north of Mexico, other than those in the Southwest, the authors also present detailed comparisons with Mesoamerican skeletal collections where human sacrifice and cannibalism were known to have been practiced.

The authors review several hypotheses for Southwest cannibalism, starvation, social pathology, and institutionalized violence and cannibalism. In the latter case, they present evidence for a potential Mexican connection and demonstrate that most of the known cannibalized series are located temporally and spatially near Chaco great houses.

In Apache Nightmare, Charles Collins, tells the story of the Battle of Cibecue Creek, a pivotal event in the Apache Wars.

On August 28, 1881, Col. Eugene Asa Carr left Fort Apache, Arizona Territory, with two cavalry troops and a company of Indian scouts. Their aim was to arrest a Cibecue Apache medicine man, Nock-ay-det-klinne, rumored to be inciting his followers against whites in the area. The arrest at Cibecue Creek was uneventful, but as Carr's forces returned to Fort Apache, the medicine man's followers attacked. The Apaches were soon joined by the Indian scouts, marking the skirmish as the only wholesale mutiny of an Indian scout company in U.S. military history.

Basing his account on extensive primary sources, including testimony from Apaches themselves, Collins describes the events leading up to the incident, recreates the battle, and analyzes its aftermath. He argues that miscommunication and poor judgment among army personnel were the primary reasons for the battle's tragic outcome. And he shows that the incident escalated tensions that ended only with Geronimo's surrender in 1886 - following two centruies of conflict between Apaches and whites.

In 1863 the Navajo began receiving medical care from the federal government during their confinement at Bosque Redondo. Over the next ninety years, a familiar litany of problems surfaced i periodic reports on Navajo heatlth care: inadequate funding, understaffing and the unrelenting spread of such communicable diseases as tuberculosis. In 1955 Congress transferred medical care from the Indian Bureau to the Public Health Service.

The Navajo accepted some aspects of western Medicine, but during the nineteeth century most government doctors actively worked to destroy age-old healing practices.Only in the 1930's did doctors begin to work with - rather than oppose- traditional healers

Scalp Dance - Indian Warfare on the High Plains, 1865-1879
by Thomas Goodrich (1997) First Edition.
llustrations, $32.95

Some of the most savage warfare in world history was waged on the American Plains from 1865 to 1879. As white settlers moved west following the Civil War, they found powerful Indian tribes barring the way. When the U.S. Army intervened, a bloody and prolonged conflict ensued.

Drawing heavily from diaries, letters, and memoirs, historian Thomas Goodrich weaves a spellbinding web of life and death on the prairie, told in the timeless words of the participants themselves. There is William Thompson, a railroad worker who was shot, stabbed, scalped, yet lived to tell the tale; the aging Kiowa chief Satanta, who stood stunned when he realized that the handful of whites he had been fighting for years were only the precursors of millions to come.

Scalp Dance is a powerful, unforgettable epic that shatters modern myths. One will search this book in vain for a John Wayne. Nor will one counter Dances with Wolves. What the reader will find is a truthful, terrifying account of Indian warfare as it occurred.

A profound sense of history has long compelled Indian peoples of the Great Plains to chronicle their lives pictorially. As the nineteenth century progressed, the trickle of white explorers and traders across the continent and up the great rivers turned into a veritable flood tide of soldiers and settlers. Their presence changed Plains life irrevocably. Plains Indians adopted a new medium for recording their visual histories, obtained through their contacts with whites: they began to draw in bound ledger books - commonly used for inventory by traders and military officers - using pens, pencils and watercolors. They also worked in small notebooks and on drawing paper.

This lavish volume is the most comprehensive treatment to date of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Plains Indian drawings. It is published on the occasion of the first extensive exhibition of this material, organized by The Drawing Center, New York, and The American Federation of Arts. Featured are thirty-six artists from the Lakota, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Arapaho tribes, such as Black Hawk, Making Medicine, Wohaw, Little Shield, and White Bull. Many of the artists were previously unknown even to experts in the field, and dozens of the drawings are published here for the first time. The eight essays, four artist statements, and catalogue entries on 153 works provide a wealth of information on Plains Indian culture, religion, and individual artists during the reservation era.

Janet Catherine Berlo is a professor at the University of Missouri - St. Louis and one of the foremost scholars of Native American art. Gerald McMaster, a Plains Cree, is an artist and curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, Quebec. They are joined by a distinguished team of fellow art historians, artists, and anthropologists, including several Native Americans: Anna Blume, Jennifer Crets, Colleen Cutshall, Candace Greene, Edgar Heap of Birds, Marilee Jantzer-White, Jane Ash Poitras, W. Jackson Rushing, Jacki Thompson Rand, Joyce Szabo, Jennifer Vigil, Edwin L. Wade, and Francis Yellow.

For more than three centuries the Apaches held sway over a vast region of the American Southwest. Not until the encroachment of white settlers and soldiers, beginning in the 1850's , was Apache dominance seriously challenged. Shadown of the Wolf, Harry James Plumlee's historical novel set in this transitional period, is the moving portrait of Nakaidoklimmi, an Apache shaman, whose life in many ways reflected the turmoil of his people

As the novel opens, Nakaidoklimmi is a novice raider on traditional Apache forays into Mexico. After the establishment of Fort Apache, he becomes a scout for the U.S. Army, fighting in skirmishes against Apache bands in the Tonto Basin of Central Arizona. The course of his life changes, however, when he encounters a white wolf in the dark of night. Drawing special powers from the wolf, he becomes a healer and spiritual leader for his troubled people.

Beseeching the gods for guidance, Nakaidoklimmi begins a series of transformational dances to unify his people. The success of the dances threatens the interests of white settlers and soldiers, who ultimately confront Nakaidoklimmi's people in the bloody battle at Cibique Creek in August 1881.

Beginning in the scant surviving information on the historical Nakaidoklinni, Plumlee weaves Apache history and myth to create a rich portrait of an individual and a cultural under stress. Told from the Apache point of view, the novel conveys a vivid impression of an alternative way of knowing and experience the world.

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On a sunbaked flat on Highway 80 East, a few miles before the Arizona desert reaches the New Mexico border, there is a small rest stop by the side of the road. It is a quiet place; only the faint rustling of the desert wind broken occasionally by the passing of a lone automobile interrupts its barren tranquility. From two concrete picnic tables and benches under a corrugated tin roof you can see several miles across the sotols, creosote bushes and cedar brakes to the upthrust Animas Mountains looking strangely dark and misty in the desert-clear light. To the side of the picnic area a 20th-foot high monument of stone and cement poking into the pale, blue Western sky commemorates the surrender of Geronimo and his band of renegade Apaches in nearly Skeleton Canyon. A bronze plaque cemented into the monument proclaims "The surrender of Geronimo in Skeleton Canyon on that historic day (September 6, 1886) forever ended Indian warfare in the United States. The statement is not quite true.

At the time of Geronimo's surrender there were other Apaches, hiding in the twisted canyons of the Sierra Madres, who would never submit to the disgrace of being taken to a reservation and assigned a number. They vowed to hold their mountain fastness against all comers and live according to age-old customs. They would, when they chose, descend upon the hated Mexicans, and yes, even the Americans, and exact their revenge.

Over a wide area of northern Sonora, Chihuahua, and into Arizona and New Mexico, they created havoc for decades. Unwary vaqueros were murdered, cattle cut out and driven off from isolated herds, ranches shot up; a stockman's wife was murdered and his son kidnaped. Thus began a bloody vendetta, which ultimately ensnared the military of Sonora and the town government of Douglas, Arizona. Word went out; Apaches were the game. Thrill seekers rushed to the border to get in on the hunt.

This is the story of those Apaches who never surrendered; and of Francisco Fimbres, a Sonoran rancher who relentlessly pursued; and of the men who flocked to the border in the midst of the Great Depression to participate in the sanguine carnival of the last Apache campaign.

Based on years of research, dozens of interviews, and personal friendships, Women of the Apache Nation sheds light on some of the mysteries surrounding traditional and contemporary Chiricahua Apache culture. Each of the women interviewed or described emphasizes the importance of storytelling and ritual in preserving Apache heritage. Ceremonies, such as the puberty rites that prepare an Apache maiden for womanhood, are still practiced today. The opening chapter describes the beauty and relevance of this four day celebration.

Colorful stories that tell of the feats of the little known Apache warrior women illustrate the fortitude, courage and cunning necessary for their survival and that of their tribe. Lozen, a warrior and medicine woman, threatened to cannibalize her own brother, Chief Victorio of the Warm Springs Apache band, rather than turn him over to government scouts. Years later, Dahteste- messenger for Geronimo's band- and Lozen were responsible for initiating negotiations with the U.S. Army that led to Geronimo's surrender.

The interviewees are members of the last generation to have personal recollections of the experiences of the sons and daughters of the Apache chiefs and Apache women. These women openly and honestly share their heritage form a contemporary Apache perspective and provide a glimpse of their culture, which continues to mystify outsiders.

This book recounts the rise and fall of the individual and tribal cattle industries against the backdrop of changing federal Indian policies. Iverson describes the Bureau's inability to recognize that most nineteenth century reservations were better suited to ranching than farming. Even though allotment and leasing stifled ranching, livestock became symbols, and ranching a new means of resisting, adapting, and living - for remaining Native. Quanah Parker, Comanche tribal leader, was one of the sucessful cattle ranchers. Starting with a modest herd in 1884, by 1886 he claimed 425 head of cattle, 200 hogs and 60 horses.

In the twentieth century, Indian and non-Indian ranchers alike faced the same dilemma that confronted Indians in the nineteenth century: they are surrounded by society that does not understand them and has different priorities for their land. Cattle ranching is no more likely to disapear than are the Indian communities themselves, but cowboys and Indians, who share a common sense of place and tradition, also share an uncertain future.

Black, Red and Deadly : Black and Indian Gunfighters of the Indian Territory, 1870 - 1907
by Art Burton (1992), 304 pages

This book recounts the exploits of several black and indian outlaws and lawmen of the Oklahoma Indian Territory. Learn about Cherokee Bill, the meanest of the mean, hanged for the murder of thirteen men by the time he was twenty. Follow such outlaws as Dick Glass, Ned Christie and the Rufus Buck Gang. The lawmen covered include Sam Sixkiller, Grant Johnson and Bass Reeves. Many of the black lawmen were hired by "Hanging" Judge Parker because of their knowledge of the Indian Territory. Bass Reeves, deputy U.S. Marshall for thirty-two years, is considered by some to be the greatest manhunter of them all and was inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1992

This stirring, epic story tells the tales of courageous deeds and dreams, both fulfilled and betrayed, of the hundreds of Indian nations that inhabited the North American continent for more than 15,000 years. The book also recounts the centuries-long struggle with the Europeans who arrived after 1492. This volume retells Native American History from before the arrival of Columbus through the movement of the Indians to reservations after the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890. 500 Nations give us a fascinating glimpse into the lives of the lives of the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Mayas, the Anasazis, and the Temple Mound Builders of the Mississippi Valley. Also chronicled are the descendants of those ancient civilizations, the Toltecs and the Aztecs, Pueblos and Hopi, Navajos and Apaches, and hundreds of other Indian nations that have inhabited North America. This 648 page book contains 485 paintings, photographs, woodcuts, drawings and Indian artifacts. Based upon the CBS television series this book provides an insightful look into the lives, culture and heritage of North America´s first inhabitants.

A comprehensive study of the Native American Warrior, the ideal of the warrior and attitudes indigenous to warfare on the North American continent, Warriors - Warfare and the Native American Indian is complemented by superb photographs from American, Canadian and European mueseums.