The Geronimo Campaign

In The Geronimo Campaign, Odie B. Faulk offers a lively and often chilling account of the war that raged between Apaches and U.S. soldiers over the deserts and mountains of Arizona, New Mexico, and northern Mexico in the mid 1880s, and traces its legacy well past Geronimo's ultimate surrender. He is especially concerned with the campaign's wider historical setting and significance, and with the sad record of betrayal of Native Americans by the U.S. Government. Faulk shows that neither the Army nor the Indians wanted war, and reveals that the true 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. This realistic and colorful narrative vividly recreates the era of the final Indian Wars, offers an exceptionally clear and sympathetic life history of Geronimo, provides a brief history of the Apache people, and sheds new light on the conflict through many hitherto unknown documents originally collected by the son of Lt. Charles B. Gatewood, the Army commander to whom Geronimo finally surrendered in 1886.