In this book Javier Ortega Urquidi, a native of Camargo, Chihuahua, portrays the history of a racial group which played an important part in the formation of the strong character of the men of northem Mexico. Employing impressive investigation and masterful sensitivity, the author, without following a rigorous order, transports us to the heart of Apache life in the Chihuahua desert. The lives of Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, Vitorio, Ju and Geronimo will be an authentic discovery for the most exacting reader. The thematic variety, the stylistic elegance and the poetic language employed in this essay of ideas, meditations and reflections about Apache life, accompanied by an important accumulation of historic notes, take us on a journey in time. Without departing from fact, the author moves between the poetic and the didactic. Both questions and anecdotes are considered in this book, through the wide-ranging freedom of theauthor´s style as he reviews the similarities and the differences that are found in various sources.

The author covers conflicts from 1837 through 1886 in Arizona, New Mexico, and California. Important chiefs covered include Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, Victorio, Geronimo, and Captain Jack. Army officers covered include George Crook and Nelson Miles.

Frederick Webb Hodge remarked that the Eastern Apache tribe called the Mescaleros were “never regarded as so warlike” as the Apaches of Arizona. But the Mescaleros’ history is one of hardship and oppression alternating with wars of revenge. They were friendly to the Spaniards until victimized, and friendly to Americans until they were betrayed again. For three hundred years Mescaleros fought the Spaniards and Mexicans. They fought Americans for forty more, before subsiding into lethargy and discouragement. Only since 1930 have the Mescaleros been able to make tribal progress. C. L. Sonnichsen tells the story of the Mescalero Apaches from the earliest records to the modern day, from the Indian's point of view. In early days the Mescaleros moved about freely. Their principal range was between the Río Grande and the Pecos in New Mexico, but they hunted into the Staked Plains and southward into Mexico. They owned nothing and everything. Today the Mescaleros are American citizens and own their reservation in the Tularosa country of New Mexico. While the Mescalero Apaches still struggle to retain their traditions and bridge the gap between their old life and the new, their people have made amazing progress.

In the early 1830s, after decades of relative peace, northern Mexicans and the Indians whom they called "the barbarians" descended into a terrifying cycle of violence. For the next fifteen years, owing in part to changes unleashed by American expansion, Indian warriors launched devastating attacks across ten Mexican states. Raids and counter-raids claimed thousands of lives, ruined much of northern Mexico's economy, depopulated its countryside, and left man-made "deserts" in place of thriving settlements. Just as important, this vast interethnic war informed and emboldened U.S. arguments in favor of seizing Mexican territory while leaving northern Mexicans too divided, exhausted, and distracted to resist the American invasion and subsequent occupation. Exploring Mexican, American, and Indian sources ranging from diplomatic correspondence and congressional debates to captivity narratives and plains Indians' pictorial calendars, "War of a Thousand Deserts" recovers the surprising and previously unrecognized ways in which economic, cultural, and political developments within native communities affected nineteenth-century nation-states. In the process this ambitious book offers a rich and often harrowing new narrative of the era when the United States seized half of Mexico's national territory.

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. Her house on the edge of the Mescalero Apache Reservation was a stopping-off place for Apaches on the dusty walk into town. She quickly realized she was talking to the sons and daughters of Geronimo, Cochise, Victorio, and their warriors. After winning their confidence, Ball would ultimately interview sixty-seven people. Here is the Apache side of the story as told to Eve Ball. Including accounts of Victorio's sister Lozen, a warrior and medicine woman who was the only unmarried woman allowed to ride with the men, as well as unflattering portrayals of Geronimo's actions while under attack, and Mescalero scorn for the horse thief Billy the Kid, this volume represents a significant new source on Apache history and lifeways. "Sherry Robinson has resurrected Eve Ball's legacy of preserving Apache oral tradition. Her meticulous presentation of Eve's shorthand notes of her interviews with Apaches unearths a wealth of primary source material that Eve never shared with us. "Apache Voices is a must read!"--Louis Kraft, author of Gatewood & Geronimo "Sherry Robinson has painstakingly gathered from Eve Ball's papers many unheard Apache voices, especially those of Apache women. This work is a genuine treasure trove. In the future, no one who writes about the Apaches or the conquest of Apacheria can ignore this collection."--Shirley A. Leckie, author of Angie Debo: Pioneering Historian

The year was 1846 – and the great American Southwest was the prize in an epic conflict. The U.S. Army and the army of Mexico met in a battle that would shape the course of history, while the legendary Apache warrior chief Mangas Coloradas looked on, determined to defend his ancestral lands and age-old tribal traditions against either of the invaders or both. On this bloody battlefield young Lieutenant Nathanial Barrington faced his first great test of manhood…as he began a career that would take him to the heart of the conflict sweeping over the West from Texas to New Mexico…and plunge him into passions that would force him to choose between two very different frontier beauties. This enthralling first novel of The Apache Wars Saga captures the drama and real history of a struggle in which no side wanted to surrender…in a series alive with all the excitement and adventures of brave men and women – white and Native American – who decided the future of America.

"A fascinating account of Apache history and ethnography. All the narratives have been carefully chosen to illustrate important facets of the Apache experience. Moreover, they make very interesting reading....This is a major contribution to both Apache history and to the history of the Southwest....The book should appeal to a very wide audience. It also should be well received by the Native American community. Indeh is oral history at its best."---R. David Edmunds, Utah Historical Quarterly