The Geronimo Campaign

Author: Odie B. Faulk

Publisher: Oxford University Press USA (1993)

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.