Geronimo

A palefaced biography of Geronimo, the ill-starred, diehard Apache brave who never stayed off the warpath for very long, this is actually a fair-to-middling chronological history of 40 years of struggle for the Southwest during which the Apache tribes of the Arizona Territory fought a two-front, rear-guard action against the Mexican and American armies. From the 1840's when the incursions of the whites began, to 1886 when the remnants of the tribes of Cochise and Mangas Coloradas were railroaded to a Florida army camp, the Apaches fought back: ambush, massacre, guerrilla warfare followed by a short-lived "truce", a brief interlude of reservation life, treachery, broken promises, and renewed hostilities. The story of Apache resistance, as Adams tells it, is thick with subplots of internecine feuds between Mexicans and gringos, Confederates and Yanks, regular army troops and frontier settlers - which makes the text somewhat turgid and relegates Geronimo to the sidelines, a shadowy, one-dimensional figure. Never a chieftain, he was famed for his daredevil valor, not his sagacity, and most of his implacable hatred of the white man was wasted in bloody retaliatory raids on Mexican border towns. (The Mexicans had once massacred his wife, mother, and three young children.) An untamed loner, he drifted from tribe counselling no surrender and - possibly - thinking of himself as an Avenger of his People. Adams certainly sees him in that light and he is loath to discuss the egotistical, whisky-crazed bravado which made him a doubtful hero to his own people. (cf. The First Hundred Years of Nino Cochise, p. 843). For a more personalized glimpse there is Geronimo's His Own Story (1970), on which Adams is oddly mute. As one more history of the winning of the West from the vantage point of the uprooted, it's a creditable presentation. But Geronimo's heroism - or heroics - deserves more tough-minded evaluation. (Kirkus Reviews)