Raised by the Apache, a young boy joins the US Army and becomes a legend of the Old West Geronimo himself hears the baby crying in the burned-out campsite, surrounded by the bodies of the boy’s family. Even as an infant, Mickey Free is too strong to die. For thirteen years, this white child is raised as an Apache, learning the ways of the greatest warriors to ever mount a horse, and taking their cause as his own. When he turns thirteen, Mickey attempts the Run of the Arrow, a warrior’s ordeal that takes him across miles of desert wasteland with nothing but a mouthful of water to sustain him. Though he doesn’t know it when he starts his journey, Mickey will be running for years to come. Betrayed by one whom he trusted most, this blue-eyed Apache is forced out of the tribe and into the uniform of the US Army. As a scout, he will become a legend, and a terror to those who once called him brother.

"On January 27, 1861, an Apache raiding party attacked John Ward's ranch in the Sonoita Valley of southeastern Arizona and carried off Ward's thirteen-year-old stepson, Felix Telles. Thus began a remarkable odyssey in which a young Mexican American boy was transformed into an Apache warrior and eventually served as Indian Scout for the U.S. Army. Nicknamed "Mickey Free," after a popular fictional character ... he moved effortlessly between three cultures and [became a major participant in the Southwest Indian conflicts]. In this thoughtful and engaging biography, Allan Radbourne employs three decades of research in archival records, printed sources, and Apache oral tradition to tell the story of Mickey Free and the Indian Scouts who played hitherto unappreciated roles in the Apache wars of the 1870s and 1880s and the application of reservation policy"--Fly leaf.

A biography of the Indian scout, born Mexican-American and captured by Apaches at age fifteen, written by a man who was personally acquainted with him.

In the tradition of Empire of the Summer Moon, a stunningly vivid historical account of the manhunt for Geronimo and the 25-year Apache struggle for their homeland. They called him Mickey Free. His kidnapping started the longest war in American history, and both sides--the Apaches and the white invaders—blamed him for it. A mixed-blood warrior who moved uneasily between the worlds of the Apaches and the American soldiers, he was never trusted by either but desperately needed by both. He was the only man Geronimo ever feared. He played a pivotal role in this long war for the desert Southwest from its beginning in 1861 until its end in 1890 with his pursuit of the renegade scout, Apache Kid. In this sprawling, monumental work, Paul Hutton unfolds over two decades of the last war for the West through the eyes of the men and women who lived it. This is Mickey Free's story, but also the story of his contemporaries: the great Apache leaders Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, and Victorio; the soldiers Kit Carson, O. O. Howard, George Crook, and Nelson Miles; the scouts and frontiersmen Al Sieber, Tom Horn, Tom Jeffords, and Texas John Slaughter; the great White Mountain scout Alchesay and the Apache female warrior Lozen; the fierce Apache warrior Geronimo; and the Apache Kid. These lives shaped the violent history of the deserts and mountains of the Southwestern borderlands--a bleak and unforgiving world where a people would make a final, bloody stand against an American war machine bent on their destruction.

In 1861, war between the United States and the Chiricahua seemed inevitable. The Apache band lived on a heavily traveled Emigrant and Overland Mail Trail and routinely raided it, organized by their leader, the prudent, not friendly Cochise. When a young boy was kidnapped from his stepfather’s ranch, Lieutenant George Bascom confronted Cochise even though there was no proof that the Chiricahua were responsible. After a series of missteps, Cochise exacted a short-lived revenge. Despite modern accounts based on spurious evidence, Bascom’s performance in a difficult situation was admirable. This book examines the legend and provides a new analysis of Bascom’s and Cochise’s behavior, putting it in the larger context of the Indian Wars that followed the American Civil War.

Most military biographies focus on officers, many of whom left diaries or wrote letters throughout their lives and careers. This collection offers new perspectives by focusing on the lives of enlisted soldiers from a variety of cultural and racial backgrounds. Comprised of ten biographies, Soldiers in the Southwest Borderlands showcases the scholarship of experts who have mined military records, descendants’ recollections, genealogical sources, and even folklore to tell common soldiers’ stories. The essays examine enlisted soldiers’ cross-cultural interactions and dynamic, situational identities. They illuminate the intersections of class, culture, and race in the nineteenth-century Southwest. The men who served under U.S. or Mexican flags and on the payrolls of the federal government or as state or territorial volunteers represented most of the major ethnicities in the West—Hispanics, African Americans, Indians, American-born Anglos, and recent European immigrants—and many moved fluidly among various social and ethnic groups. For example, though usually described as an Apache scout, Mickey Free was born to Mexican parents, raised by an American stepfather, adopted by an Apache father, given an Irish name, and was ultimately categorized by federal authorities as an Irish Mexican White Mountain Apache. George Goldsby, a former slave of mixed ancestry, served as a white soldier in the Union army during the Civil War, and then served twelve years as a “Buffalo Soldier” in the all-black Tenth U.S. Cavalry. He also claimed some American Indian ancestry and was rumored to have crossed the Mexican border to fight alongside Pancho Villa. What motivated these soldiers? Some were patriots and adventurers. Others were destitute and had few other options. Enlisted men received little professional training, and possibilities for advancement were few. Many of these men witnessed, underwent, or inflicted extreme violence, some of it personal and much of it related to excruciating military campaigns. Spotlighting ordinary men who usually appear on the margins of history, the biographical essays collected here tell the stories of soldiers in the complex world of the Southwest after the U.S.-Mexican War.