Cochise: The Life and Times of the Great Apache Chief

The Chiricahua Apache leader Cochise (1804?-1874), as nearly every American officer who faced him would testify, was an ingenious tactician and a ferocious warrior. He was also, in historian Peter Aleshire's account, a far-seeing politician and careful diplomat who balanced dedication for preserving his people's homeland with genuine efforts to keep the peace with the invading Americans who arrived in Arizona in the mid 19th century.

Renowned though he was, Cochise did not attract biographers in his own lifetime, and chroniclers preserved only a few of his words. Concerned to present Cochise's life from an Apache point of view, Aleshire draws on the ethnographic and historical literature to imagine what Cochise might have been thinking and saying as he unified scattered bands of Apaches to fend off encroaching gold miners and interlopers such as the greenhorn army lieutenant George Bascom ("only a boy, not far out of baby grass, his whiskers soft and his face smooth"), whose insulting manner led to a bloody war that would take hundreds of lives and last for many years, not ending until long after Cochise's death.

From a purely historical point of view, Aleshire's reconstructions are impossibly speculative; he admits as much, opening his book by confessing his "sins against historiography." Still, his "seminovelistic" approach is convincing and effective, and he offers a vivid picture of a great warrior and hero. --Gregory McNamee