The Apache Diaries: A Father-Son Journey

In 1886, the Apache war leader Geronimo surrendered to representatives of the United States military, after having led his small band in a years-long guerrilla war against the white invaders. He and his followers were imprisoned in Florida, then later in Oklahoma. Most would never again see their forested homeland in what is now Arizona and New Mexico.

Not all of Geronimo's comrades surrendered, however. A few dozen slipped into the mountains of Mexico, from which they launched raids on Mexican ranches and villages and were in turn hunted by federal troops. Acting on reports of these Apaches' whereabouts, the American anthropologist Grenville Goodwin journeyed deep into the Sierra Madre in 1930 to find these last "wild Apaches." He found considerable evidence, including a remote camp of several stone houses and brush shelters that had apparently been abandoned just before his arrival; surely, he said later, the Apaches had been aware of his every movement.

Grenville Goodwin, who kept extensive diaries on his expedition, died of a brain tumor in 1940, at the age of 33. His filmmaker son, Neil Goodwin, reproduces excepts from those diaries here, adding an account of his own travels along his father's trail. The combined document is a fascinating, if inconclusive, exercise in scholarly detective work, rich in ethnographic information about a people that has since disappeared. Joining such books as David Roberts's Once They Moved Like the Wind and Eve Ball's In the Days of Victorio, The Diaries offers a noteworthy addition to the popular literature on Apache culture. --Gregory McNamee