When it acquired New Mexico and Arizona, the United States inherited the territory of a people who had been a thorn in side of Mexico since 1821 and Spain before that. Known collectively as Apaches, these Indians lived in diverse, widely scattered groups with many names Mescaleros, Chiricahuas, and Jicarillas, to name but three. Much has been written about them and their leaders, such as Geronimo, Juh, Nana, Victorio, and Mangas Coloradas, but no one wrote extensively about the greatest leader of them all: Cochise. Now, however, Edwin R. Sweeney has remedied this deficiency with his...

Cochise was a name that struck terror in hearts across the Southwest. Yet in the autumn of 1872, Brigadier General Oliver O. Howard and his aid-de-camp, Lieutenant Joseph Alton Sladen, entered Arizona s rocky Dragoon Mountains in search of the elusive Chiricahua Apache chief. Accompanied only by a guide and two Apache scouts, they sought to convince Cochise that the bloody fighting between his people and the Americans must stop. Cochise had already reached that conclusion, but he had found no American official he could trust.

Slade, Howard s devoted aide, maintained a journal during...

A Chiricahua Apache of the Chokonen band, Cochise (c. 18101874) was one of the most celebrated Indian leaders of his time, battling both American intrusions and Mexican troops in the turbulent border region of nineteenth-century Arizona.

Much of what we know of Cochise has come down to us in military reports, eyewitness accounts, letters, and numerous interviews the usually reticent chief granted in the last decade of his life. "Cochise: Firsthand Accounts of the Chiricahua Apache Chief "brings together the most revealing of these documents to provide the most nuanced, multifaceted...