Geronimo's Story of His Life (Annotated): The Autobiography of the Apache War Chief, with the Photographs of the 1906 First Edition

This includes edition original content found in no other printing: A new introduction placing the book, its narrator, and its remarkable 1905 creation in historical context A publisher's note on sources and editorial method A complete new professional typesetting of the full 1906 text. This is a real book, not a photocopied scan Every photograph of the 1906 first edition, reproduced from its original plates S. M. Barrett's complete original annotations, kept as true footnotes where he placed them The government that held him did not want this book to exist. In 1905 Geronimo was the most famous prisoner of war in America, nineteen years into a captivity that would end only with his death. When S. M. Barrett, a school superintendent at Lawton, Oklahoma, asked to record the old warrior's life story, the Army refused. Barrett wrote to Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt overruled the War Department, and Geronimo began to dictate, on his own terms, through an interpreter he trusted. He would not be questioned. He would not be interrupted. He told his story exactly as he chose to tell it. The result is the only autobiography of Geronimo, and one of the most extraordinary primary sources in American history: the origin stories of the Apaches, boyhood on the Gila River, the massacre of his family at Kas-ki-yeh, decades of raid and reprisal across the border country, the final surrender at Skeleton Canyon in 1886, and the long exile that followed, including his own dry account of being present at the St. Louis World's Fair. The War Department's objections to the book are printed inside it, and Barrett's footnotes argue with his narrator down the page. He asked, at the end, to go home to Arizona. The request was refused. This Owasco Valley Classics edition is a complete new typesetting of the 1906 first edition, made with care in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Nothing has been abridged or modernized, the original photographs are restored from the first edition plates, and the annotations remain exactly where Barrett put them. For readers of western history, Native American history, and firsthand accounts of the American frontier.