{"id":968,"date":"2013-01-20T23:19:13","date_gmt":"2013-01-21T04:19:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnstrawn.com\/?p=968"},"modified":"2013-01-20T23:19:13","modified_gmt":"2013-01-21T04:19:13","slug":"geronimo-by-robert-utley-a-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/reviews\/968\/geronimo-by-robert-utley-a-review","title":{"rendered":"Geronimo, by Robert Utley: A Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert M.Utley, Geronimo<\/em>.\u00a0 Yale University Press, November, 2012.\u00a0 376 pages, $30.00.<\/p>\n

This review appeared in The Oregonian<\/a>, January 20, 2013.<\/p>\n

In 2009, Robert Utley called Geronimo the \u201cbest-known Indian in the whole world and perhaps the least deserving.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 That he had come to this conclusion before completing the biography now published by Yale University Press reflects Utley\u2019s hostility to what he derides as the sentimental, \u201c\u2019Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee\u2019 syndrome\u201d\u2014a approach Utley called \u201cmore polemic than history,\u201d treating native peoples solely as \u201cvictims.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You may remember Utley as a talking head on documentaries about the West, with his high-pitched voice, smooth round face and string-tie.\u00a0 He\u2019s affable, avuncular, and good at story-telling\u2014as you would expect from the former chief historian of the National Park Service.\u00a0 Unquestionably authoritative, given the range of subjects he\u2019s written about, from Billy the Kid to Sitting Bull to Custer, Utley nonetheless makes an odd narrative choice in Geronimo<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have tried to present various episodes from both the Apache and the white perspective,\u201d he writes, \u2018instead of\u2026the usual historian\u2019s \u2018omniscient overview.\u2019\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Utley relates first in each chapter what \u201cthe Indians perceived\u2026without including information that they did not know,\u201d followed by \u201cthe white perspective.\u201d (The very notion of a \u201cwhite perspective\u201d is non-historical, especially given that some of the participants in these events were black soldiers.\u00a0 But I think Utley just means what was reported by non-Indians.)<\/p>\n

This Rashomon strategy puts a lot of demands on the reader, especially given that the bulk of the book covers Geronimo and his fellow Apaches\u2019 twenty-odd year running battle with the US Army.\u00a0 It can be hard to keep track of the characters in this shifting series of encounters.\u00a0 \u00a0This partly reflects his overall view that the portrayal of Geronimo \u201cas the valiant Apache fighting for his homeland\u201d is \u201cplainly false.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Because he regards Geronimo as a cantankerous, duplicitous, manipulative, drunken, ruthless \u201craider\u201d with no tribal loyalties, no veracity, and little honor, he contends that Geronimo was motivated primarily by personal ambition and operated somehow independently of his Apache identity.<\/p>\n

Though his knows the official military history well, Utley\u2019s appreciation of Apache life and culture seem shallow.\u00a0 (A clue to his prejudice is an off-hand remark about the Chiricahua descendents of Geronimo and his comrades \u201cleading a decent life\u201d today on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico\u2014as if the previous ways of living were somehow not \u201cdecent.\u201d)<\/p>\n

While he provides very little sense of Apache history before the brief era of the Indian wars, Utley does convey well the complexity of the alliances, shifting loyalties, and confused aims of all the combatants during the years that Geronimo lived on reservations or, on occasion, bolted for Mexico.\u00a0 The Sierra Madres of Sonora and Chhuahua provided a relatively secure base for Geronimo\u2019s raids against both US territories and the ranches and villages of the Mexicans, who, as Utley repeatedly notes, Geronimo reviled.\u00a0\u00a0 And with good reason\u2014when Geronimo, then a young man in the band of the great Apache chief, Mangas Coloradas, was off with other warriors on \u201ca peace mission\u201d in Chihuahua, the Mexican Army attacked their encampment, and either killed all of Geronimo\u2019s family or carried them off into slavery.<\/p>\n

In one of the great ironies of American military history, when he had at long last surrendered to American troops who had pursued him into Mexico, Geronimo and his tiny band of followers were heading back to the US when a Mexican force confronted them.\u00a0 Before they persuaded the Mexicans to stand aside, the US soldiers and Geronimo had \u201cunited and prepared to battle.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The US Army had long depended on its own Apache scouts to track \u201crenegades,\u201d but now they were prepared to fight alongside their prisoners of war.\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps the saddest element of Utley\u2019s tale is the betrayal of the scouts, who were also treated as prisoners of war, despite their loyal service, and shipped off with \u201cthe hostiles\u201d to Florida, then Alabama, and finally Oklahoma\u2019s Ft. Sill, where Geronimo would spend his last days.<\/p>\n

Geronimo\u2019s legend grew during his exile, an almost Zelig-like sojourn to world\u2019s fairs in Omaha, Buffalo and St Louis (where my grandfather, as an eight-year old boy, saw him playing the role of a \u201cwild Indian,\u201d a fact which I find more astonishing as the years go by).\u00a0\u00a0 He attended Teddy Roosevelt\u2019s inauguration, riding in a parade alongside Quanah Parker, the Comanche chief who was also his neighbor in Oklahoma.\u00a0 \u00a0According to S. C. Gwynne\u2019s brilliant biography, \u201cEmpire of the Summer Moon,\u201d Parker was in fact the person Geronimo was assumed to be as his legend grew.\u00a0 Even though his mother was a white woman captured as a child, Parker was the undisputed chief of his people, and a man admired for his personal strength of character.<\/p>\n

Gwynn shares Utley\u2019s view of Geronimo, calling him both \u201ca genius at self-advertising\u201d and a drunk who \u201cwas not well-liked in Indian Country.\u201d\u00a0 Parker in turn was described by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs as a man \u201cstamped by nature\u201d with \u201cthe seal of headship.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0But while Gwynn\u2019s account of Parker\u2019s life illuminates the lost, little-known world of the Comanches, the \u201clords of the Plains,\u201d Utley\u2019s narrow focus leaves Geronimo and his people largely in the shadows.<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert M.Utley, Geronimo.\u00a0 Yale University Press, November, 2012.\u00a0 376 pages, $30.00. This review appeared in The Oregonian, January 20, 2013…. Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":969,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2013\/01\/Geronimo-cover.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=968"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":971,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions\/971"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}