It was the lengthy subtitle that caught my attention. I didn't know much about the "longest war," which lasted from 1861 to 1890, or anything about either the Apache Kid or Mickey Free, the captive boy who would grow up to become a legendary Apache scout, moving back and forth between Natives and whites, useful to both sides but not quite trusted by either.
Hutton is a highly respected historian and the book is packed with fascinating and informative anecdotes. I couldn't count how many times I said to myself, "Wow! I did not know that!" about something that I really thought I should have known, especially since I wrote my dissertation on representations of the frontier, much of it in relation to captivity narratives, those stories of settlers, mostly women, captured by Indians and living for various lengths of time among them. But Hutton is more than an academic expert whose work is grounded in phenomenal amounts of research; he is a remarkable storyteller who brings his characters to life, not as cardboard cutouts or names to be memorized for multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank test questions, but as real, complex, sometimes contradictory individuals, with real, logical reasons for their actions, which were largely motivated by understandable grief and vengeance, and/or greed.
People have been talking a lot about empathy recently, and about the value of reading good fiction because it helps us to develop empathy, and I completely agree with that assessment. History, if it's fairly presented and well told, can certainly have the same effect, and this book, which is much more than information, which is often heartbreaking and/or horrifying, clearly illustrates this point.
I received a review copy of The Apache Wars from bloggingforbooks.com in exchange for an honest review. I recommend it to anyone who's interested in American history at a deeper, messier, more real level than the superficial and self-serving nationalism so many of us were taught in school.
