The Apache Diaries: A Father-Son Journey [Hardcover]

Grenville Goodwin (Author), Neil Goodwin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2000

In 1930, four decades after the surrender of Geronimo, anthropologist Grenville Goodwin headed south in search of a rumored band of "wild" Apaches in the Sierra Madre. Goodwin's journals chronicling his epic search have been edited and annotated by his son, Neil, who was born three months before his father's tragic death at the age of thirty-three. Neil Goodwin uses the journals to engage in a dialogue with the father he never knew.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

From Publishers Weekly

During this continent's long and bitterly fought conflict between Native Americans and white invaders, perhaps no people fought more savagely or were more greatly feared than the Apache. Although the so-called Indian Wars officially ended with Geronimo's surrender and the imprisonment of his Chiricahua band in 1886, a small group of reclusive Western Apaches endured in Mexico's Sierra Madre Mountains just south of Arizona and New Mexico. In 1927, long after the West was considered secure from marauding Indians, this small band ambushed a Mexican family, killing the mother and kidnapping her three-year-old son. Settlers retaliated brutally, and the surviving Apaches soon returned to their mountain stronghold. Pursuing them was Grenville Goodwin, a restless but gifted young amateur ethnographer, who investigated the attacks and extensively studied the "phantom tribe" before dying suddenly of a brain tumor in 1940 at age 33. Years later, Goodwin's son, Neil, armed with his father's diary, set off to discover his father's enigmatic past and the Apaches he studied. Retracing both his own journey and that of his father's in this workmanlike chronicle, Goodwin--an independent filmmaker whose respected documentaries include Native American subjects--accompanied at times by friends and family, juxtaposes his own journal entries with those of his father. Unfortunately, the contrasting points of view make for an awkward, confusing story, which, coupled with Goodwin's dry narrative, fails to deliver what otherwise might have been a dramatic account. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press; annotated edition edition (April 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803221754
• ISBN-13: 978-0803221758
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,272,976 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A vivid, original, fascinating and informative work., May 8, 2000

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Apache Diaries: A Father-Son Journey (Hardcover)

To read The Apache Diaries by Grenville (1907-40) and son Neil Goodwin is to enter a portal to another dimension. Through a dialogue of contemporary and historic diaries and related photographs, a vivid landscape haunted by blood, pain, fear, suffering, passion, and ancient enmities emerges. In this world all tales are entwined by tones of sorrow, loss, and a relentless quest for the understanding and peace of the dead. There is also fascination, pride, and great heroism. The plight of the Sierra Madre Apaches intrigues the youthful Grennie, destined to become a singular if short-lived ethnographer who partially chronicles their ambiguous fate. That unfinished life task is taken up by his son Neil in the research and writing of The Apache Diaries. In an effort to reach out and perhaps even touch the father who died when he was only two months old, the author recreates the journeys made by his father when he wrote the original diary entries in the 1930's. The Apache Diaries is, as intended, a dialogue built between Neil and Grennie in an exploration of the dual enigmas of the nature of the man himself and the mysterious fate of the Sierra Madre Apaches he studied. It is as though Neil, the son, hopes to uncover a mirror experience of both the true life essence of his father and the inconclusive, mysterious fate of the "wild" Sierra Madre Apaches. It is fitting that he is joined in his quest by his wife, son and his son's future wife. The Apache Diaries is a classic quest riddle, filled with real unquenchable anguish and courage mixed with evil and cowardice. It is bitterly poignant. True to life, it never resolves completely; but there is a partial lifting of the veil. The key to experiencing this strangely compelling, haunted world of the blood- feuding Mexicans' and Apaches' history is, perhaps, acceptance of the pain and wrong, the incredible wrenching anguish that is called forth again and again. But there is a second step that is as yet unfinished. One quickly learns to guess at an outline of forgiveness, perhaps ? a future resolution that still may loom yet several generations away. The deaths and the kidnappings are so brutal and vivid. Though Grenville Goodwin was a respected ethnographer and Neil Goodwin is an accomplished film-maker of Native American documentaries, the reader does not need to be fluent in either medium to appreciate the depth and complexity of The Apache Diaries. It resonates in the heart. It breaks the heart. Perhaps it remakes the heart, or the heart's vision. This is a profoundly moving book. Perhaps the book reflects the spirit of the crown dance of the Chiricahua, a holy ritual Neil witnesses in 1987 when he accompanies two grandsons of one of Geronimo's warriors on a commemorative visit to the location of Geronimo's near surrender to General Crook:

Later during that trip the Chiricahuas conducted their holiest of rituals, the spellbinding crown dance. It begins with an immense leaping bonfire. There is a line of drummers and chanters. Shockingly, out of the darkness, come the dancers. They circle the fire wearing masks with high, antlerlike crowns, short kilts, painted bodies, a thousand tiny bells, a sword in each hand - they reel, hover, sway, and as they do, they become the mountain gods. The assembled Apaches are witnessing the first crown dance held in these mountains for a very long time. It is at long last a dance for the peaceless dead, and it is overdue by a hundred years or more. (page 236)

Nancy Lorraine Reviewer