Customer Reviews

The Jicarilla Apache Tribe: A History, 1846-1970

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This is the best history yet of the Jicarilla Apache, an interesting people who once were the scourge of the Santa Fe Trail. This was quite an accomplishment considering the tribe numbered less than 800 members. The book is easy to read and covers their history from earliest known times up to the present. The tribe's power was broken in the 1850s by Kit Carson. The next 30 years were occupied in finding the tribe a reservation as they wandered and were sent from place to place in search of some place they'd be allowed to stay. Shuffled off to wasteland the tribe has time and again turned up wealth first in timbers, then cattle, then oil, gas and uranium leases and almost as regularly up to the 1960s had the wealth stolen from them by unscroupulous Indian agents and government incompetence. The author is not always well documented presenting new evidence without a source and is clearly biased in favor of Ollero Jicarillas.