Desert Hawk Books

 

The Apache Diaries
A Father-Son Journey

Grenville Goodwin
and
Neil Goodwin

 

304  pages
34 Photographs
11 Drawings
2 Maps
6" x 9"
Hardcover

Quantity:   $29.95 & S/H

 

The surrender of Geronimo in 1886 did not mark the end of Apache resistance to white encroachment.  Over the next four decades, rumors persisted about a band of "wild" Apaches in the Sierra Madre.  Who were these reclusive Apaches?  In 1930 anthropologist Grenville Goodwin headed south to find out.  Accompanying him were guides who had often encountered the Apaches, and as Goodwin searched out abandoned campsites, the Apaches almost certainly were aware of his every move.

Grenville Goodwin's journals chronicling his epic search have been edited 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.  Retracing his father's journeys, Neil juxtaposes his own journal entries with the older ones, creating a moment of conversation and common ground between father and son while solving some enduring mysteries.

"The Apache Diaries is a haunting, passionate and meticulous detective story.  A son's longing determination to know his enigmatic father, and the brutal war waged upon a small, resourceful band of Apache, are the stuff of a terrific read that at times left me breathless with sorrow." - Louise Erdrich

"Neil Goodwin has written a great book.  One need know nothing of the Apache or anthropology or the work of Grenville Goodwin to be caught up at once in its spell.  With steadily gathering force, the amazing story unfolds of two exceptional me, father and son, each on his own quest.  And always on feels the haunting presence of the Apache, their world and their mysteries." - David McCullough. 

"The Apache Diaries is about seeking.  It is about our boundless urge to bring our lives full circle, gathering them into a meaningful whole.  It is about Apaches, but so is it about each of us.  Not since Theodora Kroeber penned Ishi has there been another book like this." - Bernard L. Fontana, author of Tarahumara: Where Night Is the Day of the Moon.

"A son's search for his father and the father's search, fifty years earlier, for the mysterious Sierra Madre Apaches, come together in this profoundly moving story." - H. Henrietta Stockel, author of Women of the Apache Nation: Voices of Truth."

"An absorbing and informative account of an unexplored chapter in Chiricahua Apache history." - Keith N. Basso

Grenville Goodwin (1907-1940) was a well-known and respected ethnographer of the Apaches.  
Neil Goodwin, an independent filmmaker and consultant is the president of Peace River Films.  His documentaries on Native subjects include Geronimo and the Apache Resistance and Seasons of a Navajo.