SANTANA
War Chief of the Mescalero Apache

Almer N. Blazer
Edited by A. R. Pruit
Introduction by Jerry D. Thompson

$14.95 
(Softcover)
 
$24.95 
(Hardcover)

8.5" x 5.5", 315 pages, 26 historic photographs

Drawn from previously unpublished firsthand accounts of the years 1862 to 1880, this book tells the story of a great Mescalero war chief who was targeted for death by the U.S. military as a dangerous renegade. Because of his gifts as a leader and negotiator, Santana eventually won the confidence of the government, saved his people from extermination by the military, and secured a reservation on their traditional homeland in the mountains of south-central New Mexico. The manuscript on which this book is based--written by Almer N. Blazer in the 1940s--recreates the stories of both Santana himself and the beleaguered tribe that looked to his leadership during their gravest crisis. A neighbor and close friend of the Mescalero, Blazer writes sympathetically of the tribe's struggle for survival and gives detailed, authentic descriptions of Mescalero life before it was forever changed by contact with European culture.