Days of War, Days of Peace, Volume 2
Native American Literature, Biographical Fiction, Western
Date Published: 01-21-2025
Publisher: Hat Creek
Defying betrayal and hardship, Chato fights to save his family and his
people’s rightful place in the West.
As the Apache Wars roar toward their conclusion in the summer of 1886,
renowned Apache army scout and leader Chato joins a delegation of scouts to
Washington, D.C., to meet President Grover Cleveland. Their mission? To
plead their case for the Chiricahua scouts to remain at Fort Apache and
cultivate their lands in peace.
For his unwavering loyalty and service, Chato is awarded a silver medal
from Cleveland, along with the implied promise that the scouts can stay
where they are. However, after Geronimo’s surrender, Chato and his fellow
scouts are instead transported to the harsh confines of Fort Marion,
Florida, as prisoners of war. They, and the Chiricahua people as a whole,
will be deprived of their freedom and their way of life for the next three
decades.
EXCERPT
Excerpt 1 From Introduction
Proud Outcast is the second of two novels about the Apache chief and warrior Pedes-klinje, or as the Mexicans called him, Chato (meaning “Flat Nose”). The first book, Desperate Warrior, covered the years from 1877 to 1886, when Chato often rode with Geronimo as his segundo (second in command) in numerous raids and battles, especially in Mexico, after they escaped San Carlos Reservation in September 1881. During the years in Mexico, Chato lost a wife and two children to Mexican slavery after they were captured during a Rarámuri (aka Tarahumara) Indian attack led by Mexican military on the great Nednhi Chief Juh’s winter camp in January 1883.
Losing his family was a defining event in Chato’s life. He was desperate to get his family back and out of Mexican slavery. Five months after his family was taken, General Crook offered to get them back through high-level negotiations between the Chihuahuan state in Mexico and his big chiefs in Washington. Realizing this was his last, best hope of getting his family back, Chato
vowed allegiance to the Army and to General Crook.
Chato understood that for General Crook’s offer to work in retrieving his family, Geronimo had to stay peaceful on the reservation and not escape to raid in Mexico, Arizona, and New Mexico. He told Geronimo that if he left the reservation, he would destroy Crook’s ability to get their families out of slavery, and he, Chato, would find and drag him back to the San Carlos guardhouse in chains. The White Eyes would imprison him there or on the little land in the western big water, Alcatraz, for years. Geronimo called Chato a traitor and a liar, and when he broke out of Fort Apache Reservation tried to have him killed. They remained enemies until Geronimo’s dying day twenty-four years later.
The lives of Chato and Geronimo show striking similarities. Some historians have called Chato “Geronimo’s doppelgänger.” Although Geronimo was about thirty years older than Chato, they both claimed supernatural powers, rode together on many raids, were on the same reservations at the same time, lost wives and children to Mexican slavery and were deadly rifle shots. Both men became Christians but then left the church to become again believers in the Apache creator god, Ussen. Geronimo was the acknowledged leader of the Chiricahua faction that wanted war to settle differences with the White Eyes. Chato was a major leader of the peace faction that believed peace with the White Eyes was necessary for Chiricahua survival.
Chato’s story of captivity and release to freedom is told in Proud Outcast, which covers the years from 1886 to 1934. During this time, Chato survived betrayal by the Army as a prisoner of war and endured, with his head held high, being treated as an outcast by some of his own People after they were freed. As Desperate Warrior said, Chato’s story is taken from history, but its truth is told through fiction as imaginatively seen through the eyes of Chato, whom Lieutenant Britton Davis, his former commander, described in 1929 as “the finest man, red or white, I ever knew.”
About the Author
W. Michael Farmer combines ten-plus years of research into
nineteenth-century Apache history and culture with Southwest-living
experience to fill his stories with a genuine sense of time and place. A
retired Ph.D. physicist, his scientific research has included measurement of
atmospheric aerosols with laser-based instruments, and he has published a
two-volume reference book on atmospheric effects on remote sensing. He has
also written short stories for anthologies and award-winning essays. His
first novel, Hombrecito’s War, won a Western Writers of America Spur
Finalist Award for Best First Novel in 2006 and was a New Mexico Book Award
Finalist for Historical Fiction in 2007. His other novels include:
Hombrecito’s Search; Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright: The Betrayals of
Pancho Villa; and Conspiracy: The Trial of Oliver Lee and James Gililland.
His Killer of Witches, The Life and Times of Yellow Boy, Mescalero Apache,
Book 1 won a Will Rogers Medallion Award and was a New Mexico–Arizona
Book Awards Finalist in 2106. Mariana’s Knight, The Revenge of Henry
Fountain won the 2017 New Mexico–Arizona Book Award for Historical
Fiction and Blood of the Devil, The Life and Times of Yellow Boy, Mescalero
Apache, Book 2 was a finalist.
These two novels have also won 2018 Silver Medallion Will Rogers Awards.
Apacheria, True Stories of Apache Culture, 1860-1920 won the 2018 New
Mexico–Arizona Book Award for History-Other (Other than New Mexico or
Arizona), Best New Mexico Book in 2018, a gold medallion in the 2019 Will
Rogers Awards for History-Young Folks, and named one of the twenty best
books on the southwest by the Pima County (Phoenix and surrounding area)
Library System. In 2019 Knight’s Odyssey and Knight of the Tiger won
gold medallions in the Will Rogers Medallion Awards, and Knight of the Tiger
won the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Fiction-Adventure NM.
The author is continuing work on two histories and two novels to be
released in 2019 through 2021 about the captivity and wars of Geronimo.
Geronimo: Prisoner of Lies, Twenty-Three Years as a Prisoner of War is a
history of what happened to Geronimo after he surrendered in 1886 and was
published in October 2019. The Odyssey of Geronimo, a novel about his years
in captivity, will be published in May 2020. The history of Geronimo’s
last ten years of war and peace before his surrender, An Apache Iliad, and
the companion novel, The Iliad of Geronimo, A Song of Blood and Fire are
expected to be published in 2021.
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