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.
Interview with W. Michael Farmer
What is your favorite part of the book?
When Chato served as the lead scout for General Crook he found Chihuahua’s (Chihuahua was an Apache leader) camp on the Bavispe River in Mexico. He led an attack on it with only the backing of a few other scouts. The sixteen-year-old nephew of Chihuahua was killed in the attack. The Apaches believed that because Chato led the attack, he was responsible for the boy’s death even if he didn’t personally shoot him. Chihuahua and his brother Ulzana swore blood revenge against Chato for the boy’s death. However, at Fort Marian in Florida, Chihuahua told Chato there would be no revenge attempted until they were no longer POWs. Ten years later, Chihuahua became a Christian and a little later so did Chato. Chihuahua privately told Chato that now that he, Chihuahua, was a Christian, there would be no revenge for the death of his nephew.
Does your book have a lesson? Moral?
Personal honor means always doing the right thing regardless of deprecations made against you from those around you.
Are your characters based off real people or did they all come entirely from your imagination?
In Proud Outcast, virtually all the characters are real except one, the Mescalero Scout, Yellow Boy, who has appeared in six of my novels and is the lead character in the Killer of Witches trilogy.
Of all the characters you have created, which is your favorite and why?
Yellow Boy is my favorite created character. He first appeared as a mentor to the young hero, Henry Fountain, in the “Knight” trilogy. The great Apache creator god gave young Yellow Boy a gift of hitting with phenomenal accuracy what he aimed at with his Henry rifle. In the years that followed Yellow Boy helped lead what was left of his band from the Guadalupe Mountains on the Texas border to the Mescalero Reservation in central New Mexico. He married, had a child, became a tribal policeman, went into Mexico after the Chiricahua Apaches with General Crook’s expedition, and hunted down and killed the witch who had tried to destroy his band. All the while he was having to learn to deal with the American bureaucracy attempting to destroy Mescalero life-ways and assimilate the Apaches into white society as second class citizens.
What character in your book are you least likely to get along with?
General Nelson A. Miles who was as political as they come in the Army and was ignorant of the culture and people he was supposed to manage and care for. Virtually everything he did was intended to advance his career.
What would the main character in your book have to say about you?
I think Chato would say that I spoke the truth about events and personalities and saw the Apaches as human beings, not blood thirsty savages.
Do you want each book to stand on its own, or are you trying to build a body of work with connections between each book?
I want each book to stand on its own. However, history and imagination show that there are many connecting threads in these stories between the characters that tie them together through time and place into a coherent whole.
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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1 comments:
Sounds amazing
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