The Apache Kid: Army Apache Scout

Farmer chronicles the life and career of an Apache renegade in this historical Western novel, the first in a series.

Arizona, 1871: When Ohyessonna is 11 years old, many of the women and children of his tribe are massacred in their home camp by a raiding party of Tohono O’odham, Mexican, and American vigilantes. Ohyessonna and his family, who were out gathering food in the hills, survive the slaughter and retreat with the remaining tribe members into the mountains, from where they launch a series of revenge raids against the White Eyes (whites) in the area. Ohyessonna learns to shoot arrows and guard horses, and by the time he’s 14, he’s a crack shot with a Winchester. One day, a Blue Coat rides into camp looking for a good shot to help him with his work on the San Carlos Reservation. “This is a man I should study,” thinks Ohyessonna. “He can teach me much about White Eyes and how they do things, things I need to know and understand.” Under the tutelage of Teniente Beauford, and later U.S. Army Chief of Scouts Al Sieber, Ohyessonna learns the ways of the White Eyes—but when his people come under the oppression of the same Blue Coats he’s sworn to serve, he chooses the former. Under the new name of the Apache Kid, the outlaw Ohyessonna ranges across the Southwest, attempting to elude a death sentence for himself and his tribe’s way of life. Narrated from Ohyessonna’s perspective, Farmer’s story adopts the Apache’s sense of geography, history, and time, as well as his plainspoken diction: “Though scarred in his face, an eye sagging in the scar from his fight with a bear in his young-man days, but its vision still good, Loco was no man’s fool.” The book covers a fascinating period of history, and Ohyessonna embodies its painful contradictions. Nevertheless, one wishes Farmer offered more of a sense of his protagonist’s interiority, which may have helped to balance out the novel’s strenuous pace.

An immersive novel of the American Indian Wars.