Apache lament
(Book)

It's January 1881, and a winter sotrm has struck the desert crags of Trans-Pecos, Texas. Eight months have passed since Sam DeJarnett lost his wife and unborn child to Mescalero Apaches, and now he is one of ten Texas Rangers pursuing those very hostiles. He lives only for vengeance, and the fresh Mescalero trail in the snow is leading straight into the bitterly cold Sierra Diablo, the Devil Mountains. In the Mescalero band is Nejeunee, a twenty-year-old woman with a baby. She has lost her husband to the Indaa, or white men, and she lives every moment in hatred, even as she and the band flee the rangers. Nejeunee is proud to be Apache, but she was born Mexican, and now she is trubbled by long-suppressed memories of the massacre in which she was taken captive. This story of vengeance and revelation unfolds through the alternating viwpoints of Sam the Apache hater and Nejeunee the Indaa hater. High in the Diablo snows, they are fated to meet, and what comes afterward will test everything each of them has believed about the other's race. Apache Lament is based on the actual events of January 1881, when Texas Rangers tracked the last free-ranging Mescaleros into the frozen Diablos. In writing sensitively of the final days of the Apache in Texas, author Patrick Dearen draws upon his deep knowledge of the region's geography and history, as well as long-lost voice recordings from 1946 with one of the rangers involved.