A pile of stones in arid Skeleton Canyon, Arizona marks the place where the last war for America ended. But the highway marker commemorating Apache warrior Geronimo’s surrender to General Nelson A. Miles, United States Army, in 1886, is placed ten miles away, unseen by the drivers who speed by on the asphalt black ribbon of road. The two locations are near enough, but they are still worlds apart.
H.W. Brands’ new book, The Last Campaign: Sherman, Geronimo and the War for America, is the story of the last years of armed conflict between two peoples from these different worlds: indigenous Americans who lived on lands in the world of nature and the irrepressible flood tide of white people determined to remake these lands as part of their new world. Brands focuses on the final years of the Indian Wars in North America, the post-Civil War period from 1865-1886, and the last and pivotal campaigns on the edge of the shrinking frontier
The Last Campaign is the work of an exceptional American historian. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton, Sr, Chair in History at the University of Texas at Austin. A diligent researcher and a prolific writer, he is the author of more than thirty works on U.S. history and has built a well-deserved following among readers of historical scholarship and a wider and appreciative general audience. His 2000 biography of Benjamin Franklin, The First American, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and a New York Times best-seller. Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008) was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
