This work is an account of John C. Cremony's encounters with the Indians of the Southwest. Major John C. Cremony was an American soldier famous for creating the first dictionary of the Apache language. His first meeting with the Apache occurred in the early 1850s when he accompanied John R. Bartlett's boundary commission surveying the United States-Mexican border, and also ten years later, when he, as an officer of the California Volunteers, renewed his acquaintance, particularly with the Apaches, whom he came to know as few white Americans.