Review by Choice Review
In 1872, US soldiers captured a young Yavapai named Hoo-moo-thy-ah after massacring his band (including his father) at Skeleton Cave, and renamed him Mike Burns (c1864-1934). Gregory McNamee thankfully resurrects and annotates Burns's memoir, which has been mostly ignored in the Sharlot Hall Museum's archives since 1929. It is a remarkable document. Burns recounts his life from 1872 until 1886, where he eyewitnessed much of the Indian Wars of that period. First raised by soldiers' families as a foster son, then sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where he also worked on nearby farms (and later a farm in Ohio), Burns eventually earned a teacher's certificate at Highland University in Kansas. Wanting to return to Arizona, he became an army Indian scout. Evincing a profound ethic, Burns provides a remarkably centered, nonjudgmental account of the events and the people he encountered, assessing people by their actions, not by their ethnicity. Although shaped by his own white education and by later editors, his narrative evokes a Native tone and pace that is at once peaceful and gripping. Burns's story creates an inimitable view onto a western reality that simply is not attainable anywhere else. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. J. B. Wolford University of Missouri--St. Louis
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Unique among the numerous nineteenth-century accounts of whites raised by Native tribes, this is the remarkable story of a young Yavapai, the survivor of a U.S. Cavalry raid in 1872 in Arizona, who was adopted by Captain James Burns and his family and given their name. After the captain's death, in 1874, Mike accompanied the Fifth Cavalry on a trip to the East, coming close to the Battle of the Little Bighorn and participating in the pursuit of Sitting Bull. Mike always missed his homeland but was resolved to go with the white people and learn their ways. This conviction led him to Pennsylvania's Carlisle Indian School in 1880 and a brief stint at a Kansas college before returning west, where he worked as scout until 1886, despite his guilt over being an Indian at work hunting down other Indians in the service of the white conquerors of Arizona. Hidden in archives for decades and now expertly brought to light by writer and editor McNamee, Burns' memoir is a compelling account of Indian-white relations during the tumultuous pre-reservation years.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Before he died in 1934, Yavapai Indian Burns wrote down his experiences, especially during the Indian wars that raged in Arizona from 1872 to 1886. His memoir has finally found a publisher, thanks to McNamee (Otero Mesa: Preserving America's Wildest Grassland). Burns begins with his childhood, when he was named Hoomothya. He was captured by the Fifth U.S. Cavalry and watched the soldiers and their Akimel O'Odham, Apache, and Maricopa allies slaughter his people at the Skeleton Cave Massacre. While growing up, he was assigned by the soldiers to multiple roles, from cleaning out stables to spying on other Yavapais. After a brief stint at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, he became an Indian scout, helping the cavalry subdue other native peoples. Obviously conflicted by this role, Burns repeatedly observed that all Native Americans, be they allies or victims, were mistreated and that the United States kept no promises to them. After his services were no longer required by the military, he was abandoned to life on the reservation. His manuscript ultimately arrived at Arizona's Sharlot Hall Museum. VERDICT- McNamee has rescued a moving memoir from obscurity. Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Southwest and its native peoples as conveyed by a native writer.-John Burch, Campbellsville Univ. Lib., KY (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
One shattered life in what was to become Arizona in the second half of the 19th century, on a personal scale and from a native perspective. Burns started life as Hoomothya, aka Wet Nose, a child of one of the tribal branches gathered under the name Yavapai. In 1872, when he was about eight years old, his family was murdered at the Skeleton Cave Massacre, and Hoomothya was taken by Capt. James Burns, in whose home he fell somewhere between a ward and a servant, and renamed Mike Burns. This is the story of a swath of his life, though concentrating on the years 18721886, and told in his words. Aided by Bloomsbury Review and Encyclopaedia Britannica contributing editor McNamee's (Aelian's On the Nature of Animals, 2011, etc.) light editorial touch, those words have an unfiltered, sand-blasted polish, spare and well-chosen and strung with piquant atmospherics and a decided sense of transport. "Burns lived in two worlds, and he was at home in neither," writes McNamee, but he did spend many years as a scout for the United States military, where he took part in the push westward. There is plenty of mayhem and bloodshed, but what gives this memoir its peerless value is the potency and immediacy of the observations. This might be as quotidian as herding chickens, or as appalling as a man shot at such close range his clothes caught on fire, or as evocative as the place descriptions, moving camp, "following a big wash upstream toward the Superstition Mountains near the Gold Field." Threaded throughout is the mistreatment and murder of native populations that Burns, despite being a scout, could or would hardly ignore. An ethnographic and historical prize from "that anthropological desideratum above all others--the native point of view."]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
