Edwin Corle

Leaving the despised reservation after the defeat of Geronimo, Fig Tree John settles with his small family on a desolate shore of the Salton Sea. But he is helpless against the encroaching white civilization. When his wife is killed by two outlaws, he grows old in sullen vindictiveness, waiting to wreak justice upon the whites. But his only son is intrigued by white civilization and marries a white woman. This violent and incestuous story of an embittered man's desperate struggle to instill true Apache ideals in his son provides one of the most profound psychological descriptions of the Indian ever written.

In the words of Edwin Corle, author of Desert Country, who has chronicled the story of the Gila River, "There is no other stream that even resembles it"—and the pages of this book bear him out. A changeable ricer, at one time the Gila resembled the Everglades; in 1950 the lower river—fully half it six-hundred-mile length—was dry as dust. The Gila has never known a steamboat, very few rowboats, and only a fair assortment of fish, but from its ice caves and mountain torrents, through its torturous canyons, to its parched and sun-baked confluence with the Colorado, it has a history as dramatic and significant as any river in America. Civil War generals, Apaches, Mexicans, Mormons, and pioneers figure in the cast of characters, for since Spanish times the Gila has been a crossroads of the Southwest and in the direct line of march of the westward movement.