Native in a Strange Land: The Life of Mike Burns, Indian Scout and Autobiographer

Mike Burns lived a long life in two worlds. Born in about 1862 into the Kwevkepaya (Yavapai) people, he was taken prisoner by U.S. soldiers after his family was massacred at a place called Skeleton Cave. He lived for years as something between a captive and a servant until joining the Indian Scouts, riding against Sitting Bull after the Battle of Little Bighorn and Geronimo in the Apache Wars. McNamee, the editor of Burns’s memoir The Only One Living to Tell, recounts Burns’s life in the context of nineteenth-century Arizona history.

Gregory McNamee is a writer, editor, photographer, and publisher. He is the author of thirty-six books and of more than four thousand articles and other publications. He is a contributing editor to the Encyclopædia Britannica, a research fellow at the Southwest Center of the University of Arizona, and a lecturer in the Eller School of Management, also at the University of Arizona.