Neil Goodwin’s most recently published work is featured immediately below and on the first page of this website.

We Go As Captives: The Royalton Raid
and the Shadow War on the Revolutionary Frontier

We Go As Captives revolves around the story of Zadock Steele, a young man who was captured in the attack on Royalton and subsequently wrote about his harrowing experience as a prisoner, first of the Mohawks and then of the British. Steele and some thirty neighbors entered the dark underbelly of the American Revolution. Barefoot, ill-clothed, at the mercy of people whose language, customs, and tendency toward mayhem were utterly incomprehensible, the captives were hustled north. After two years, as his resignation turns to despair and unaware that the war is about to end, Steele and a few comrades execute a daring escape from the infamous Prison Island in the St. Lawrence River.

Find this book for sale on the Vermont Historical Society’s website. Click the link below to go to their online shop.

https://squareup.com/store/vermont-historical-society-museum/

Los Diarios Apaches: Un Viaje De Padre E Hijo

Neil and Grenville Goodwin’s book The Apache Diaries: A Father-Son Journey has now been translated into Spanish.

A Spanish language description of this book can be found on the “Home” page and by clicking this link: Home

The English version description of this book is below.

For information on purchasing the printed Spanish version of the book please follow this link: Amazon

To download a pdf version of this book click here.

Les Guerriers Silencieux – Journaux Apaches

Neil and Grenville Goodwin’s book The Apache Diaries: A Father-Son Journey has now been translated into a French publication. Neil will be in France at the locations and dates noted just to the right.

A French language description of this book can be found on the “Home” page and by clicking this link: Home

The English version description of this book is below.

For information on purchasing the French version of the book please follow this link: http://nuagerouge.iblogger.org/?ckattempt=1 .

The Apache Diaries: A Father-Son Journey

The surrender of Geronimo in 1886 did not mark the end of Apache resistance to white encroachment. Over the next four decades, rumors persisted about a band of “wild” Apaches in the Sierra Madre Mountains of northern Mexico. Throughout the 1920’s stories of captured children and bloodshed marked the escalating violence in the remote mountains, culminating in a sensational murder and kidnapping in 1927. Who were these reclusive Apaches? In 1930 anthropologist Grenville Goodwin headed south to find out. Accompanying him were guides who had often encountered the Apaches, and as Goodwin searched out abandoned campsites, the Apaches were quite likely watching his group.

Grenville Goodwin’s journals chronicling his epic search have been edited and annotated by his son Neil, who was born three months before his father’s tragic death in 1940. Neil Goodwin uses the journals to engage in a dialogue with the father he never knew. Retracing his father’s journeys, picking up the old, cold trail, Neil juxtaposes his own journal entries with the older ones, creating a moment of conversation and common ground between father and son while solving some enduring mysteries.

Grenville Goodwin (1907 – 1940) was a well-known and respected ethnographer of the Apaches. He was the author of The Social Organization of the Western Apache; Myths and Tales of the White Mountain Apache, Western Apache Raiding and Warfare.

EARLY REVIEWS AND COMMENTS

“With steadily gathering force, the amazing story unfolds of two exceptional men, father and son, each on his own quest. And always one feels the haunting presence of the Apache, their world and their mysteries”. –David McCullough

“A son’s longing determination to know his enigmatic father, and the brutal war waged upon a small, resourceful band of Apache, are the stuff of a terrific read that at times left me breathless with sorrow.”–Louise Erdrich.

“The Apache Diaries is about seeking. It is about our boundless urge to bring our lives full circle, gathering them into a meaningful whole. It is about Apaches, but so is it about each of us. Not since Theodora Kroeber penned Ishi has there been another book like this.”–Bernard L. Fontana.

“A son’s search for his father and the father’s search, fifty years earlier, for the mysterious Sierra Madre Apaches, come together in this profoundly moving story.”–H. Henrietta Stockel, author of Women of the Apache Nation: Voices of Truth.

“An absorbing and informative account of an unexplored chapter in Chiricahua Apache history.”–Keith N. Basso.

Like A Brother: Grenville Goodwin’s Apache Years, 1928-1939

When the anthropologist Grenville Goodwin died in 1940 at the age of 32, he had published several papers and one book, Myths and Tales of the White Mountain Apache, and had already achieved a stature that has only continued to grow. His posthumous landmark monograph, The Social Organization of the Western Apache, was hailed by anthropologist Edward Spicer as “one of the most detailed and best-documented studies of Indian social organization”. Yet, although he was highly regarded by colleagues within the profession, Goodwin himself was largely self-taught, with neither formal training nor academic degrees. This volume is the latest in series of books derived from his unpublished papers. It helps broaden our understanding of Goodwin’s life and work. It includes selections from his field notes, diaries, and letters, along with those of his wife Jan and other family members. Assembled by Goodwin’s son Neil, who never knew his father, these writings are gathered in thematic chapters that extend Neil Goodwin’s earlier work, The Apache Diaries, and shed light on Grenville Goodwin’s deepening understanding of the Apache people and their culture, and of the wrenching problems which reservation life forced on them.