From the Prologue... These Apaches were of the Aravaipa band, who lived to the northeast of the Sonoita Valley. The Aravaipa would come to call the kidnapped boy Coyote, after their trickster god, because they could never decide if he was friend or foe. Years later, white men would name him Mickey Free. The boy’s kidnapping started the final struggle for Apacheria—the longest war in the history of the United States. This conflict would leave a trail of blood from the Pecos River in Texas through New Mexico and Arizona and deep into Mexico from 1861 to 1886. All sides in that conflict blamed Mickey Free for starting it. In time, the boy would come to play a pivotal role in the war, moving back and forth between the harshly conflicted worlds of the Apache and the white invader, never really accepted by either but invaluable to both. This is Mickey Free’s story, but it is also the story of his contemporaries—both friend and foe, red and white—whose lives were shaped by the violent history of the deserts and mountains of the American Southwest and northern Mexico. It was a land where every plant bore a barb, every insect a stinger, every bird a talon, every reptile a fang—an inhospitable, deadly environment known to the outside world as Apacheria. In this bleak and unforgiving world, the one-eyed, deeply scarred Mickey Free was at home.