The Book
Born in Missouri in 1860, Tom Horn left home at age 16 to go West. Thus began the extraordinary journey of a government scout and interpreter, adopted son of Chief Pedro of the White Mountain Apaches, trusted negotiator with Geronimo, war chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, and chief of scouts during the Apache wars of 1885-86.
He died in 1903, hanged for a crime he didn’t commit.
Tom Horn’s life was featured in a 1980 movie starring Steve McQueen.
The world he lived in is mostly gone now. But this exciting glimpse of that world tells about who we are as Americans and how we got where we are.
How I Came to Publish the Book
Tom Horn’s autobiography was first published in 1903 soon after his death by hangman’s rope.
My husband bought a copy of the book several years ago and found it impossible to read. The type was too small, and the lines too long to get from the right margin back the left side of the next line. It made my head hurt to look at it. He never got a chance to read it.
So here we were, in the Great COVID Quarantine of 2020, and I felt like doing a book project. I downloaded the text version of the book from the internet and started editing. Aside from the type size, there were errors in the text. Optical character recognition software was used in getting the book into text format, and errors happen. Sometimes gibberish, such as |< instead of “k”; sometime Kanch instead of Ranch. Some of these had been corrected in the book we had on our shelf; some of them not.
As I edited the book I kept telling my husband, Did you know he got along with Geronimo? They weren’t exactly friends, but they respected each other.” He finally asked me not to spoil it for him
I edited the book throughout. I regularized the spellings and made the punctuation more modern. For example, Mickey Free was spelled “Micky Free” throughout the book. I used the more modern spelling, so that if someone wants to know more about him, it will be easier to find out. The words and voice remain Tom Horn’s.
My goal was to create an attractive, readable edition that gives this fascinating history the place in your library it deserves.