July 26, 2007
As promised here is one of the opening spreads for Mickey Free. The narrator, of course, is Frederick Remington:

Mickey Free's Crooked Trail
It is a bold person, or a fool, who will dare make the claim that a wilder savage ever lived than an Apache Indian, and so it is no small irony that a bronco Irish-Mexican gave them all a run for the money. Also, hard to believe, is that this same derelict of human degradation would meet an Apache boy, raised by whites, and that the two of them would became fast friends. This too defies logic, but it’s all true.

The short version is this: the Apache Kid was outlawed by a revenge killing on the reservation. When he hit the outlaw trail the last time he didn’t leave much more trail than a buzzard, and it took years to unravel it.

Chief of Scouts, Al Sieber, sent his first sergeant, the famous tracker Mickey Free, with a picked party of trailers, to pick up the Kid’s trail, and they travelled deep down into Old Mexico. Eventually Mick caught up with the Kid and something happened that no one has ever figured out. At least that’s the story I heard at the time these events unfolded.

But let’s start at the beginning.



When he was just a boy, he started a war. The longest in the history of the United States.