John C Cremony

Life Among the Apaches (1868) John C Cremony

One of the original seventeenth-century historical accounts of the Apaches and the southwestern American Indians. John C. Cremony's first encounter with the Indians of the Southwest occurred in the early 1850s, when he accompanied John R. Bartlett's boundary commission surveying the United States-Mexican border. Some ten years later, as an officer of the California Volunteers, he renewed his acquaintance, particularly with the Apaches, whom he came to know as few white Americans before him had. Cremony was the first white man to become fluent in the Apache language, and he published the first dictionary of their language as a tool for the US Army... Major John C. Cremony (1815 - August 24, 1879) was an American newspaperman who enrolled in the Massachusetts Volunteers in 1846, serving as a lieutenant. He served as a Spanish-language interpreter for the U. S. Boundary Commission which laid out the Mexican and United States Border between 1849-1852. He went on to serve as captain in Company B, 2nd Regiment California Volunteer Cavalry a unit of California Volunteers, with the California Column in New Mexico Territory. He eventually achieved the rank of major in 1864 and commanded the 1st Battalion of Native Cavalry, California Volunteers until 1866. He was the first editor of San Francisco's Weekly Sunday Times newspaper