author
Merrill Pingree Freeman
1844–1915
A longtime Arizona pioneer, banker, and civic leader, he wrote from lived experience about the violence and upheaval of the early Southwest. His best-known work looks back on Apache conflicts through the eyes of someone deeply tied to frontier-era Arizona.
1 Audiobook
The dread Apache: That early-day scourge of the Southwest
by Merrill Pingree Freeman
About the author
Born in Ohio in February 1844, he moved west with his family while still a child and later spent many years in Nevada before settling in Tucson, Arizona, in 1880. Archival and library records describe him as a businessman and public figure whose life overlapped closely with the development of Arizona in its territorial years.
He is remembered in print chiefly for The Dread Apache: That Early-Day Scourge of the Southwest, a work also listed by Project Gutenberg. The book reflects his interest in preserving stories from the frontier period and the conflicts that shaped the region.
Records from the University of Arizona and related Arizona collections also connect him with civic and educational work in the state, including correspondence preserved from the years 1907 to 1915. Some sources disagree on his year of death, so that detail is best treated cautiously.