The first contact between the Shis-Inday (Apaches) and the Spanish most likely occurred in 1540, when the conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado passed through their lands searching for the Seven Cities of Gold. Although Coronado passed peacefully, for the next 300 years, there were almost constant hostilities between the Shis-Inday and the Spanish, and eventually the Mexicans.

This is the story of a brief episode during that 300-year war, during the period when Spanish missionaries established and maintained a series of missions in Southwestern North America. The force of Spanish arms conquered and Christianized most of the native peoples in that large territory. One notable exception was the Apache.

Bernardo Cuesta is a Franciscan friar assigned to the mission of San Jose, hoping to follow in the missionary footsteps of Padre Kino. Bernardo, the sole survivor of an Apache ambush, is kept as a slave to the savages. Over the years of captivity, he attempts to convert the heathens and encounters the conflict between Christian beliefs and Apache shamanism.

This is a novel of faith and courage. The remarkable journey of one man through an alien culture and the imprint he left. If you want the most complete possible understanding of what the Apache became in terms of what they experienced, you must read all three books of the Chiricahua Apache series.