Maureen Corrigan

She didn't look back, but she clearly heard a group of horses breaking away from the herd of running cattle and swerving toward her.

When the dust raised by the pounding of the horses' hooves began to sting her eyes, she threw herself on the ground and curled into a ball, hoping to be trampled to death.

Then she was yanked up by her braids, her neck wrenched, her legs kicking, her brown underskirts a flower in the wind.

Camila's abduction spurs a second narrative featuring a ragtag search party assembled under a lieutenant colonel of the Mexican Republic.

The searchers ride far into the vast territory that was once known as Apacheria.

Enrique tells us this ancient homeland of the various Apache tribes vanished before our eyes, like cassette tapes or incandescent light bulbs.

Where Sonora, Chihuahua, Arizona, and New Mexico meet today was an Atlantis, an in-between country.

And straddling it were the Mexicans and the gringos, like two children, eyes shut, their backs to each other, while the Apaches scuttled back and forth between their legs, not sure where to go, with strangers bubbling up everywhere, filling their lands.

The endgame for the Apache began in March 1886, when their great leader and shaman, Geronimo, surrendered with a small band of warriors to the U.S.

Army.

According to the official transcript of that moment, Geronimo said,

Once I moved like the wind, now I surrender to you, and that is all.

Enrique's novel, which takes its title from Geronimo's eloquent words, loses some vitality when it focuses on the story of his surrender and afterlife as a prisoner of war and a curiosity.

Geronimo appeared, for instance, at the 1904 World's Fair in St.

Louis and rode in Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural parade the year after.

Given that Enrique writes with such unsentimental admiration about Apacheria, perhaps recounting the story of Geronimo's fall felt more like a writerly duty than a desire.

Now I Surrender has been described as a revisionist or alternative Western, which it is.

But given its scope, I think it might be more apt to call it an expandable Western.

There's room for everyone in this epic of conquest and eradication – Native Americans, Mexicans, gringos, formerly enslaved people, immigrants, and one lone writer –

Gamely trying to tell their stories before the curtain comes down on the whole enterprise.