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.