Publisher's Synopsis
Major John C. Cremony (1815 - August 24, 1879 was an American soldier who wrote the first dictionary of the Apache language and later became a newspaperman in San Francisco.Early lifeCremony was born in Boston in 1815 and claimed to have been of Cuban descent. He ran away to sea where he bore witness to piracy and the slave trade.He enlisted in the Massachusetts Volunteers in 1846 at the onset of the Mexican-American War, and served as a Spanish-language interpreter and rose to the rank of lieutenant. After the war with Mexico, Cremony returned to Massachusetts and briefly worked as a newspaper reporter until 1850 when he returned to the west and served as a Spanish-language interpreter for the U.S. Boundary Commission which laid out the Mexican and United States Border between 1849-1852. When the Boundary Commission returned to the East, Cremony remained in San Diego, California and sought his fortune as a miner and prospector.With the outbreak of the Civil War, Cremony joined the California Volunteers. In 1861 as a captain in Company B, 2nd Regiment California Volunteer Cavalry a unit of California Volunteers, he arrived in the New Mexico Territory as part of the California Column.
