People seldom remember that Geronimo and Apaches in general were the enemies of most every Indian tribe they encountered. Fact is the same went for most tribes at one time or another. The painting "when Sioux and Blackfoot meet" is a good illustration of this.
There were a few very peace loving tribes that earned the respect of neighboring tribes. These were usually unmolested. In one instance when "the Copper Pot people" were massacred by an extremely warlike and possibly cannibalistic band the neighboring tribes put aside their differences temporarily to together to hunt down and kill the murderers wiping them out completely.
I found out about this from an article about the oldest known story in pictographs ever translated.
The tribe "rubbed out" were also believed to have killed and eaten the survivors of a Spanish shipwreck on the Texas coast. They were extinct before whites tried colonizing the south west, good riddance I say.
The American Indians were definitely the victims of white colonization, but they were no angels themselves. They practiced slavery on a grand scale and while their battles were usually a relatively small scale their wars against their neighbors went on for many centuries, often only ending when one side or the other ceased to exist.
The region where I live was known as "the Dark and Bloody Ground" said to be so fertile because of the blood of generations of warriors of the five major tribes who claimed it as their own hunting grounds. They had no concept of ownership of land, they claimed an area by conquest and held it only so long as they remained undefeated.
Basically before the whites introduced horses, the wheel, and iron tools the American Indian never advanced beyond the Neolithic stage of civilization.
Geronimo earned the respect of his enemies for his courage, fighting skills and leadership abilities, but he was in the end just the most skilled killer of a race of killers. The name for the Apache used by neighboring tribes was always their word in their own language meaning "enemy".
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Topic: Re: Geronimo 1 - Indian Fighter (Read 206 times)
