Opus 2019-190: How!

We live in stereotypes.  I started wondering, just how tough were the Apaches?

I am not talking about could they have cleaned my clock.  Any thug in the inner city of Los Angeles could do that without breathing hard.  I am talking about in the context of history, how tough were they?

The Apache tribes, and there were several of them, were located in the southwest United States and northern Mexico.  In case you don’t get out much that is a barren wasteland.  Rattlesnakes and cactus.  Vultures and skeletons.  Sand and scorpions.  It is not a place that you would chose to live if you did not have air conditioning and bug spray.  If the Apache were such great warriors why didn’t they move to greener pastures?

I asked myself what would happen if you were to pit 100 Apache against 100 Mongol warriors in 1,300 A.D.?  It would be a slaughter.  None of the Apache would live to tell their grandchildren about the embarrassment. 

Technology would be part of the difference.  Set aside that the Mongol might have had iron weapons.  Give the Apache horses.  It would have still been no contest.  The Mongol used compound bows that were much stronger than what the Apache weapon.  The Mongol had discovered that undergarments of layered silk would stop arrowheads. 

One of the reasons that the American Indians were routinely defeated was that their culture had no room for technological advancement.  Some of the tribes learned to work with copper but they never moved to bronze and iron.  They used the metal for ornaments, not tools.  While it is true that they probably learned how to make sharper arrowheads from flint, they still remained flint.  Someone once said that when the first Indian started using a steel knife without knowing how to make it, the fate of the American Indian was sealed.

It is true that the American Indians had domesticated some plants but they never developed any tools beyond a sharpened stick to increase their yield.  They adopted the horse from the Europeans but never learned to make their own rifles or ammunition.  Like it or not they were a culture that was destined to fail.  They did not fail because they were weak.  They failed because they refused to move forward.

Stereotypes only help when you are picking out a music system.

homo unius libri