In the movie, it showed that the Apaches and the Americans had different views of life and culture.

For example, they had different views on the use of land, on religion, and on law. Choose one specific area where the Apaches and Americans had different views. Write what the Americans believed and what Apaches believed. Give reasons to support your example. At the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, the U.S had gotten a large amount of land from Mexico, including the land that the Apache lived on. Around that time, many Americans went west, usually through Apache territory, as they were drawn by the idea of the untamed west and manifest destiny. But when gold was found in California in the 1850s, land surveyors gave way to thousands of fortune hunters, all streaming west right through Chiricahua Apache (the tribe that Geronimo belonged to) territory, interrupting daily life. They debated on how to deal with the newcomers, and turned to their chief, Cochise, a wise and great warrior. He was able to negotiate a deal that allowed travellers and goods to pass through Apache land. But when Spanish gold mines were discovered, the prospectors came to stay. They settled and made frontier towns, demanding and pushing the Apache out of large portions of their land. Some acted rather cruelly to the Chiricahua poisoning their food, selling young Apache girls into slavery, decapitating heads of venerated warriors. This was what pushed Cochise too far, and he told his people to take revenge. Meanwhile, the number of white settlers in the area increased exponentially, and they grew angry that the government wasnt helping to protect them against the Indians. Newspapers in the nearby frontier town of Tucson called for retribution as well. At this point, the Civil War that had torn apart the nation was slowly coming to an end, and the idea of Manifest Destiny was seen more as a truth than as a dream. More men started to move west, taming the land, and moving the Indians out. Many Apache tribes saw their land as sacred, since it was given to them directly by the Creator, and it offered them natural resources and wildlife. It serves as something that shaped their religion, culture, background the very backbone of who they are, because the land is something permanent. It has been there for longer then they can remember, all the way back, and it is a marker in history of what happened, not when it happened. And so the Apache were very hesitant to part with their land. The Chiricahua chose the fight, instead of comply with the Americans and move to reservations. This was what the Navajo had done ten years ago, and they were eventually forced by the military off their ancestral lands and to a reservation that the U.S government had set aside for them. The Apache knew this, and some complied, and over time, one Apache chief after another agreed to reservation life. But the Chiricahua continued to fight. Many of the Indians that had complied with the government were started to be assimilated with the mainstream Christianity, English, and the dominant white culture. The Bureau of Indian Affairs replaced independent council governments, and the traditional ways started getting lost. These had to be taught to the young secretly by elders now. It seemed that soon, the west would become white mans land.

But the Apache continued to fight for almost twenty years, mostly lead the Geronimo. He was considered vicious and savage in his day, but he eventually had to surrender. The Apache were growing fewer in number, and he knew he couldnt run and fight forever. But after a while, the nation began to accept him. He became a sort of legend to the nation, and President Theodore Roosevelt even asked the then 80-year-old Apache to be part of his inaugural procession.