The Rostes Boys

Decades ago I read a review of Major Dundee where someone asked if it would have been so bad for the Rostes boys to be raised as Apaches.

And I had to think that the boys would have a longer life expectency as Americans than as Apaches, and would probably never rob or murder anyone.

In 1864 General Carleton was allegedly planning for the total extermination of the Apaches in real life. As it happened, the majority of the Apaches survived the extermination phase of relations with the US government, but it was not a certain thing in 1864.

At the end of Hondo (1953) Hondo says it was a shame that the Apache way of life is doomed to end.

So I wrote a post pointing out that the Apache way of life, had a fatal flaw, the inability or unwillingness to avoid violence.

Anglo Americans, Mexican Americans, and Tohono O'odham Indians had many differences, but the ones who participated in the Camp Grant Massacre of surrendered Apaches in 1871 could all agree on one thing, that the only good Apache was a dead Apache. The Apaches were doomed unless they gave up the violent part of their lifestyle.

The majority of Apaches gave up the violent part of their lifestyle, and so survived, and still maintain some parts of their 19th century lifestyle at the present.

But there was one small group of Apaches who never gave up their warrior lifestyle and never lived in peace, the "Lost Apaches" living in the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico.

As late as 1924 a leader with a light colored beard was seen among the Lost Apaches, presumably a white man who had been captured as a child and raised by the Lost Apaches. The fictional Rostes boys would have been 60 years older in 1924 than in 1864. They would have had to go though considerable danger to survive the Apache Wars and go onto a reseveration in the 1870s. And if they, or any real white captives of the Apaches, remained among the Lost Apaches in 1924 they didn't have many years left to live.

In the early 1930s escalating acts of violence between the Lost Apaches and rancher Francisco Fimbres lead to him leading posses into the Sierra Madre mountains and exterminating the Lost Apaches. Except for those Lost Apaches who already went to the reservations in the USA, or joined Mexican or in one case American society, the last surviving one may have been "la nina Bronca", "the wild girl", who refused to eat in captivity and starved herself to death in the summer of 1933.

This thread: ,url>https://moviechat.org/tt0045883/Hondo/59cd4b24748a0b001277305c/The-Apache-Way-of-Life discusses the total failure of the old Apache way of life, the life that Sierra Carriba would have given to the Rostes boys.