The word tomahawk is a transliteration of the Algonquin word for axe. Hand-held axes were a general-purpose Native tool, used primarily for hunting, construction, and, when necessary, war.
When I was a Troop 105 Boy Scout growing up in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, the climax of the scouting year was a week-long trip to the Tomahawk Scout Reservation in Long Lake, Wisconsin. The troop, about 30 boys and 5 adults, would fill up a pair of vans and drive East into the woods where a slew of other troops from around the Upper Midwest had gathered. Tomahawk camp life included no small amount of of mess-eating and ceremony, for example the annual firelit induction of the "Order of the Arrow," a select group of obsequiously elite scouts that were allowed to wear their red arrow sashes with pride.
Dodge Tomahawk Concept Cycle
The Tomahawk missile was designed by the General Dynamics Corporation in 1970, and has become a primary weapon in the US military arsenal. Featured in such films as the penultimate James Bond and Steven Segal's Under Siege, the Tomahawk uses a global positioning system to skim the Earth's surface, and can even be fitted with a nuclear warhead. They have a range of over 650 miles and fly at almost 500 mph. Tomahawks were the weapon of choice for Clinton's famous "African aspirin factory" bombing, as well as for the first Bush's Gulf War, where about 300 Tomahawks were launched at military and civilian targets in Iraq.
Out of the many activites that Tomahawk had to offer, including knot-tying, sailing on a small lake, and climbing a 40 foot tower, the invariable highlight was a three-mile hike through the woods to "Foxfire Outpost," a sub-camp where burly men taught us to shoot black powder muskets and throw tomahawks. Even compared to the old-fashioned rifles, tomahawk throwing really tested a young scout's dexterity and luck, and I only once managed to get the tomahawk to stick into the weather-beaten stump that served as a target. It was probably an accident, but I can still feel the testosterone charge from seeing the tomahawk leave a vertical gash in the wood, my mark imperceptible amongst decades of accumulated others. Coming back we'd hike through the woods by moon and flashlight, telling dirty jokes or ghost stories, engaging eachother in a gentle fearlessness competition. By now, two of the boys from that group have enlisted in the Air Force, and are serving their time somewhere in the Middle-eastern desert.
S-590 Tomahawk Hovercraft
The word "tomahawk" entered the cultural mainstream after the publication of James Fenimore Cooper's bestselling 1826 romantic adventure novel, The Last of the Mohicans. The book set a publishing precedent for much of the American adventure writing that followed, from early Melville to Jack London to Ernest Hemingway. A great deal of the book's violence was cut from the 1992 movie adaptation, which I first saw in my Jr. High punk daze. In the movie, the hero, Hawk-Eye (played by Daniel Day Lewis) kills at least four American or British soldiers with a tomahawk, spinning it through the air with deadly movie accuracy. We can probably blame The Last of the Mohicans for many cultural mishaps, the most glaring example being Kevin Costner's Best Director Oscar for Dances With Wolves.
Apache:
Just as the word Sioux means "enemy" in the Ojibiwe language, Apache derives from the Zuni word for "enemy." The Apache tribe's ancestral territory covered a large part of Arizona and New Mexico, and that's where they offered some of the fiercest resistance to European land development during the last half of the 19th century. They became such a militant thorn that one American general complementarily called them "the tigers of the human species." After the 1848 California Gold Rush, the Apache resistance became much more difficult, and soon a steady stream of fortune-seekers were crawling all about the Southwestern mountains.
Apache Web Server
The Apache is the Army's most agressively armed attack helicopter. One of the Boeing corporation's more lucrative exports, Apaches have been sold to countries all over the world, including Israel, Greece, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Apache can be fitted with a wide range of armaments, from powerful Hellfire missiles to a mounted 30 milimeter chain gun that can link to a sight on the gunner's helmet, a prominent fusion of man and machine. Apaches were used extensively in the combat phases of both Gulf Wars, and, luckily for Apache pilots, most of the current conflict's helicopter accidents have involved the more logistically-oriented Blackhawk.
In one famous Apache/US dispute, Chocise, the son-in-law of a famous chief, went under a flag of truce to dicuss a long-standing conflict with US soldiers. All of Chochise's negotiation party was taken captive by the commanding general, and marched to a nearby Army base. Cochise himself escaped imprisonment by cutting a hole in the side of his tent, but had three bullet holes in him by the time he reached his home tribe. Along the way he took hostage three white settlers, in hopes of exchanging them for his imprisoned family members. When the army refused to negotiate, both parties killed all of their captives. This incident ignited the bloody skirmishes known as The Cochise Wars.
At least in the movies, when military paratroopers jump out of airplanes they traditionally shout "Geronimo," the name of the famous Apache chief who led a prolonged guerilla war against the US Army in the Southwest. Ironically, Geronimo's actual name was Goyahkla, an Indian word that means "one who yawns." Evading capture for six years, and pursued by over 5,000 US military personnel, the younger members of Geronimo's guerilla band eventually persuaded him to surrender to the Army force. He gave himself up in 1886 and spent two years in prison in
Apache Farm Tractor
Fort Marion, Florida as a punishment. Banished from his native reservation, he briefly joined a traveling Wild West Show that, among other things, performed a memorable show at the Saint Louis World's Fair. Geronimo died in 1909.
Today the Apache tribe lives primarily on a group of reservations in Arizona and New Mexico. When I was 15 years old my family drove West from Minnesota to California on a tour of Major League baseball stadiums. Along the way we stopped at Four Corners, the only place in the country where four states meet. Smack in the middle of reservation territory and desert, Four Corners ranks quite low on the sightseeing heirarchy, and most of the people that end up there are families of tourist flotsam from off the beaten Interstate. After making my requisite four-state stand in the dry heat, I poked my head into one of the many trinket booths that surround the site like a haphazard stockade. I remember looking at the tables filled with Native bead work and jewelry and thinking, "What a bunch of cheap crap."
