Apache had plenty of knowledge of agriculture. They lived in an agricultural world and interacted with people who were agriculturalists, and even practiced herd

Apache had plenty of knowledge of agriculture. They lived in an agricultural world and interacted with people who were agriculturalists, and even practiced herding (a form of agriculture). Moreover, it's wise to consider the context of gory incidents described in popular culture. This all took place against a backdrop of devastating war that captured the imagination of 19th century popular media. This is one of the periods of colonization where we can clearly point to genocide in the sense that total eradication was unambiguously a political goal and you could get money by bringing a native scalp/head into a government office. Despite that, as someone who's worked with primary sources from this period and region, I'll caution you that particularly lurid descriptions of atrocities are often both exaggerated and cherry-picked. As an aside, the Apache in particular were very well organized as far as first nations go and at the height of their power had thousands of warriors with fairly modern light weaponry. We have sources from the Mexican American war about Mexican commanders refusing to head off American troops because they were more worried about native forces than the Americans. That's also why article XI of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was such an important point for the negotiations.