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Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History Paperback – Illustrated, May 10, 2011
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S. C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moonspans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches.
Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how and when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. So effective were the Comanches that they forced the creation of the Texas Rangers and account for the advent of the new weapon specifically designed to fight them: the six-gun.
The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads—a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being.
Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker, a lovely nine-year-old girl with cornflower-blue eyes who was kidnapped by Comanches from the far Texas frontier in 1836. She grew to love her captors and became infamous as the "White Squaw" who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah, a warrior who was never defeated and whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend.
S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a major new writer of American history.
- Print length371 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherScribner
- Publication dateMay 10, 2011
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 8.44 inches
- ISBN-101416591060
- ISBN-13978-1416591061
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Award-winning works of history from S.C. Gwynne | "A rich tale of technology, daring and folly." —New York Times Book Review | “A masterwork of history” (Lawrence Wright, author of God Save Texas)--the spellbinding, epic account of the last year of the Civil War | The epic New York Times bestselling account of how Civil War general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson became a great and tragic national hero | The incredible story of how two unknown coaches revolutionized American football at every level, from high school to the NFL |
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"In Empire of the Summer Moon, Sam Gwynne has given us a rich, vividly detailed rendering of an important era in our history and of two great men, Quanah Parker and Ranald Slidel Mackenzie, whose struggles did much to define it."—Larry McMurtry
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A NEW KIND OF WAR
CAVALRYMEN REMEMBER SUCH moments: dust swirling behind the pack mules, regimental bugles shattering the air, horses snorting and riders’ tack creaking through the ranks, their old company song rising on the wind: “Come home, John! Don’t stay long. Come home soon to your own chick-a-biddy!”1 The date was October 3, 1871. Six hundred soldiers and twenty Tonkawa scouts had bivouacked on a lovely bend of the Clear Fork of the Brazos, in a rolling, scarred prairie of grama grass, scrub oak, sage, and chaparral, about one hundred fifty miles west of Fort Worth, Texas. Now they were breaking camp, moving out in a long, snaking line through the high cutbanks and quicksand streams. Though they did not know it at the time—the idea would have seemed preposterous—the sounding of “boots and saddle” that morning marked the beginning of the end of the Indian wars in America, of fully two hundred fifty years of bloody combat that had begun almost with the first landing of the first ship on the first fatal shore in Virginia. The final destruction of the last of the hostile tribes would not take place for a few more years. Time would be yet required to round them all up, or starve them out, or exterminate their sources of food, or run them to ground in shallow canyons, or kill them outright. For the moment the question was one of hard, unalloyed will. There had been brief spasms of official vengeance and retribution before: J. M. Chivington’s and George Armstrong Custer’s savage massacres of Cheyennes in 1864 and 1868 were examples. But in those days there was no real attempt to destroy the tribes on a larger scale, no stomach for it. That had changed, and on October 3, the change assumed the form of an order, barked out through the lines of command to the men of the Fourth Cavalry and Eleventh Infantry, to go forth and kill Comanches. It was the end of anything like tolerance, the beginning of the final solution.
The white men were grunts, bluecoats, cavalry, and dragoons; mostly veterans of the War Between the States who now found themselves at the edge of the known universe, ascending to the turreted rock towers that gated the fabled Llano Estacado—Coronado’s term for it, meaning “palisaded plains” of West Texas, a country populated exclusively by the most hostile Indians on the continent, where few U.S. soldiers had ever gone before. The llano was a place of extreme desolation, a vast, trackless, and featureless ocean of grass where white men became lost and disoriented and died of thirst; a place where the imperial Spanish had once marched confidently forth to hunt Comanches, only to find that they themselves were the hunted, the ones to be slaughtered. In 1864, Kit Carson had led a large force of federal troops from Santa Fe and attacked a Comanche band at a trading post called Adobe Walls, north of modern-day Amarillo. He had survived it, but had come within a whisker of watching his three companies of cavalry and infantry destroyed.2
The troops were now going back, because enough was enough, because President Grant’s vaunted “Peace Policy” toward the remaining Indians, run by his gentle Quaker appointees, had failed utterly to bring peace, and finally because the exasperated general in chief of the army, William Tecumseh Sherman, had ordered it so. Sherman’s chosen agent of destruction was a civil war hero named Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, a difficult, moody, and implacable young man who had graduated first in his class from West Point in 1862 and had finished the Civil War, remarkably, as a brevet brigadier general. Because his hand was gruesomely disfigured from war wounds, the Indians called him No-Finger Chief, or Bad Hand. A complex destiny awaited him. Within four years he would prove himself the most brutally effective Indian fighter in American history. In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them.
For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.
Just how bad things were in 1871 along this razor edge of civilization could be seen in the numbers of settlers who had abandoned their lands. The frontier, carried westward with so much sweat and blood and toil, was now rolling backward, retreating. Colonel Randolph Marcy, who accompanied Sherman on a western tour in the spring, and who had known the country intimately for decades, had been shocked to find that in many places there were fewer people than eighteen years before. “If the Indian marauders are not punished,” he wrote, “the whole country seems in a fair way of becoming totally depopulated.”3 This phenomenon was not entirely unknown in the history of the New World. The Comanches had also stopped cold the northward advance of the Spanish empire in the eighteenth century—an empire that had, up to that point, easily subdued and killed millions of Indians in Mexico and moved at will through the continent. Now, after more than a century of relentless westward movement, they were rolling back civilization’s advance again, only on a much larger scale. Whole areas of the borderlands were simply emptying out, melting back eastward toward the safety of the forests. One county—Wise—had seen its population drop from 3,160 in the year 1860 to 1,450 in 1870. In some places the line of settlements had been driven back a hundred miles.4 If General Sherman wondered about the cause—as he once did—his tour with Marcy relieved him of his doubts. That spring they had narrowly missed being killed themselves by a party of raiding Indians. The Indians, mostly Kiowas, passed them over because of a shaman’s superstitions and had instead attacked a nearby wagon train. What happened was typical of the savage, revenge-driven attacks by Comanches and Kiowas in Texas in the postwar years. What was not typical was Sherman’s proximity and his own very personal and mortal sense that he might have been a victim, too. Because of that the raid became famous, known to history as the Salt Creek Massacre.5
Seven men were killed in the raid, though that does not begin to describe the horror of what Mackenzie found at the scene. According to Captain Robert G. Carter, Mackenzie’s subordinate, who witnessed its aftermath, the victims were stripped, scalped, and mutilated. Some had been beheaded and others had their brains scooped out. “Their fingers, toes and private parts had been cut off and stuck in their mouths,” wrote Carter, “and their bodies, now lying in several inches of water and swollen or bloated beyond all chance of recognition, were filled full of arrows, which made them resemble porcupines.” They had clearly been tortured, too. “Upon each exposed abdomen had been placed a mass of live coals. . . . One wretched man, Samuel Elliott, who, fighting hard to the last, had evidently been wounded, was found chained between two wagon wheels and, a fire having been made from the wagon pole, he had been slowly roasted to death—‘burnt to a crisp.’ ”6
Thus the settlers’ headlong flight eastward, especially on the Texas frontier, where such raiding was at its worst. After so many long and successful wars of conquest and dominion, it seemed implausible that the westward rush of Anglo-European civilization would stall in the prairies of central Texas. No tribe had ever managed to resist for very long the surge of nascent American civilization with its harquebuses and blunderbusses and muskets and eventually lethal repeating weapons and its endless stocks of eager, land-greedy settlers, its elegant moral double standards and its complete disregard for native interests. Beginning with the subjection of the Atlantic coastal tribes (Pequots, Penobscots, Pamunkeys, Wampanoags, et al), hundreds of tribes and bands had either perished from the earth, been driven west into territories, or forcibly assimilated. This included the Iroquois and their enormous, warlike confederation that ruled the area of present-day New York; the once powerful Delawares, driven west into the lands of their enemies; the Iroquois, then yet farther west into even more murderous foes on the plains. The Shawnees of the Ohio Country had fought a desperate rearguard action starting in the 1750s. The great nations of the south—Chicasaw, Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, and Choctaw—saw their reservation lands expropriated in spite of a string of treaties; they were coerced westward into lands given them in yet more treaties that were violated before they were even signed; hounded along a trail of tears until they, too, landed in “Indian Territory” (present-day Oklahoma), a land controlled by Comanches, Kiowas, Araphoes, and Cheyennes.
Even stranger was that the Comanches’ stunning success was happening amid phenomenal technological and social changes in the west. In 1869 the Transcontinental Railroad was completed, linking the industrializing east with the developing west and rendering the old trails—Oregon, Santa Fe, and tributaries—instantly obsolete. With the rails came cattle, herded northward in epic drives to railheads by Texans who could make fast fortunes getting them to Chicago markets. With the rails, too, came buffalo hunters carrying deadly accurate .50-caliber Sharps rifles that could kill effectively at extreme range—grim, violent, opportunistic men blessed now by both a market in the east for buffalo leather and the means of getting it there. In 1871 the buffalo still roamed the plains: Earlier that year a herd of four million had been spotted near the Arkansas River in present-day southern Kansas. The main body was fifty miles deep and twenty-five miles wide.7 But the slaughter had already begun. It would soon become the greatest mass destruction of warm-blooded animals in human history. In Kansas alone the bones of thirty-one million buffalo were sold for fertilizer between 1868 and 1881.8 All of these profound changes were under way as Mackenzie’s Raiders departed their camps on the Clear Fork. The nation was booming; a railroad had finally stitched it together. There was only this one obstacle left: the warlike and unreconstructed Indian tribes who inhabited the physical wastes of the Great Plains.
Of those, the most remote, primitive, and irredeemably hostile were a band of Comanches known as the Quahadis. Like all Plains Indians, they were nomadic. They hunted primarily the southernmost part of the high plains, a place known to the Spanish, who had been abjectly driven from it, as Comancheria. The Llano Estacado, located within Comancheria, was a dead-flat tableland larger than New England and rising, in its highest elevations, to more than five thousand feet. For Europeans, the land was like a bad hallucination. “Although I traveled over them for more than 300 leagues,” wrote Coronado in a letter to the king of Spain on October 20, 1541, “[there were] no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea . . . there was not a stone, nor a bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.”9 The Canadian River formed its northern boundary. In the east was the precipitous Caprock Escarpment, a cliff rising somewhere between two hundred and one thousand feet that demarcates the high plains from the lower Permian Plains below, giving the Quahadis something that approximated a gigantic, nearly impregnable fortress. Unlike almost all of the other tribal bands on the plains, the Quahadis had always shunned contact with Anglos. They would not even trade with them, as a general principle, preferring the Mexican traders from Santa Fe, known as Comancheros. So aloof were they that in the numerous Indian ethnographies compiled from 1758 onward chronicling the various Comanche bands (there were as many as thirteen), they do not even show up until 1872.10 For this reason they had largely avoided the cholera plagues of 1816 and 1849 that had ravaged western tribes and had destroyed fully half of all Comanches. Virtually alone among all bands of all tribes in North America, they never signed a treaty. Quahadis were the hardest, fiercest, least yielding component of a tribe that had long had the reputation as the most violent and warlike on the continent; if they ran low on water, they were known to drink the contents of a dead horse’s stomach, something even the toughest Texas Ranger would not do. Even other Comanches feared them. They were the richest of all plains bands in the currency by which Indians measured wealth—horses—and in the years after the Civil War managed a herd of some fifteen thousand. They also owned “Texas cattle without number.”11
On that clear autumn day in 1871, Mackenzie’s troops were hunting Quahadis. Because they were nomadic, it was not possible to fix their location. One could know only their general ranges, their hunting grounds, perhaps old camp locations. They were known to hunt the Llano Estacado; they liked to camp in the depths of Palo Duro Canyon, the second-largest canyon in North America after the Grand Canyon; they often stayed near the head waters of the Pease River and McClellan’s Creek; and in Blanco Canyon, all within a roughly hundred-mile ambit of present-day Amarillo in the upper Texas Panhandle. If you were pursuing them, as Mackenzie was, you had your Tonkawa scouts fan out far in advance of the column. The Tonks, as they were called, members of an occasionally cannibalistic Indian tribe that had nearly been exterminated by Comanches and whose remaining members lusted for vengeance, would look for signs, try to cut trails, then follow the trails to the lodges. Without them the army would never have had the shadow of a chance against these or any Indians on the open plains.
By the afternoon of the second day, the Tonks had found a trail. They reported to Mackenzie that they were tracking a Quahadi band under the leadership of a brilliant young war chief named Quanah—a Comanche word that meant “odor” or “fragrance.” The idea was to find and destroy Quanah’s village. Mackenzie had a certain advantage in that no white man had ever dared try such a thing before; not in the panhandle plains, not against the Quahadis.
Mackenzie and his men did not know much about Quanah. No one did. Though there is an intimacy of information on the frontier—opposing sides often had a surprisingly detailed understanding of one another, in spite of the enormous physical distances between them and the fact that they were trying to kill one another—Quanah was simply too young for anyone to know much about him yet, where he had been, or what he had done. Though no one would be able to even estimate the date of his birth until many years later, it was mostly likely in 1848, making him twenty-three that year and eight years younger than Mackenzie, who was also so young that few people in Texas, Indian or white, knew much about him at the time. Both men achieved their fame only in the final, brutal Indian wars of the mid-1870s. Quanah was exceptionally young to be a chief. He was reputed to be ruthless, clever, and fearless in battle.
But there was something else about Quanah, too. He was a half-breed, the son of a Comanche chief and a white woman. People on the Texas frontier would soon learn this about him, partly because the fact was so exceptional. Comanche warriors had for centuries taken female captives—Indian, French, English, Spanish, Mexican, and American—and fathered children by them who were raised as Comanches. But there is no record of any prominent half-white Comanche war chief. By the time Mackenzie was hunting him in 1871, Quanah’s mother had long been famous. She was the best known of all Indian captives of the era, discussed in drawing rooms in New York and London as “the white squaw” because she had refused on repeated occasions to return to her people, thus challenging one of the most fundamental of the Eurocentric assumptions about Indian ways: that given the choice between the sophisticated, industrialized, Christian culture of Europe and the savage, bloody, and morally backward ways of the Indians, no sane person would ever choose the latter. Few, other than Quanah’s mother, did. Her name was Cynthia Ann Parker. She was the daughter of one of early Texas’s most prominent families, one that included Texas Ranger captains, politicians, and prominent Baptists who founded the state’s first Protestant church. In 1836, at the age of nine, she had been kidnapped in a Comanche raid at Parker’s Fort, ninety miles south of present Dallas. She soon forgot her mother tongue, learned Indian ways, and became a full member of the tribe. She married Peta Nocona, a prominent war chief, and had three children by him, of whom Quanah was the eldest. In 1860, when Quanah was twelve, Cynthia Ann was recaptured during an attack by Texas Rangers on her village, during which everyone but her and her infant daughter, Prairie Flower, were killed. Mackenzie and his soldiers most likely knew the story of Cynthia Ann Parker—most everyone on the frontier did—but they had no idea that her blood ran in Quanah’s veins. They would not learn this until 1875. For now they knew only that he was the target of the largest anti-Indian expedition mounted since 1865, one of the largest ever undertaken.
Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry, which he would soon build into a grimly efficient mobile assault force, for the moment consisted largely of timeservers who were unprepared to encounter the likes of Quanah and his hardened plains warriors. The soldiers were operating well beyond the ranges of civilization, beyond anything like a trail they could follow or any landmarks they could possibly have recognized. They were dismayed to learn that their principal water sources were buffalo wallow holes that, according to Carter, were “stagnant, warm, nauseating, odorous with smells, and covered with green slime that had to be pushed aside.”12 Their inexperience was evident during their first night on the trail. Sometime around midnight, above the din of a West Texas windstorm, the men heard “a tremendous tramping and an unmistakable snorting and bellowing.”13 That sound, as they soon discovered, was made by stampeding buffalo. The soldiers had made the horrendous mistake of making camp between a large herd of buffalo and its water source. Panicked, the men emerged from their tents in darkness, screaming and waving blankets and trying desperately to turn the stampeding animals. They succeeded, but by the smallest of margins. “The immense herds of brown monsters were caromed off and they stampeded to our left at breakneck speed,” wrote Carter, “rushing and jostling but flushing only the edge of one of our horse herds. . . . one could hardly repress a shudder of what might have been the result of this nocturnal visit, for although the horses were strongly ‘lariated out,’ ‘staked,’ or ‘picketed,’ nothing could have saved them from the terror which this headlong charge would have inevitably created, had we not heard them just in time to turn the leading herds.”14
Miraculously spared the consequences of their own ignorance, the bluecoats rounded up the stray horses, broke camp at dawn, and spent the day riding westward over a rolling mesquite prairie pocked with prairie-dog towns. The latter were common in the Texas Panhandle and extremely dangerous to horses and mules. Think of enormous anthills populated by oversized rodents, stretching for miles. The troopers passed more herds of buffalo, vast and odorous, and rivers whose gypsum-infused water was impossible to drink. They passed curious-looking trading stations, abandoned now, consisting of caves built into the sides of cliffs and reinforced with poles that looked like prison bars.
On the second day they ran into more trouble. Mackenzie ordered a night march, hoping to surprise the enemy in its camps. His men struggled through steep terrain, dense brush, ravines, and arroyos. After hours of what Carter described as “trials and tribulations and much hard talk verging on profanity” and “many rather comical scenes,” they fetched up bruised and battered in the dead end of a small canyon and had to wait until daybreak to find their way out. A few hours later they reached the Freshwater Fork of the Brazos, deep in Indian territory, in a broad, shallow thirty-mile-long valley that averaged fifteen hundred feet in width and was cut by smaller side canyons. The place was known as Blanco Canyon and was located just to the east of present-day Lubbock, one of the Quahadis’ favorite campgrounds.
Whatever surprise Mackenzie had hoped for was gone. On the third day the Tonkawa scouts realized they were being shadowed by a group of four Comanche warriors, who had been watching their every move, presumably including what must have seemed to them the comical blunders of the night march. The Tonks gave chase, but “the hostiles being better mounted soon distanced their pursuers and vanished into the hills.” This was not surprising: In two hundred years of enmity, the Tonkawas had never been close to matching the horsemanship of the Comanches. They always lost. The result was that, while the cavalrymen and dragoons had no idea where the Comanches were camped, Quanah knew precisely what Mackenzie was doing and where he was. The next night Mackenzie compounded the error by allowing the men the indulgence of campfires, tantamount to painting a large arrow in the canyon pointing to their camp. Some of the companies blundered yet again by failing to place “sleeping parties” among the horses.
At around midnight, the regiment was awakened by a succession of unearthly, high-pitched yells. Those were followed by shots, and more yells, and suddenly the camp was alive with Comanches riding at full gallop. Exactly what the Indians were doing was soon apparent: Mingled with the screams and gunshots and general mayhem of the camp was another sound, only barely audible at first, then rising quickly to something like rolling thunder. The men quickly realized, to their horror, that it was the sound of stampeding horses. Their horses. Amid shouts of “Every man to his lariat!” six hundred panicked horses tore loose through the camp, rearing, jumping, and plunging at full speed. Lariats snapped with the sound of pistol shots; iron picket pins that a few minutes before had been used to secure the horses now whirled and snapped about their necks like airborne sabres. Men tried to grab them and were thrown to the ground and dragged among the horses, their hands lacerated and bleeding.
When it was all over, the soldiers discovered that Quanah and his warriors had made off with seventy of their best horses and mules, including Colonel Mackenzie’s magnificent gray pacer. In west Texas in 1871, stealing someone’s horse was often equivalent to a death sentence. It was an old Indian tactic, especially on the high plains, to simply steal white men’s horses and leave them to die of thirst or starvation. Comanches had used it to lethal effect against the Spanish in the early eighteenth century. In any case, an unmounted army regular stood little chance against a mounted Comanche.
This midnight raid was Quanah’s calling card, a clear message that hunting him and his Comanche warriors in their homeland was going to be a difficult and treacherous business. Thus began what would become known to history as the Battle of Blanco Canyon, which was in turn the opening salvo in a bloody Indian war in the highlands of west Texas that would last four years and culminate in the final destruction of the Comanche nation. Blanco Canyon would also provide the U.S. Army with its first look at Quanah. Captain Carter, who would win the Congressional Medal of Honor for his bravery in Blanco Canyon, offered this description of the young war chief in battle on the day after the midnight stampede:
A large and powerfully built chief led the bunch, on a coal black racing pony. Leaning forward upon his mane, his heels nervously working in the animal’s side, with six-shooter poised in the air, he seemed the incarnation of savage, brutal joy. His face was smeared with black warpaint, which gave his features a satanic look. . . . A full-length headdress or war bonnet of eagle’s feathers, spreading out as he rode, and descending from his forehead, over head and back, to his pony’s tail, almost swept the ground. Large brass hoops were in his ears; he was naked to the waist, wearing simply leggings, moccasins and a breechclout. A necklace of beare’s claws hung about his neck. . . . Bells jingled as he rode at headlong speed, followed by the leading warriors, all eager to outstrip him in the race. It was Quanah, principal warchief of the Qua-ha-das.15
Moments later, Quanah wheeled his horse in the direction of an unfortunate private named Seander Gregg and, as Carter and his men watched, blew Gregg’s brains out.
© 2010 S. C. Gwynne
Product details
- Publisher : Scribner (May 10, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 371 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1416591060
- ISBN-13 : 978-1416591061
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 8.44 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,921 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2 in Native American Biographies
- #3 in Native American History (Books)
- #15 in U.S. State & Local History
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About the author
Sam Gwynne is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared extensively in Time, for which he worked as bureau chief, national correspondent and senior editor from 1988 to 2000, and in Texas Monthly, where he was executive editor. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Harper's, and California Magazine. His previous book Outlaw Bank (co-authored with Jonathan Beaty) detailed the rise and fall of the corrupt global bank BCCI. He attended Princeton and Johns Hopkins and lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Katie and daughter Maisie.
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Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They appreciate its history and insights into the past. The research is praised as thorough and informative, providing solid factual information. Readers praise the vivid, realistic portrayal of the plains Indians and frontier life. They find the perspective honest and unique, offering depth and detail of cultures, economics, and tactics. Overall, customers describe the book as entertaining and an exciting read.
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Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They appreciate the author's balanced approach and creative insights. The book hooks readers from the first page and doesn't let go until the end.
"...Gwynne is an exceptional writer and he tells their story well, detailing the formidable military power the Comanches were and how they achieved that..." Read more
"...may cause the squeamish nightmares, but overall I found the book fascinating." Read more
"This is an absolutely fascinating and incredibly well-written book about the history of the Comanches and their tremendous impact on the history of..." Read more
"...the history was fascinating and I feel like the author did a great job of staying impartial and showed both sides of the story...." Read more
Customers find the history fascinating and informative. They appreciate the author's storytelling, providing a unique look at a segment of American history. The book provides background information, details about the time and players, and an analysis of Manifest Destiny.
"...Gwynne is an exceptional writer and he tells their story well, detailing the formidable military power the Comanches were and how they achieved that..." Read more
"...Gwynne is a journalist and his writing reflects his ability to tell a story...." Read more
"...You really should read this book. It'll give you an insight into our past that will hopefully inspire even more reading on this incredibly important..." Read more
"...I’m so glad I did because the history was fascinating and I feel like the author did a great job of staying impartial and showed both sides of the..." Read more
Customers find the book provides compelling evidence and solid factual information. They appreciate the author's analytical points and extensive research. The book provides an inside view of the complicated and tragic demise of the civilization.
"...Twenty-two chapters, 371 pages including notes, bibliography and index" Read more
"...All of this and much more is effectively laid out in this fine book...." Read more
"This book was an amazing adventure. Well written and throughly researched. I enjoyed it from start to finish...." Read more
"...such a strong sense of independence and pride, this book offers some powerful insights...." Read more
Customers appreciate the graphic quality of the book. They find it realistic and vivid, with great B&W pictures and detailed descriptions of the landscape and climate. The narrative portrays both sides of the story without liberal whining.
"...It is this tension that this book expertly, dramatically, and historically draws out throughout the book and the book begins and closes with the half..." Read more
"...There are a lot of gory details throughout the book." Read more
"...The mini biography of General "Bad hand" McKenzie is also well detailed and makes you want to learn more about him as one of the most daring Indian..." Read more
"...He's a clever, high IQ, resourceful warrior, a courageous leader of his people...." Read more
Customers find the book's perspective vivid and honest. They appreciate the detailed descriptions of cultures, economics, tactics, and landmarks. The book provides a balanced view with references to famous Texans, Mexicans, military figures, and other key players.
"...Succinctly, I thought this book was a unique perspective and analysis of Manifest Destiny as this force played out in the Southwest region of the..." Read more
"...The author notes in detail their savvy ability to live off land that seem relatively barren and harsh while having a reputation as one of the..." Read more
"...This work has an excellent pedigree...." Read more
"...He details their cruel tortures, their sport of horse raiding for plunder and the taking of captives...." Read more
Customers enjoy the character development. They find the author's work to bring their backgrounds and personalities to the forefront. Quanta Parker is described as an accomplished man and leader. The cavalry leader Ranald MacKenzie is praised as a great man. The book includes great photos of the characters.
"...You'll also learn about Ranald MacKenzie, the great cavalry leader who ultimately defeated the Comanches by following the lessons of the Texas..." Read more
"...It is this frank nature of the depictions that will be interesting once high school students read the material next year, as they will have to show..." Read more
"...Author does an excellent job of bringing characters backgrounds and personalities to the forefront of the story told affording the reader to have..." Read more
"...Their unmatched skill on horseback and in battle didn’t just earn them their fearsome reputation—it literally shaped the map of the West...." Read more
Customers enjoy the engaging storytelling and learning about the Old West. They find the book exciting, joyful, and gripping. The narratives immerse readers in the lives of frontier people and instantly translate into action.
"...I was able to fluidly read through each page which my mind instantly translated into action and projected onto my mind's viewing screen...." Read more
"...Gwynne's prose is consistently eloquent and engaging...." Read more
"...Overall, I found the book very educational and entertaining but I ended up leaving the book somewhat questioning the accuracy of the book due to the..." Read more
"...Gwynne has a knack for explaining history in a way that is readable, entertaining, and educational...." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some find it fast-paced and action-packed, while others find the violence merciless and disturbing.
"...This was a fast read. Gwynne is a journalist and his writing reflects his ability to tell a story...." Read more
"...The book was a fast read and I zipped through it in a matter of a few days. The author really brings the times and the people involved to life...." Read more
"...It’s bloody, graphic, and disturbing but a definite must for anyone who wants to know more about our country’s history." Read more
"...Cynthia Anne Parker abduction to the end of Quanah Parker's life, it's tragic and thought provoking...." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2013A few months ago I watched the prequel to the Lonesome Dove series. I would rate the three part series 3 out of 5 stars. It wasn't great, but it was good enough to watch all three episodes.
One of the things I look for in a series like that is how historical is it. Since much of the series dealt with the Texas Rangers, pre-Civil War, and their interactions with the Comanches (and Mexican bandits) I have to admit that I knew little.
So, I was surprised when the Comanche chief (played by Wes Studi and one of the most interesting of the characters in the series) Buffalo Hump gathered together a large Comanche force and attacked Austin, Texas! Since I'd never heard of this I did a little research to see if it really happened.
What I found was a reference to Empire of the Summer Moon-Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches the most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne. I bought it and frankly had a hard time putting it down.
Quanah Parker is the thread that the book revolves around but the book is about much more than that.
The backdrop is what the author refers to as Comancheria, an area encompassing modern Texas, Oklahoma, parts of New Mexico, parts of Old Mexico, southern Colorado and southern Kansas. At the height of Comancheria (1836) approximately 20,000 Comanches in five major bands roamed free in their empire victimizing their neighbors, the Apaches, the Utes, the Navahos and any other tribe within range (except the Kiowa who were in alliance with the Comanche) as well as the Mexicans and Texans.
Gwynne is an exceptional writer and he tells their story well, detailing the formidable military power the Comanches were and how they achieved that status. One US military observer rated the Comanche horse warriors as the finest light cavalry in the world and Gwynn gives the reader plenty of examples to make the case.
We tend to think that the Texans and Mexicans would have had an advantage with their gun powder weapons over the Comanches with their bows and arrows. Prior to the advent of repeating rifles, post-Civil War this simply was not true.
Pre-Civil War weapons were single-shot muzzle loading weapons that took time to reload, a difficult thing to do mounted in the middle of a battle. It was so difficult that the Texans who fought the Comanches probably the most often, fought dismounted, a serious mistake against Comanches who were excellent horse archers and could get off five arrows to a Texan's single shot.
After giving the reader the fascinating background of the Comanche, Gwynne begins to weave the story of the Parkers into the bigger story of the Comanche Empire of the Summer Moon. (Summer Moon refers to the Comanche habit of raiding in the summer by the light of the moon. The term "Comanche Moon" is still used in Texas to describe a bright summer moon.)
Back in 1836, shortly after the famous Battle of the Alamo during the Texas War of Independence against Mexico, the Parker family moved to the frontier fringes of civilization. They built a family fort in Comancheria which was a direct challenge to the warlike Comanches.
The fort was certainly a good idea because it negated the Comanches mobility and Comanches would rarely attack a fixed position held by determined men whose long range rifles had the advantage.
Well, on May 19th, 1836, ten of the sixteen men of the Parker clan were out in the cornfields. Eight women and nine children were inside the fort, but the armored gate was left wide-open. The remaining men were unarmed. Clearly, the Parkers, despite the fact they built a fort perceived little danger. They were horribly wrong despite the fact that the Comanches were known to be raiding near-by.
On the morning of the 19th a large band of Comanches rode up to the fort. Rachel Parker, age seventeen, guessed they were "friendlies" another bad mistake, common enough though since telling one Indian from another must have been a challenge. It was probably safer to pray for the best but arm yourself for the worst until you knew for certain what you were up against.
The raiding party consisted of Comanches and Kiowas and into this large group of fierce warriors walked Ben Parker, one of the six men in the fort. Ben was certainly brave, but also foolhardy.
The raiders said they wanted a cow to slaughter and directions to a water hole even though their mounts were dripping wet clearly indicating the Indians knew exactly where they were. Ben said no to the cow offering instead other food. Remarkably, Ben went back into the fort and spoke to his brother Silas about how ridiculous the Comanches demands were regarding the water hole. Even more remarkably Ben gathered up some supplies and went back out to give them to the raiders even though Silas warned against it!
Silas was on to something and some of the Parker clan but not all tried to make a get-a-way while the remaining men (not all) decided to make a stand although not a not a one was armed at the time.
Ben Parker meanwhile was surrounded by the Comanches and horribly killed probably scalped while still alive. Silas would die too as would others in the ensuing chaos.
This was only the beginning of the horrors inflicted on the Parkers.
Gwynne does not pull any punches when he describes what happens to victims of the Comanches nor what the Texans did to Comanches once the tide of war began to turn. To say that frontier warfare was brutal is to understate just how brutal.
The Comanche culture dictated brutality to captives (most of horse tribes were the same but Comanches were among the worse of the worst). They tortured the captive men to death, killed babies that cried too much and gang-raped captive women, sometimes to death, although they frequently made women and older children captive. They had been doing this for years and their targets more often than not were other Indians, notably the Lipan Apaches who they nearly exterminated. What happened to the Parkers was par for the course and as barbaric as what the Comanches practiced on fellow Indians (and they on them when they had the chance).
Cynthia Ann Parker was a nine-year-old girl who was taken captive at the raid. She witnessed all that happened to her family. Cynthia Ann would spend the next twenty-four years as a Comanche eventually becoming a wife of a Comanche war chief. She would give birth to three children, one of whom was Quanah Parker, a half-breed who would rank along with Sitting Bull, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse and Geronimo as one the Indians who gave the US Army the hardest time in the 1870's.
Cynthia was "rescued" in 1860 as the tide began to turn against the Comanches. But the fact is, by then, she did not want to be rescued and her story became a double-tragedy as she is forced to live among the whites and the culture she had long forgot.
Quanah was twelve when his mother was "rescued" and father killed. His rise to war chief among the Comanches was remarkable for the fact he was a half-breed and after his father was killed a no-body among his band, the Quahadi Comanches (the word Comanche means "people").
Quanah was whatever else one might say about him was courageous, had a mind for strategy and tactics and as it turns out in the story a pretty savvy pragmatist and successful business man once the Comanches were forced to the reservation in present day Oklahoma.
To say any more about this book would only serve as a spoiler and I don't want to do that.
I thought I knew something about the Indian Wars but Empire of the Summer Moon opened my eyes to much. The book is rich in detail and packed with human interest stories regarding all the major players and many minor ones as well. The amount of research the author did was massive as the bibliography illustrates.
As for Buffalo Hump and the raid on Austin, it never happened.
What did happen is that Buffalo Hump a chief among the Comanches did mange to assemble a rather large "army" of Comanches. The raid that Buffalo Hump led is known in Texas as the Great Linville Raid and it took place in 1840.
Buffalo Hump had a vision of driving the Texans into the sea. He led a force of 1,000 Comanches south of San Antonio killing and looting along the river lines that led to the Gulf of Mexico. The river part is in the TV series. In the TV series the town being destroyed by the rampaging Comanches is Austin, but historically it's probably Victoria and/or Linville.
The Comanches rode through the surprised town of Victoria first, killed at least a dozen people before being driven off by rifle fire. Instead of closing in for the kill immediately which they could have done, the Comanches settled for looting concentrating on the horses and mules, the criteria for wealth among the Comanches. The Comanches did attack again but the delay had given the residents time to build barricades turning the town into a fort and thus discouraging the Comanches from getting to close to the long rifles of the Texans.
The Comanches departed with two thousand horses and a young black girl who presumably became part of the tribe like Cynthia Ann had four years earlier.
The Comanches continued their ride of terror, following Buffalo Hump's vision all the way to the sea and small town of Linville on the coast.
The town's residents panicked (rightly so) and fled to boats in the harbor but not all got away. The usual was the killing of all the men and the gang-raping of all captive women.
While the residents fled the Comanches discovered the town's warehouses and that's when the real looting took place. They took all they could carry of the white man's goods and then burned the town as the sea-borne residents watched helplessly. The town would never be rebuilt.
Buffalo Hump then lost control of his "army." The fact of the matter is the Comanches were always, in those days, more interested in raiding and loot, than driving the Texans into the sea. It wasn't until much later than some of the Comanches realized they were in a fight for survival and a fight to keep to the old ways.
So, at this point, the Comanches decided to pack it in a return to their sanctuaries and cash in on the loot something they always had done primarily with the Comancheros of New Mexico.
They were dogged all the way back by the aroused Texas militia fighting the Battle of Plum Creek along the way. Among the pursuers were some Texas Rangers and after a war chief was killed the mounted Texans actually charged the Comanches rather than fight in the old dismounted fashion. This began a shift in the tactics of fighting of Comanches. The advent of the Colt revolver by the time of the Mexican War (1846-48) that the Texas Rangers would purchase in quantity (the US Army would not, rather shortsightedly) would eventually shift the balance of military power into the hands of the Texans. The repeating rifle (the Henry and Spencer would seal the deal by 1866).
The raid was however, from the Comanche point-of-view a success. Only a few hundred head of horses were recovered.
Comanche raids would continue until 1874, many led in the later years by Quanah Parker. Quanah was eventually beaten by Ranald S. Mackenzie, a contemporary of George Armstrong Custer. Ironically, Custer would become famous for losing the biggest disaster on the plains and Mackenize would be forgotten for being the most successful of the Generals who fought the plains tribes.
This book is history how it's meant to be written.
Empire of the Summer Moon
Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
By S.C. Gwynne (Scribner, 2010)
Twenty-two chapters, 371 pages including notes, bibliography and index
- Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2019The relationship between Native American tribes in the American West changed dramatically in the 17th Century with the rise of the Comanche. Prior to the Spanish colonization of Mexico, horses were unknown in the Americas. Over time horses that escaped Spanish farms and missions or were abandoned from expeditions began to breed and flourish in the high grasslands to the east and south of the Rocky Mountains. Although most tribes learned to domesticate horses, utilizing them for transportation, the Comanche learned to fight from the horses. Their strategy changed the power structure as a formerly non-important band of Native Americans began expanding their territory in what is now Texas, along with parts of Oklahoma, eastern Colorado and northern New Mexico. They pushed out Sioux, Paiute, Apaches and other tribes and their fierceness keep the Spanish and later the Mexicans from their territory. This book tells their story along with the story of early Texas history.
After independence from Spain, the Mexican government found itself at struggling with its northern territories. Its missions in Texas were often being attacked by Comanche raiding parties, which eventually led to the Mexicans inviting American farmers into the area in hopes that they might create a buffer from the Comanche. What happened, instead, is that the Americans would seek and eventually gain independence from Mexico and form a new country, Texas, which then had to deal with the Comanche problem.
The Comanche were a warring tribe. Their life consisted of raids, buffalo and horses. They did not settle into permanent villages but constantly moved. Unlike their northern neighbors, the Sioux and Cheyenne, the Comanche didn’t wear colorful bonnets of feathers, preferring a cap with buffalo horns. The women did the hard work, setting up camp and cooking and preparing the killed buffalo. The men were warriors and were fierce. They were brutal to their captives, whether from another tribe or Anglo-settlers, often torturing both men and women. Sometimes children would be spared and brought into the tribe, especially because the low birthrate among Comanche women (which probably came from their constant time on horses), but children of enemies were also often killed.
Gwynne tells the story of the rise and fall of the Comanche by framing it around the Parkers, an early Texas family that set up a settlement in West Texas adjacent to Comanche territory. In the middle of a day in 1836, while the men were in the fields, a band of Comanche approached their homestead. At first they seemed friendly, then they began to kill and took as captives several women and children. One of the girls was Cynthia, who was nine. She witnessed the murder, rape and torture of several other family members. She would grow up among the Comanche and eventually marry one of the leading warriors. Their son (a half-bred), would be the last great warrior of the Comanche and the only Comanche to be chief over the whole tribe (the Comanche tended not to have a hierarchical structure as they lived in bands and when someone wanted to lead a “war party” he would recruit from the various bands enough warriors who would look to his leadership for that event).
Later, Cynthia and her Native American daughter would be recaptured, but she never fully integrated back into American culture. The author points out that she had the misfortune to be “adopted” into two different cultures that were alien to what she knew (first into the Comanche life when she was nine and later back into a culture in which she’d forgotten when she was an adult).
In addition to the Parker family, the book focuses on Cynthia’s son, Quanah. He led the last of the war parties and, when he realized that he could never hold back the white settlers and with the buffalo gone, led the tribe into a treaty. While on the reservation, he made a good life for himself as he raised cattle, but he was also very generous and when he died wasn’t wealthy. He was also a showman who enjoyed hosting guests to his home, which was quite the change from the young warrior that was feared by the U. S. Army along with other tribes.
Gwynne makes that case that technology eventually bought about the Comanche downfall. While the Mexicans and early American settlers tried to fight with muskets and long rifles, these were not very good weapons for close combat with a mounted enemy. The Comanche warrior could shot 30 arrows in the time a person could reload a musket. But just like the horse gave them an advantage over other tribes, the use of repeating pistols and rifles brought an advantage first to the Texas rangers (who fought like the Comanche, from the saddle) and later to the United States Army. He also notes that the Comanche downfall was inevitable as their warrior culture wasn’t adaptable in a changing world.
The two key groups at keeping the Comanche in check according to Gwynne were the Texas Rangers (who fought like the Comanche) and Ranald Slidell MacKenzie. MacKenzie, an army general, was much more successful but less known than Custer, another graduate from his era at West Point. Sadly, after serving on posts in the West, he ended his life in a mental institute.
This was a fast read. Gwynne is a journalist and his writing reflects his ability to tell a story. Some of the parts about the Comanche treatment of captives may cause the squeamish nightmares, but overall I found the book fascinating.
Top reviews from other countries
- JulianReviewed in Canada on October 3, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars This should essential reading in any history class about North American history.
A remarkable story and a well written book. I couldn't put it down.
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sergioReviewed in Mexico on December 31, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Increíble libro de historia norteamericana
Una maravilla de libro.
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IbrizidaReviewed in Brazil on March 12, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Muita informação e pouco juízo de valor. Grande livro.
Nunca imaginei a realidade da vida de todos envolvidos nas guerras indígenas dos EUA. Ao ler esse livro fui impactado pela crueza e brutalidade com que povos que ainda viviam na pré-história entraram em conflilto com a "civilização". Uma das coisas que me surpreendeu, foi que uma quantidade relativamente pequena de índios vivia e controlava uma enorme quantidade de território e isso acontece aqui no Brasil também, com a diferença que aqui é na selva é impenetrável, mas lá era uma planície boa para pecuária. Grande livro com muita informação e poucos juízos de valor.
- The most racist book I have ever readReviewed in Turkey on December 22, 2024
1.0 out of 5 stars Shockingly Racist
I got this book with the hopes of learning more about native americans. In my country we don’t know much about them and we never had a direct contact, so they are unknown to me. However I don’t even know how to begin with the racism of this book. The writer continues to describe the native people as “savage, uncivilized, barbaric, dirty, stone age primitive people” and so on trough out the book. (He also refers to native americans as “Indians” throughout the entire book) He does not only uses utterly racist descriptions of the native people but portrays them in such a way the book gives the feeling it was written in the 19th century even though it was published in 2010. I also want to mention that he goes very far justifying the horrendous actions of the colonizers as far as watering down genocide. I am honestly so shocked that a book like this could get published yet along almost won the pulitzer prize. Overall an extremely racist book that didn’t even try to cover it up. Not worth your money nor attention. I feel bad for the trees that were cut down to print this book.
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Petra ZellingerReviewed in Germany on August 31, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches
Sehr guter Zustand, schnelle, verlässliche Lieferung. Top interessantes Buch