Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Camanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne wasn't what I expected when I bought it though I'm not sure what I expected. Gwynne appears to try to tell the history fairly, but how fair can a story be when the documentation of the other side is often biased and the documentation on the other side is scarce? Gwynne certainly pulled me into this well written story with visceral details about the interactions between the Comanches and the settlers as well as the landscape. He has no qualms talking about the settlers taking the land, but like so many books written by oppressors seems to marvel that people will kill to keep the land they've show more inhabited for generations and will reject invaders telling them how to live their lives. Empire of the Summer Moon paints a picture that feeds into stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples and relies heavily on documentation by the "white man" while excusing this by saying the Comanches didn't keep records. Having read An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States before reading Empire of the Summer Moon, I couldn't help but notice how differently the books presented the histories of the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and the Europeans who "settled" the United States. Still, I found Empire of the Summer Moon engaging, informative, and interesting as well as bold and graphic. show less

This excellent narrative will leave the reader flush with new knowledge and massive sorrow, and, in my case, a thirst for knowledge about the varied Native American tribes and their natures and histories. The writing is so vivid that I truly felt I could view the minds of the horse Indians and the troops that pursued them relentlessly until they came down from the Plains and into ruin. Quanah Parker's life is exemplary and fascinating, but so is the complete change of lifestyle forced on the entire Comanche Nation (not that there really was one - the various bands were too independent, but all suffered the same dismal fate) by striving settlers and satanically greedy buffalo hunters. It's like being invited to join the most show more knowledgeable raconteur on the subject when he's lazing around the campfire in a gregarious mood - just a complete pleasure to read and an overwhelming tragedy to behold. show less

For those of you who were doubtful that I would ever finish Empire of the Summer Moon, you can relax, it's in the bag. I gave it 4.5 stars and already I am thinking that maybe I need to bump that up because very few books have ever had me rereading the chapters before I have finished with the book. It is very well done and filled with so many amazing facts. It is not just about Quanah Parker or the rise and fall of the Comanche Nation, it is about how the Texas Rangers got their start, about the evolution of the Colt revolver, about how we are doomed to repeat the past over and over again if we cannot learn from it. Originally, I had this book out from the library, but it became more than a book for me; it became a journey. It would not show more let me read it quickly or take it lightly; it has depths that beg to be explored and passages that cry out to be pondered. I ended up buying the ebook version because then I could also buy the audiobook for just a few dollars more, and this, for me, became the perfect way to explore this book.

"Few historians would argue that the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which a defeated Mexican republic signed on February 2, 1848, in the wake of the lopsided war, was as momentous an event in American history as the signing, seventeen years later, of the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Yet in its own way it was quite as definitive. Appomattox stitched the nation back together....But Guadalupe Hidalgo created the physical nation itself. Before the treaty the American West consisted of the old Louisiana Purchase lands that rose in ladderlike fashion from the mouth of the Mississippi, climbed the courses of the Missouri, and touched the rocky, fog-shrouded shores of the Northwest. It was a tentative, partial fulfillment of the national myth. Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico gave up its claims north of the Rio Grande, made the dream suddenly, and completely, real. It added the old Spanish lands that lay, enormous and sun-drenched, athwart the Southwest. They included the modern states of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, California, and Nevada. There was Texas, too, in a sense, though it had been subsumed in 1845. U.S. annexation of Texas was what the war with Mexico was about, and the American victory settled the question forever. In all, the United States of America acquired 1.2 million square miles of real estate, an instant 66 percent increase in its total landmass. In the terms of land gained, on a percentage basis, it was as though France had acquired Germany. Thus was the nation entirely recast. Its singularity of purpose, its raw and conquistador-like desires to possess and dominate all lands it touched and to dispossess or destroy all of its aboriginal peoples, its burgeoning will to power could now stretch, untrammeled, from sea to shining sea. It was manifest destiny made manifest."

I chose the above passage to represent the book because it speaks to everything that amazed me about the narrative of this incredible piece of nonfiction. It is beautifully and eloquently written. It takes what could be confusing and dry sets of statistics and makes them accessible and interesting. It sets the story that it tells firmly within parameters that are well defined and clearly explained. And it gives you the big picture while also delivering the smaller ones that make the story stunning and personal. It is a book worthy of your time if you are at all interested in the subject matter. show less

First, the title is sort-of misleading. You would think it's a straight biography of Quanah Parker, but it isn't. Quanah is the nail that Gwynne uses to hang a narrative history of the Comanche on. A good chunk of the book follows Quanah and his family, so that is why he is in the title. But, it is really a history of the rise and decline of the Comanches.

Second, Gwynne is a gripping, engaging writer. His research seems solid enough. But, it is not a work of deep scholarship like Pekka Hämäläinen's recent tome The Comanche Empire. But, it doesn't aspire to be.

Third, Gwynne does not seem to buy the postmodern, post-1960s view of Amerindians as glorious, peaceful, environmentalist hippies, who never did any wrong. Conversely, Gwynne show more does not seem to buy the construct's other premise: that white people are inherently bad and evil. Now, don't get me wrong, Gwynne does not shy away from describing the racism, the colonialism, the greed, the bloodlust of Anglos, whites, Texians, Americans, etc. But he also does not shy away from describing the racism, the colonialism, the greed, the bloodlust of the Comanches (and associated tribes). Gwynne, in essence, buys the same idea Hämäläinen does: Comancheria was an empire. The Comanche empire clashed with the Spanish, then the Mexicans, then the Texians, and then the Americans. There were bad things done on both sides.

So, Gwynne describes the evils of the whites. He describes the evils of the Comanche: raiding, theft, pillaging, rapes, murders. The former is pro forma these days in our society. The latter is shocking to many readers. Read some random comments on Amazon.com for a sampling of such sentiment. Native Americans couldn't be bad, could they? Well, yes, they could. People are people are people. The whites eventually "won" and so we can today point at them and say they were genocidal, ethnic-cleansing monsters. But, that's not how they saw themselves. And such a conclusion is incomplete anyway. (I shudder to wonder what people will say of our society two hundred years in the future, though we consider ourselves quite modern and moral today.)

So, reader beware.

But, all-in-all, it is an engaging read.

4.5 out of 5 stars. show less

"Love Indian and wild life so well, no want to go back to white folks. All same people anyway, God say." – Quanah Parker, in his mother's eulogy (pg. 414).

A stunning narrative history of the end of the Comanche tribe in the American West, anchored in the tragic story of Cynthia Ann Parker, a nine-year-old white girl captured in a Comanche raid in 1836, and Quanah Parker, the half-breed son she raised amongst them, who became the last of the great Comanche war chiefs.

Sweeping and yet intimate, and impeccably researched, S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon offers a fuller picture of the American West than perhaps we deserve. Conspicuously unsentimental and even-handed, Gwynne avoids the pitfalls of the 'white supremacists committed show more Indian genocide' narrative so popular nowadays, and also its blustery 'Indians were savages' antipode. Instead, we have a fine history without editorializing; a real education in what this strange time and place could have been like.

Gwynne was on the Joe Rogan podcast recently (available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iq8Ss9yg6bo; it finally persuaded me to pick up the book, which had lingered unread on my shelf for a number of years), with Rogan interested in some of the more incidental elements of the book, including bow-hunting techniques and peyote. He was also fascinated, rightly, by how recent the events in the book are. As he says, it is 'three people ago', or three lifespans. And yet, while people were living by gaslight and the boons of the Industrial Revolution, and the complete works of Dickens were available, in the vast western lands of one of the world's predominant countries, a great struggle was taking place against an Indian hunter-gatherer empire scarcely changed since the Stone Age. Quanah Parker learned to ride and hunt at a very young age, and followed the buffalo across the stretch of a continent at a time when such bountiful herds filled the horizon, and died just a few years short of the First World War, having sampled the telephone, the car and the locomotive (pg. 407).

Whatever awe such thoughts might evoke, Gwynne's book facilitates them without pandering to them. Quanah was a Comanche warrior and a remorseless killer, but ended life as a benevolent American patriarch and, "in the best American fashion, he had carefully removed the less savory parts from [accounts of] his past" (pg. 415). We might learn from this, and not approach the history of Western expansion with the cultural hairshirt we currently employ, but instead as the sharpest example of freedom, both for the natives and the settlers; a freedom that possessed both dangers and atavistic joys. Empire of the Summer Moon brings us the West, in all its tragedy, brutality and contradictions, and revives the "memory of the wild, ecstatic freedom of the plains" (pg. 417), which even today are not too far removed. Some people might find such romance distasteful, but it is natural romance, capable of evoking wonder in anyone longing for a bit of freedom. Deep down, we're all much the same people anyway, God says. show less

As a student of American Indian history (in the Southeast), I have been asked more than once whether I’ve read this popular book. I’m no expert on the Comanches and only have a general acquaintance with the Great Plains nations. But I do have an in-depth understanding of how challenging it is to write the history of a people whose records were kept by their conquerors. Knowing how much better Indian histories have become in recent years, I came to Empire of the Summer Moon with high hopes. But my first scout through the pages, including a long camp in the bibliography, showed me a history as dead and barren as Ezekiel’s plain of dry bones. Reading the book is like having the ghosts of cavalrymen and settlers rise up to harangue us show more about the bloody deeds of “wild Indians,” while Indian ghosts remain quiet in their unmarked graves.

This old-fashioned western history pits civilized white people against savage redmen in a bloody contest for control of land. The contest is a racial one and the outcome is inevitable. Because race explains so much, the book dwells with fascination on the “white squaw” Cynthia Ann Parker and her “mixed-blood” son, Quanah. The Comanches as a whole are treated, not as a nation with a history and culture, but as a body of fierce, “primitive” horseback warriors with women and children stowed back at camp under tepees. Because they are so primitive, the Comanches have no history: the way they lived in the 1800s is assumed to be the way they had always lived, and the only way they ever could live.

A good counterpoint to this book would be Comanche author Paul Chaat Smith’s funny and insightful Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong. It’s too bad Sam Gwynne didn’t have a chance to read it before he embarked on Empire of the Summer Moon. Maybe it would have made a difference.

More: https://alarob.wordpress.com/2015/02/10/book-review-empire-of-the-summer-moon/ show less

Settlers in Texas were terrorized by Comanches who raped, killed, and took survivors captive. Comanches were terrorized by Texans who raped, killed, and usually ensured there weren’t any survivors. The scariest time was during the full moon in summer, still called a “Comanche Moon” in Texas. Although author S.C. Gwynne is a journalist he does a pretty good job being even-handed; this is one of the cases where the journalistic practice of telling both sides of a story actually works, because there really are two sides to the story.


The focus is Quanah Parker. On May 19, 1836, a band of Comanche showed up at “Parker’s Fort”, roughly halfway between Houston and Dallas (neither of which existed at the time, of course). The show more “fort” was a wood palisade surrounding a group of houses. It would have been eminently defensible against horsemen, except nobody was defending it when the Comanche showed up; ten of the sixteen men in the Parker clan were out farming; the remaining six and the eight women and six children at the fort had left the gate open and didn’t have weapons to hand. After a short initial parley, the Comanche attacked, killing and scalping five men, leaving two women for dead, and taking two women and three children captive. One of the women was nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker.


Cynthia’s older sister, Rachel, was eventually ransomed, but Cynthia disappeared into the Great Plains. Her relatives repeatedly searched for her (which story was made into the John Ford movie, The Searchers, with the names changed and the events moved from 1836 to 1868). She eventually became the wife of Comanche “chief” Peta Nocona under the Comanche name Nautdah; she had three children, the boys Quanah and “Peanuts”, and the girl Prairie Flower. In 1860, Texas Rangers under Sul Ross and troopers from the U.S Second Cavalry attacked a Comanche camp near the Pease River; most of the male Comanche had already left for winter quarters, leaving the women and old men to pack up buffalo meat and tipis and follow. However, Peta Nocona had also remained behind and was killed in a running fight (Ross allowed the multiple wounded Comanche to sing his death song before having a Mexican boy “end his misery with a charge of buckshot”). Another Comanche was captured; this turned out to be a woman and when the grease and dirt was cleaned off proved to have pale skin, blue eyes, and a baby; this was Nautdah/Cynthia Ann Parker and Prairie Flower. Two Comanche boys escaped – these were Quanah and “Peanuts”.


Cynthia was returned to her family – her white family – and didn’t do very well. She had only dim memories of her pre-Comanche life and no longer remembered any English. She was passed around among various relatives; although everybody acknowledged she was the best buffalo robe tanner they had ever seen, she made repeated escape attempts and had to be watched; this wasn’t that much of a problem because she was something of a tourist attraction. Prairie Flower and Cynthia both died within a few years of their “rescue”.


In the meantime, twelve-year-old Quanah and his ten-year-old brother rode for three days in the dead of winter to another Comanche camp. The Comanche lifestyle was not kind to orphans; “Peanuts” died relatively quickly. Quanah, on the other hand, found out that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and grew up to be six feet tall and strongly built. The 1860s were a good time to be a young brave in the West; Federal soldiers were withdrawn to fight in the Civil War and stayed to enforce Reconstruction, and Quanah acquired a reputation as a war leader. A lot of the warfare was Indian-on-Indian and essentially undocumented, but there was plenty of raiding of white settlements as well. (Quanah pointedly never talked about that in later years).


After various attempts at treaties, which both sides broke as soon as they were written, and the establishment of a Comanche reservation in Oklahoma, which the Comanche used as a convenient base between raids, the US Government eventually assigned Ranald Mackenzie the job of ending the Comanche menace. Gwynne calls Mackenzie the “AntiCuster”; like Custer he had become a brevet brigadier general at a very young age for Civil War heroism; unlike Custer he was a competent Indian fighter. Mackenzie was helped by the elimination of the buffalo; it became increasingly difficult for the Comanche to subsist off the reservation; however Mackenzie also trained his cavalry troopers to be as tough and self-reliant as the Comanche (he’d lost two fingers during the Civil War, which lead to his Comanche name, “Bad Hand”). Unlike Custer, Mackenzie had no interest in self-promotion (or perhaps just no equivalent of Libby Custer).


Mackenzie was helped by the arrival of a Comanche prophet, Isatai, who insisted that his “medicine” would make warriors invulnerable to bullets; this turned out not to be the case.


The eventual end for the Comanche came with the “Red River War”; Mackenzie chased them to their previous refuge in Palo Duro Canyon. Only four Comanche were killed in the battle, but all their lodges and stockpiled food was burned and Mackenzie, having learned that Comanche could retake captured horses almost at will, had all the ponies shot (the canyon is reportedly haunted by a phantom herd). The Comanche survivors trickled back to the reservation, and Quanah Parker decided to walk the white man’s road.


He turned out to be a shrewd businessman. He and cattleman Charles Goodnight had formed a friendship after a somewhat tense encounter, and Quanah began leasing his allotment land to Goodnight and other ranchers. He eventually became wealthy enough to build the famous Star House, with enough rooms for his eight wives (one of whom commented that his most salient accomplishment was keeping his wives from fighting). There’s a photograph of the Parker family on the front porch of Star House; the wives are all dressed in white clothes, in both senses of the word; Quanah looks quite handsome in a suit and tie but still wears his hair long. He had changed from a man who had (presumably; he never admitted it) scalped people alive to one who owned a car, appeared in a silent movie, and entertained President Teddy Roosevelt at dinner. He was remembered as unfailingly generous to all, white or native, and his funeral was attended by a huge crowd, many of whom had ridden for miles to attend. (There was some difficulty figuring out the inheritance among the wives and children).


A good read. Even handed, as mentioned; Gwynne does a good job of being politically incorrect in pointing out that the Comanche were not noble savages; savage, yes (well, OK, Quanah Parker ended up meeting even a pretty stringent definition of “noble”). He also says much the same of the Texans, with particularly harsh words for Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, who invited Comanches to a parley and then tried to hold them hostage. Along the line Gwynne explains something I never knew about the Texas Rangers. The Rangers were funded by annual budget appropriations; that meant they were frequently disbanded when the money ran out and recruited anew when there was another threat. That meant their performance was very uneven; sometimes they were efficient professionals; sometimes they were brutal thugs (which didn’t preclude them being effective Indian fighters); and sometimes they were just useless losers.


Photographs of the principals; an adequate map of the campaign. Well endnoted, and a thorough bibliography. Recommended. show less