Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil. 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, first published in 2010, tells the entertaining and informative, somewhat scholarly account of the Comanche tribe. After moving to the reservation, Quanah Parker got in touch with his white relatives from his mother's family. He stayed for a few weeks with them, where he studied English and Western culture, and learned white farming techniques.

In reality, most of 1800's America (at least the America east of the Mississippi) thought that the problems between white settlers and Indians were the fault of the white settlers. Most US citizens and almost all of Congress believed the answer to stopping the violence was to leave the Indians alone and stop bothering them. He is buried at Chief's Knoll on Fort Sill. Many cities and highway systems in southwest Oklahoma and north Texas, once southern Comancheria, bear reference to his name.Cynthia Ann lived 25 years with the Comanches, married Chief Peta Nocona, and gave birth to three children, including son Quanah Parker, who would become the last Chief of the Comanches. At the age 34, she was recaptured by the Texas Rangers and forcibly returned “home”. The question is what was home then? She missed her children and the Native American way of life and never readjusted to white society again. He was also strikingly handsome: fully dark-skinned Comanche but with a classical, straight northern European nose, high cheekbones, and piercing light gray eyes that were as luminous and transparent as his mother's. He somehow looked completely Indian without looking Asiatic, and could have served as a model of how white people thought a noble savage ought to look.... In 2019 the asteroid (260366) Quanah = 2004 US3 discovered on 2004 Oct. 28 by J. Dellinger at Needville was named in his honor. [28] This book is not about Quanah Parker, his mother, or the Comanche. It's really about How the White Man Conquered the Savage, Primitive, Warmongering Barbarians.

Empire of the Summer Moon is an excellent read, I learned so much about the Comanche Indians, the truth about the formation of the Texas Rangers and the buffalo hunters. My only complaint is there is not Quanah Parker in this book. Billing him in the title was deceptive. They resembled less the Algonquins or the Choctaws than the great and legendary mounted archers of history: Mongols, Parthians, and Magyars. 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.The raid by a small party of fearsomely painted Comanches, riding into a poorly protected settlement or camp ~~ killing the men, raping the women, and stealing children and horses ~~ was a way of life. White Texas settlers on the north-south 98th meridian, or blood meridian, where the prairie began, were a particular threat, and bore the brunt of the Comanches' ruthless cruelty in the mid-1800s.

However it was so good that since using audible I have constantly looked for it and was so pleased when it was eventually released. I'll leave you with this, perhaps the "best" quote from this book, and then I'm going to quietly toss it in the Goodwill pile, after which I will dance the dance of joy that I never have to look at this again: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. In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all. Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second is 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. Carlson, Paul H. and Crum, Tom (2012). Myth, Memory and Massacre: The Pease River Capture of Cynthia Ann Parker. Texas Tech University Press. ISBN 978-0896727465. OCLC 793384221 a b Neeley, Bill (2009). The Last Comanche Chief: The Life and Times of Quanah Parker. Castle Books. p.304. ISBN 978-0785822592.

Gwynne's writing style is just annoying, filled with "What happened next was one of the greatest/worst/most...." or "No one knows why...." This isn't a story being told around a cowboy campfire. Give me some facts and let me decide, thank you very much. The greatest threat of all to their identity, and to the very idea of a nomadic hunter in North America, appeared on the plains in the late 1860s. These were the buffalo men. Between 1868 and 1881 they would kill thirty-one million buffalo, stripping the plains almost entirely of the huge, lumbering creatures and destroying any last small hope that any horse tribe could ever be restored to its traditional life. There was no such thing as a horse Indian without a buffalo herd. Such an Indian had no identity at all. While Empire of the Summer Moon can be distracting in its word choice, Gwynne generally keeps his sympathy with the Comanches, especially the dynamic Quanah. The story of Quanah, which is threaded through the book, but is actually only central to the last act, was a great, honest portrait of a man worth knowing. S. C. " Sam" Gwynne is an American writer. [1] [2] He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Princeton University and a master's degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University. [3] Life and career [ edit ]Consider how history would have changed if the Spanish and French had been more successful in fighting the Comanche. If the Comanches hadn’t repelled the Spanish and French advancement, would America have become the country it is today? Meanwhile, in an effort to stop the raiding and killing, government authorities were making treaties with the Plains Indians. Treaties as it turned out that neither the Indians or the Government had any real intention of honouring. It astounds me that later, when many of the Plains Tribes surrendered and agreed to relocate to the white man’s reservations, they were held accountable and punished for breaking those same treaties that the white man so frequently broke themselves. Starting with the pre-columbian history the book describes the revolutionary change brought about by the advent of horses on the plains. It enabled the Comanche who had been culturally among the lowliest among the tribes to transform into being the invaders from the north. They were a branch that had separated from the Shoshoe of Wyoming that moved into the region of Texas displacing the Ute, Pueblo, Navaho, and Apache from their ancestral lands. They seem to have been the most successful Indian tribe at taking advantage of the horse by becoming skilled as mounted warriors. Horses and horsemanship are the central components of the Comanche story, some historians and even concurrent observers equated them more with other horse cultures such as the Mongols, Tartars or Magyars than with other Native American tribes. Other ethnographers and anthropologists have compared the warlike Comanche with the culture of ancient Sparta or of the ancient Celts and Vikings. Later, as a grown woman, Cynthia became famous when recaptured with her baby daughter in a brutal cavalry raid while skinning buffalo and loading meat as the wife of a chief. Her defiant resistance to return to white cultural ways captured the imagination of the American public. She refused to speak English and perpetually tried to run away to her people, eventually dying of pneumonia. A different kind of fame arose when it came out that her mixed race son, who at age 12 escaped during the raid and grew up to become the brilliant warrior and leader of the reclusive Quahadi band of the Comanche, Quanah Parker.