Empire of the Summer Moon

Though much of the history of the conflict between white and Native Americans focus on the battles of the Indians of the Northern Plains, S.C. Gwynne points out, in his book Empire of the Summer Moon, that the most powerful Indians of North America were the Comanche, who held off encroachment by Europeans for forty years. They actually repelled the Spanish coming from the south, pushed the Apaches west, and held Texans at bay for years, until they were finally wiped out. Before that, though, they had the most successful empire of any indigenous North American tribe.

As Gwynne puts it: "The Comanche...were..a military and trade empire that covered some 240,000 square miles, essentially the southern Great Plains. Their land encompassed large chunks of five present-day states: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado. Kansas, and Oklahoma...It was not an empire in the traditional sense, and the Comanches knew nothing of the political structures that stitched European empires together. But they ruled the place outright. They held sway over some twenty different tribes who had been conquered, driven off, or reduced to vassal status."

The Comanches were extremely nomadic, and knew nothing of agriculture. They were not united, but instead consisted of half a dozen different bands, which made making treaties with them futile, as no one person spoke for them all. In a way they had not advanced since the stone age, and in 1836, when they first came into serious conflict with whites, they were still living life the same way they did hundreds of years earlier, with one important difference--the horse.

The horse, it is good to remind ourselves, is not native to North America. It was brought here by the Spanish, but the Comanche adapted to it as no other tribe. They lived on horseback, and a horse became an extension of them. They could fight on them, too. A warrior could unleash 20 arrows in the time a Texan could load and shoot one round.

The Comanche were also extremely vicious. To refer to a race of people as savages is today verboten, but they were, in a sense, savage. Their morality, as it were, was different even then the cruelties of Europeans or eastern Indians. The Comanche fought to the death, and had no compunction about torturing their victims. They also, in contrast to many other tribes, were very cruel to women, torturing and gang-raping them. This had been their tradition of hundreds of years.

Gwynne tells the story of the Comanche nation thoroughly, but uses the thread of the tale of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son, Quanah. Parker was nine years old in 1836, when she was kidnapped by a band of Comanches. She ended up marrying a chief, Peta Neconta, and giving birth to a son called Quanah. Her clan looked for her for years (which partly inspired the John Ford film The Searchers) and tried to ransom her. Eventually, in a skirmish in which her husband was killed, she was retaken by whites when she was 33 years old. Two of her sons, including Quanah, escaped. She would never see them again.

Cynthia Ann, or Nautde, her Comanche name, wanted nothing to do with the white world. She constantly tried to escape and return to the only life she knew. She had completely forgotten English, and had no interest in relearning it. She did have a daughter with her, Prairie Flower, but when she died Cynthia Ann gave up the will to live and died.

Quanah, returning to his tribe as an orphan, was socially ostracized as having white blood, and his status as son of a chief was gone. He would persevere, though, and become the leader of his people, hating the white man and killing many. The Comanche were normally a short, squat people, but Quanah, with his white blood, towered over them, with a strong physique and superior leadership qualities.

The Texans, and later the Americans, tried everything to repel the Comanches. A group celebrated today by the name of a baseball team was created to thwart them: "It came in the form of dirty, bearded, violent, and undisciplined men wearing buckskins, serapes, coonskin caps, sombreros, and other odd bits of clothing, who belonged to no army, wore no insignias or uniforms, made cold camps on the prairie, and were only intermittently paid. They owed their existence to the Comanche threat; their methods, copied closely from the Comanches, would change frontier warfare in North America. They were called by many different names, including 'spies,' and 'mounted volunteers,' and 'gunmen,' and 'mounted gunmen.' It was not until the middle of the 1840s that they finally had a name everybody could agree on: Rangers."

The Texas Rangers had only limited success against the Comanches. The greatest Ranger, John Coffee Hays, is largely responsible for the success of the Colt .45. Colt had gone bankrupt, as the U.S. Army saw no need for his revolver. Hays, needing a multishot weapon that could be fired from a horse, ordered several, and put Colt on the way to becoming one of the richest men in the world.

Eventually the U.S. Army, after the Civil War, turned its attention to the Comanche threat. Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, who Gwynne calls "the anti-Custer," was ultimately successful in wiping them out. One band after another went to the reservation, and finally, in the 1875, Quanah saw the writing on the wall and turned himself in. He then went on to have a spectacularly different sort of second act of his life. He embraced the white man's ways (although he never cut his hair, didn't give up polygamy or using peyote) and was named the first and only Principal Chief of the Comanches. He also, ironically, became close friends with Mackenzie, the man determined to defeat him.

Gwynne's book is a fascinating account for those interested in Native American life. Though mostly chronological, he at times jumps back and ahead, and I at times lost the thread. But his writing is mostly vivid, and includes some winking asides. Perhaps the most playful is his description of the bawdy names of some of the Indians. Buffalo Hump (who would play a notorious part in Larry McMurtry's novels of Texas) had a name that literally translated as "Erection That Won't Go Down." But I liked the literal translation of a medicine man named Isa-Tai, which is either "Wolf Vulva," or "Coyote Vagina," both good names for a punk rock band.