Empire of the Summer Moon

No one who grew up in Texas in the early to mid twentieth century can be wholly ignorant of tales of Comanche raids and the Indian wars that lasted until nearly the last years of the nineteenth. But in those days we were more likely to hear stories about Geronimo circulating in songs and folklore. Comanches were legendary, but the specifics were always rather sketchy. We probably learned more from the movies than we did from our school books. John Ford's The Searchers (1956) seemed to capture better than most some of the ambiguities of the decades long struggle between the encroaching whites and the beleaguered native peoples, but even so remained a vastly distorted Hollywood version of such events. Over the years I became interested in some of the stories we grew up with, especially the displacement of the so-called civilized tribes and the fleeting moment of revenge and retribution represented by the massacre of Custer and his men at Little Big Horn by the tribes of the northern plains. Then I read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), Dee Brown's sad saga of the treatment of American Indians, after which I decided it was more than shameful, much like our national embrace of slavery, but there was little hope that anything sensible could be done at this late date.

So I'm a little surprised that I picked up S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon (2011). Someone in my book club alluded to it in an email. It had been one of their selections a few years back, before I joined the group. It sounded interesting, and I was intrigued by the focus on Texas and the Comanches. Somehow the Comanches usually seem to be exceptions to the general outlines of Indian stories. They are always described as more fierce, more independent, more feared. And after reading Gwynne's book, I understand why all of that might be true. The Comanches were not only the scourge of Texans, but before that of Spaniards and Mexicans and nearly every other Indian tribe as well. They were primitives, even by Indian standards, basically hunter gatherers who eked out their existence on the southern plains. Then they discovered horses, brought to the southwest by the Spanish, often left to run wild and eventually tamed by the Indians, especially the Comanches, who were transformed into horse Indians, mounted hunters and warriors, predators and raiders who were feared by everyone they encountered.

Although Gwynne recounts a rather complete history of the encounter between early white settlers of Texas and the Comanches and other native peoples, he also tells an even more detailed story of a singular foundational incident and its various complications and ramifications: the kidnapping in 1836 of nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker. This was a real-life version of the central episode in John Ford's The Searchers. Cynthia Parker's parents were massacred on their frontier farm, and she and her brother, along with other relatives, were taken captive. Her Uncle, James Parker, spent most of the rest of his life looking for her. But what makes the real-life story even more interesting than the fiction is that when Cynthia Ann was finally "rescued" -- actually re-kidnapped by some Texas Rangers twenty-five years later  -- she wanted only to return to her life as a Comanche woman.

That, however, is not the only strange turn in the tale. It turns out that Cynthia Ann had become the wife of Peta Nocona, one of the key leaders of a particularly wild and independent band of Comanches. During a raid of reprisal in 1861 he is killed and she and her infant daughter are taken captive, but her two teenaged boys escape and eventually join another band of Comanches. One of those boys, the older, Quanah, will grow up to become famous as the last chief of the Comanches. The story is a little more complicated than that, but those are the essentials. Quanah Parker became not only a great warrior, but later, after finally taking up the white man's ways,  a very clever politician and an astute business man and successful rancher. Unfortunately, that was not the end of the story. Eventually, Quanah Parker, like every other American Indian, is defeated by the relentless acquisitive onslaught of the white man's civilization. He tries to stay ahead of the game, but he is doomed by forces he is powerless to control, even though he was befriended by influential men, including Teddy Roosevelt.

Finally, I was left a little depressed by the way everything turned out, but that is almost inevitable when you read stories about American Indians. Americans seem reluctant to accept that we have prospered primarily because we as a nation openly pursued a policy of genocide. Gwynne is not the only historian to document this, but he is particularly honest and straightforward in pointing out that Comanches were more than justified in their behavior. They were trying to defend their land and their people and their way of life. But they were on the wrong side of history. American manifest destiny meant that they had to go. There was no realistic way to share a land with pre-historic hunters. And even other Indian tribes feared and despised them. Nothing can really justify the way Texans behaved toward the Indians, who after all were here first, long before them or the Spanish. The new settlers wanted the land, and they made no secret of their fervent desire to wipe out the Indians, and not just the feared Comanches, but all Indians.

Those were different times, perhaps, but the story Gwynne tells helps one understand the mentality of some latter day Texans who continue to abide by their own peculiar sense of law and government, trusting to their personal views of right and wrong and their enduring faith in the possession of and justified use of fire arms. Not that Texas is really all that peculiar. Killing has always been a way of life on the American frontier. The way of the gun is more than a myth. Gwynne points out that the real turning point in the war against the Indians was ironically not the invention of the Colt repeating pistol, but the advent of the Sharps buffalo rifle. After that it was only a matter of a very little time before superior arms would allow the newcomers to exterminate their stone age enemies. But strangely enough, they did it not only by wiping out the Indians, but by killing the millions of American bison that were the prime basis of their way of life. Well, as I said, it's a depressing story, even though a rather familiar and predictable one.