Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches

S. C. Gwynne, “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches,” Scribner, 2010, 319 pp.

This book is a history of the Comanches after they were introduced to horses.  The Comanches transformation between 1625 and 1750 was remarkable. “Few nations have ever progressed with such breathtaking speed to become a dominant power.”  The Comanches had the horse to thank for this transformation. 

In the sixteenth century, the first conquistadors in Mexico had brought horses from Spain. When the Pueblo tribe in New Mexico rebelled in 1680, the fleeing Spaniards abandoned their steeds which then multiplied in the wild, and so did the number of Indian riders. “The horse gave them what must have seemed to them astonishing mobility,” writes Gwynne. “It allowed them, for the first time, to fully master the buffalo…. Hunting skills quickly became martial skills. Tribes who learned to hunt on horseback gained an almost instant military dominance….” They were transformed from “poor foot soldiers into dazzling cavalrymen,” likely the best the world has ever seen.  The Commanche culture was based on war: Young men had to fight and kill and return with horses to have any stature in the tribe.

The story of the Parker’s begins in 1833 when 30 oxcarts carried "an extended family of religious, easterners known to their neighbors as the Parker Clan” from Illinois to Texas. “The deal they were offered seemed almost too good to be true,” writes Gwynne. “In exchange for meaningless promises of allegiance to Mexico (of which Texas was still a part), several Parker family heads were each given grants of 4600 acres.” This was prime real estate—heavily timbered, with meadowlands, springs, creeks, and plenty of fish and fowl.  (In 1835 Texas had a population of less than forty thousand).

Because the property was on “the absolute outermost edge of the Indian frontier, ninety miles south of present-day Dallas, “the Parkers built a one-acre fort around their new homes. It didn’t work: they left the gate open. In May of 1836, a band of Comanche and Kiowa warriors attacked. Within minutes, the Indians had killed five men, wounded two women, and taken another two women and three children captive. Among those kidnapped was Cynthia Ann Parker, a blue-eyed nine-year-old.

Cynthia Ann Parker quickly assimilated into this Comanche culture. Treated like other young Indian girls, she embraced the tribal ways. Cynthia Ann, known as Nautdah, married a Comanche chief named Peta Nocena. They had three children, including Quanah, who was born in 1848.

But in 1860, Peta Nocena and about fifteen other Indians were surprised by the Rangers and soldiers from the Second Cavalry. Peta Nocena, Quanah’s father, was killed and Nautdah (Cynthia Ann Parker) was captured. Returned to the world of the Parkers, she resisted all efforts to “civilize” her and led an unhappy existence until her death ten years later in 1870. She never again saw her children.  

Twelve-year-old Quanah was with his parents during this deadly fight, but escaped. Over the next fifty years he rose to become a much admired and feared chief.  But in 1875, as the U.S. finally came to dominate the Comanche thanks to better firepower, more men, and the virtual extinction of the buffalo on which the Comanche depended, not to mention the epidemics that decimated the Comanches, Quanah surrendered peacefully. Once on the reservation, he became the only man ever to hold the title Principal Chief of the Comanche and lobbied Congress for fairer treatment for Native Americans.  He also conducted business with white ranchers, sat on the local school board, moved into a big house, got a telephone and car, appeared in the first two-reel western movie, and dined with Teddy Roosevelt.

Quanah Parker explains to a friend named Miller how “the white man had pushed the Indian off the land.” Quanah directs Miller to sit on a cottonwood log. "Quanah sat down close to him and said 'Move over.' Miller moved. Parker moved with him, and again sat down close to him. ‘Move over,’ he repeated. This continued until Miller had fallen off the log. 'Like that,' said Quanah."  In truth, the forty-year battle between the Comanche and the white man for control of the Great Plains and Texas was much more violent. The author, Gwynne, the former executive editor of Texas Monthly, details the atrocities perpetrated by each side.  This is a good book to read which will dissuade anyone that believes humans, whether Indian or Caucasian, have innate genetic traits of fair-dealing and decency outside tribal units. Mirabeau Bonaparte Lamar, the President of Texas, had explicitly declared a policy of genocide in 1838 against the Indians and immediately got to work on it; his rallying cry was “extinction or expulsion.”  On the other hand, genocide had always been practiced by the Comanche’s as a way of life, moderated somewhat by trading captives.

A few months before his death in February 1911, Quanah spoke to an overflow crowd at the Texas State Fair in Dallas. “I used to be a bad man,” he said. “Now I am a citizen of the United States. I pay taxes same as you do. We are the same people now."

My Notes:

Pg. 5:  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.  But the slaughter had begun.  In Kansas alone the bones of thirty-one million buffalo were sold for fertilizer between 1868 and 1881. 

Pg. 23:  Comanche land (240,000 square miles) encompassed large chunks of five present-day states: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma.  This imperial dominance was the product of more than 150 years of deliberate, sustained combat on horseback against Mexicans and any Indians in the area after migrating south in the late 1600s to the richest hunting area for buffalo.

Pg. 26:  In the early nineteenth century the phenomenon of a horse-mounted Indian was quite new.  Most Indians at that time were footbound.  There were no horses at all on the continent until the Spanish introduced them in the sixteenth century.  Their dispersal into wild mustang herds was exclusively a western event, confined to the plains and to the southwest, and accruing almost entirely to the benefit of the aboriginal inhabitants of those areas...  No soldier or settler east of the Mississippi had ever encountered a mounted Indian warrior. 

Pg. 41:  Comanche trade rested on horses, buffalo hides, and captives.   As the women did all the work with the hides, the men had an increased interest in polygamy (Quanah had eight wives at one time, seven which he married after joining the Reservation). 

Pg. 49:  There were five major bands of Comanche’s at the turn of the nineteenth century.  Each of the five bands contained no less than a thousand, some as many as five thousand.   At its zenith, there were about twenty thousand Comanche’s.  As they had so far avoided contact with white men, they had not yet been exposed to diseases that they had no immunity. (By 1874 there were only three thousand Comanches left in the world. Pg. 274).

Pg. 129:  The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico was a momentous event.  Before the treaty, the American West consisted of the old Louisiana Purchase lands that rose in a ladder like fashion from the mouth of the Mississippi, climbed the courses of the Missouri, and touched the rocky shores of the Northwest.  Now with the defeat of Mexico, the US added lands that 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 against Mexico was about; in all, the US acquired 1.2 million square miles of land, an instant 66 percent increase in its total landmass. 

 Pg. 138:  Jack Hays (1817-1883) was a Texas Ranger; at twenty-three years old he was probably one of the finest military commanders America has ever produced.  Though he fought on the Texas frontier and Mexico for less than twelve years he, personally put an indelible stamp not only on the Texas Rangers—an organization that may be said to have arisen in imitation of him—but also on the American West. 

Pg. 211:  The frontier exploded in a nightmare of killing in 1862 with their origins in the north with an Indian revolt on the prairie plains of Minnesota.  The Sioux rose up from their reservation along the Minnesota River and killed as many as eight hundred white settlers  They made another  forty thousand into refugees, who fled eastward in full mortal panic.