Empire of the Summer Moon -- Book Review

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. G.  Gwynne.   New York:  Scribner.  2010.  pp. 371.

This is a riveting, absorbing story of the Comanche nation and the conquest of the Great Plains and Texas by white Americans in the mid-nineteenth century.  It begins on May 19, 1836 when a party of Comanche raiders brutally killed most of the family of Benjamin Parker roughly 50 miles east of what is now Waco, Texas.  Nine year old Cynthia Parker was kidnapped  that day and raised in the Comanche tribe.  Twelve years later she would give birth to a son named Quanah, who would be the last and greatest leader of the Comanches.  The book tells the story of Quanah's journey from "Stone Age barbarian into the mainstream of industrial American culture."  But it is not simply a biography of Quanah Parker.  Quanah Parker actually comes to the fore in the later chapters of the book.  Most of the book is a social and cultural history of an age of ferment and radical transformation on the American Great Plains.  Technology, migration, warfare, and the quest for wealth would dramatically sweep away within a few decades the Stone Age way of life that had been in place on the Great Plains for centuries.  Gwynne depicts that ancient way of life with great vividness.  The book is carefully researched and detailed, but not at all pedantic.  He focuses on the personalities and the human dramas that were fabric of this whole panorama of historical developments: Ranald Mackenzie, Cynthia Parker, William T. Sherman, George Armstrong Custer, the white buffalo hunters who finally exterminated the buffalo, the relations between the various Indian tribes of the plains, the tactics of warfare, the treatment of captives including torture and gang rape, the treatment that the conquered Indians received from the American government, life on the reservations, among many topics thoughtfully covered with great sensitivity and detail.  The Americans and the Comanches, despite the vast cultural gulf between them, actually had some similarities in basic outlook.  Both were aggressive, militaristic societies that lived by warfare and conquest.   Both could be unspeakably brutal.  Both valued an inner sense of freedom and unlimited possibilities.  However, the Indians never had a chance.  Despite many early victories and their ability to wreak much havoc on the early frontier settlers, the tide of white settlement was too overwhelming.  In a very short time the Stone Age way of life that depended on hunting buffalo on horseback with bows and arrows was completely swept away and replaced with settled towns, farming and cattle ranches.  Remarkably, Quanah Parker, through shrewdness, intelligence and flexibility, was able to make adjustments and achieve a reasonably successful life under the white man's regime, both for himself and for many of his tribesmen.  It is a fascinating story, carefully researched, and beautifully told by a very able writer.