That makes it all the more regrettable that he finds the Comanches “simple” because they didn’t have priests or warrior societies or complex political structures. The problem, as always, is that when you try to define “civilized,” you run the risk of treating your own life, systems, and values as the norm, and comparing everyone else to that standard. It’s a false comparison, especially when that standard is by no means superior. For example, I found it extremely jarring when Gwynne confidently asserts that the Comanches were barbarians, but then goes on to laud the annihilationist policies of Mirabeau Lamar, and to come strikingly close to fetishizing the Texas Rangers for their ability to unleash unrestrained violence. Ben Parker meanwhile was surrounded by the Comanches and horribly killed probably scalped while still alive. Silas would die too as would others in the ensuing chaos.

They resembled less the Algonquins or the Choctaws than the great and legendary mounted archers of history: Mongols, Parthians, and Magyars. Quanah Parker did adopt some European-American ways, but he always wore his hair long and in braids. [1] He also refused to follow U.S. marriage laws and had up to eight wives at one time. [1] Family reunion [ edit ]The Comanche culture dictated brutality to captives (most of horse tribes were the same but Comanches were among the worse of the worst). They tortured the captive men to death, killed babies that cried too much and gang-raped captive women, sometimes to death, although they frequently made women and older children captive. They had been doing this for years and their targets more often than not were other Indians, notably the Lipan Apaches who they nearly exterminated. What happened to the Parkers was par for the course and as barbaric as what the Comanches practiced on fellow Indians (and they on them when they had the chance). 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. Gwynne is an exceptional writer and he tells their story well, detailing the formidable military power the Comanches were and how they achieved that status. One US military observer rated the Comanche horse warriors as the finest light cavalry in the world and Gwynn gives the reader plenty of examples to make the case.

Book Genre: American History, Biography, Historical, History, Native American History, Native Americans, Nonfiction, North American Hi…, War, Westerns As a historian, I will rarely give a general or popular history more than 3 stars. Much the same way I will never say 'an historian'. And no matter the amount of research that goes into popular history, it hardly ever seems to merit so much praise. And that is because it answers no questions, asks no new questions, puts forth none of its own theories, and has no one singular hypothesis. This book, although a fantastic, sweeping history of the Comanche, it is not a work to be discussed as academic history. Gwynne offers captivating portraits of individuals frequently left out of histories of the American West. While early history of the Comanche remains much of a mystery, Gwynne brings the Comanche into sharp focus from 1830s Texas until their ultimate surrender in the late 19th Century. Prior to his career as a journalist and historian, Gwynne was a French teacher at Gilman School in Baltimore, Maryland. He was an international banker with both Ameritrust in Cleveland, Ohio and First Interstate Bank in Los Angeles and traveled extensively overseas.

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Memorials and honors [ edit ] The Quanah Parker Inn is located on U.S. Highway 287 at the west end of Quanah, Texas It's fairly balanced in it's treatment of all sides although I think Gwynne is overly kind to Texans and the Texas Rangers. Nothing good to be said of either imo. However it was so good that since using audible I have constantly looked for it and was so pleased when it was eventually released. 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. Quanah Parker taught that the sacred peyote medicine was the sacrament given to the Indian peoples and was to be used with water when taking communion in a traditional Native American Church medicine ceremony. Quanah Parker was a proponent of the "half-moon" style of the peyote ceremony. The "cross" ceremony later evolved in Oklahoma because of Caddo influences introduced by John Wilson, a Caddo- Delaware religious leader who traveled extensively around the same time as Parker during the early days of the Native American Church movement.

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. Schedule a screening with your book club of one of the handful of movies devoted to the Comanche Indians. The most critically acclaimed is Budd Boetticher’s Comanche Station. Another movie, Comanche, a 1956 offering from George Sherman, features an actor playing the role of Quanah Parker. There is also a 2010 documentary produced by the History Channel titled Comanche Warriors. John Ford’s The Searchers is one of the greatest westerns ever made and is based on the stories of Cynthia Ann Parker and her uncle James. He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. There was no such thing as a horse Indian without a buffalo herd. Such an Indian had no identity at all.” The result, the Walker Colt, was one of the most effective and deadly pieces of technology ever devised, one that would soon kill more men in combat than any sidearm since the Roman short sword.”Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War, Scribner, 2019, ISBN 9781501116223 Surprisingly enough, Quanah was able to adapt to reservation life. Still, he lived as only a Comanche would be allowed to, with eight wives and twenty-four children. As Gwynne writes, Quanah “existed . . . in the weird half-world of the reservation” (p. 302). What do you make of Quanah’s peaceful surrender and his “second life” on the reservation? Were you surprised by his ability to balance both his captivity and his role as an assertive Comanche leader?