The tale of the Comanches

The battle for Texas

The tale of a great warrior and the wild Texas frontier

Cynthia Ann’s unusual legacy

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.C. Gwynne. Scribner; 384 pages; $27.50. Buy from Amazon.com

ALL American schoolchildren learn of the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn, in which General George Custer and the federal cavalry got trounced by Indians in present-day Montana. Far fewer know about the desperate, brutal struggle that played out just a few years earlier for control of the southern part of America’s Great Plains. In this riveting book, S.C. Gwynne turns the spotlight on his home state, Texas.

Mr Gwynne’s focus is the Comanches, a tribe that he describes as “the greatest light cavalry on earth” during their heyday. They could loose a flock of arrows while hanging off the side of a galloping horse, using the animal as protection against return fire. The sight amazed and terrified their white (and Indian) adversaries. The Comanches dominated the Plains; their very identity was rooted in war.

Comanche lore took a memorable turn in 1836. That year warriors attacked an ill-prepared Texas fort and kidnapped nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker, along with several others. In itself, this was not particularly notable: the Indians waged a campaign of terror against white settlers streaming into the brand-new Republic of Texas. Rapes and scalps were common. Mr Gwynne is frank about the butchery on both sides.

In 1860 the whites recaptured Cynthia Ann. By then she had become a full-fledged Comanche squaw. She had married a chief (who Mr Gwynne says died during the attack), forgotten English and had no desire to live among whites again. Yet the settlers, who thought they had saved her from heathen murderers, kept her against her will for the rest of her days.

But Cynthia Ann left another legacy. Her 12-year-old son, Quanah, had galloped away from the attackers, with a younger brother in tow. Soon Quanah, brave in battle, rose through the tribal ranks to become a leader of the most-feared subset of the Comanches, the Quahadi.

Quanah’s job was to hold off white settlement. The settlers, sick of the Indians’ raiding, were determined to exterminate them, with help from the nascent Texas Rangers. The Comanches rolled back the frontier during the civil war, when fighting-age Texans headed east. But several years after the war ended, William Tecumseh Sherman, President Ulysses Grant’s army chief, dispatched Ranald Mackenzie, one of their crack young officers, to track down the Comanches. Thus began an epic chase, including an episode in which Quanah led his entire village out of Mackenzie’s grasp, using criss-crossing tracks to fool federal troops. Mackenzie eventually spotted the mobile village, but Quanah got lucky: a monster storm descended and Mackenzie had to turn back.

But for the Quahadi, surrender was only a matter of time. Mr Gwynne recounts how technological innovation—first the Colt revolver, then high-powered rifles—kept the Texans a step ahead. Worse than the federal troops were the buffalo hunters, who slaughtered the great herds of the Texas Panhandle after the civil war, thus depriving the Comanches of a crucial source of food and warm clothes. Finally, in 1875, the Quahadis gave up and headed for the reservation. That was one year before Custer’s death at Little Bighorn; according to Mr Gwynne, Quanah had almost fought Custer in 1868.

The remarkable Quanah adapted to his new life well. He retained multiple wives, but donned white men’s clothes (sometimes) and entered the cattle business. He became fast friends with some of the men who had pursued him, and even welcomed President Teddy Roosevelt to his home in Oklahoma. Wisely, however, he refrained from telling spine-chilling stories about his earlier raids on white settlers. He died in 1911, and is known to history as the last chief of the Comanches.