#526： The Rise and Fall of the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
Episode Stats
Summary
For nearly 400 years, the Comanches controlled the southern plains of America. Even as Europeans arrived on the scene with guns and armor, the comanches held them off with nothing but horses, arrows, and lances. In the 19th century, they stymied the development of the new country by engaging in a 40-year war with the Texas Rangers and the U.S. military. It wasn t until the latter part of that century that the Comanche finally laid down their arms. How did they create a resistance so fierce and long-lasting? Well, my guest today explores that question in his book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History.
Transcript
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the art of manliness podcast. For nearly 400 years, the Comanche tribe controlled the southern
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plains of America. Even as Europeans arrived on the scene with guns and middle armor, the Comanches
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held them off with nothing but horses, arrows, lances, and buffalo hide shields. In the 18th
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century, the Comanche stopped the Spanish from driving north from Mexico and halted French
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expansion westward from Louisiana. In the 19th century, they stymied the development of the
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new country by engaging in a 40-year war with the Texas Rangers and the U.S. military. It wasn't
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until the latter part of that century that the Comanches finally laid down their arms. How did
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they create a resistance so fierce and long-lasting? Well, my guest today explores that question in his
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book, Empire of the Summer Moon. Quanah Parker and the rise involved the Comanches, the most powerful
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Indian tribe in American history. His name is Sam Gwynn, and we begin our discussion by explaining
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where the Comanches were from originally, and how their introduction to the horse radically changed
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their culture and kick-started the precipitous rise to power. Sam then explains how the Comanches
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shifted from a hunting culture to a warrior culture, and how their warrior culture was very
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similar to that of the ancient Spartans. We then discuss the event that began the decline of the
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Comanches, the kidnapping of a Texan girl named Cynthia Ann Parker. Sam explains how she went on to
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become the mother of the last great war chief of the Comanches, Quanah, why Quanah ultimately decided to
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surrender to the military, and the interesting path his life took afterward. This is a fascinating
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story about an oft-overlooked part of American history. After the show's over, check out our
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show notes at aom.is slash Comanches. Sam joins me now via Skype.
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So you're the author of the book, Empire of the Summer Moon, Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall
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of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. I grew up in Oklahoma, I live
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in Oklahoma, and you know, you have to do Oklahoma history, but they always talk about just the five
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civilized tribes, which is an interesting history. The Comanches get like a passing, and the story is
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It's kind of what, it's true in Texas, too. There's a lot of, I mean, they just blow by this. They
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certainly did. My daughter was in high school, you know, 10 years ago here. They just blew right by it.
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Well, why is that? Why does the history of the Comanches get overlooked or blown by
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I don't know. It's a really good question. The, you know, the plains are, the high plains,
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Comanche plains are the last part of America to be settled, of course. You know, the east settles
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and the west settles, and then you've got this thing sitting out here that is really the plains
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extending down from the northern plains that were controlled by the Sioux through the central Cheyennes
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and Arapahoes and then Comanches. And you had this very uncivilized, shall we say, middle
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that took a very long time to settle. And on some level, I think that it may be because they're just,
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because of that fact, there just wasn't anything out here, really. I mean, this was a frontier. And
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because there was a frontier, you didn't, it wasn't crawling with our reporters necessarily.
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And it just, it just never had the play. And it was a, even something like the Red River War,
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which is an extremely significant sort of moment in American history. It was kind of, you know,
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the end of the frontier and the frontier ended here in Texas. It didn't end in California. It ended here.
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These things didn't get covered very well. They didn't get written about that well. And
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I don't know. I mean, it's been a privilege and an honor for me to be able to restore it in some
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ways, certainly here in Texas, because it wasn't that the Comanche period here in Texas was not
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really part of the conversation. And so what led you down that path? Did you come across a story or
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was it your, you know, your daughter, you know, going through Texas history in high school and like
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Comanche sort of got a quick pass. I mean, was, did you come across something that there's,
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there's a bigger story here that I need to write about and research?
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Yeah. So it is all related to me, the Connecticut Yankee moving to Texas and having absolutely no
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clue about the history here and kind of going around, walking around and saying, oh, wow,
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look at that. Gee, I never, I never knew that. Really? That's, I mean, this is, you know,
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the idiot Easterner who doesn't know any better. I mean, you know, that's who I was. And I thought,
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this is just incredibly cool. And I went on in the high plains and then I heard about the,
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you know, these nomadic tribes that lived out there in this whole kind of world that I had
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never known about. I've never even heard about. And so living here. So, so what made me write it
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was moving to Texas where, which I did 26 years ago and I'm still here. I came here. Yeah. Kind of
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was, I was just kind of on the circuit as a, you know, I was a bureau chief for time magazine. I'd been
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in LA, Los Angeles for time magazine and, and Detroit in Washington and New York. And this was another
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stop on the way, you know, and I mean, it was like, okay, but I got here and I just started
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hearing, first of all, you start hearing things because Texas is really close to its frontier.
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And I mean, when I grew up in the East coast, the, whatever native Americans had been around
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when a white man arrived had been pretty much killed off at least in, in, in large numbers by
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disease mostly, but also by weapons and bullets and things like that. And, and this, this,
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the subjugation of the Indians that happened hundreds of years before my forebears ever
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got off the boat in Texas, that wasn't true. The history was, it was right here. It was just
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in your face. You're from Oklahoma. You know, this, right. This is immediate. It's you, you
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know, the, the last of the Indians did not surrender here until 1875. And there was a lot
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of jostling on and off the res that went on into the 20th century. And I would just hear
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these stories and these were, you know, stories that seemed like they were kind of almost current
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day. It was a very different take on it, but yeah, it was all, it was all, it was all where
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I was and this, this incredible sense of the land in particular, my, a love affair that I've
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had with the land West of, uh, in the, in West Texas and just this incredible history that
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Yeah. So let's talk about the Comanches because like I said, I didn't know much about
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this tribe. I think when we talk about Native Americans, particularly here in Oklahoma, like
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I said, you talk about the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, where you talk, if you're
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in the East Coast, you're talking about the Iroquois, the Comanches don't get much, they
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don't get talked about, but like, they're a fascinating, fascinating culture. They were
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primarily in Texas, West Texas, Southern, Southwest Oklahoma, and went into New Mexico, but they
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weren't originally from there, which I didn't know. Where were they from originally?
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So the, the origin of the tribe is, uh, I mean, there's not, there's a, you sort of put
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this together as best you can, or rather the people who were there at the time put this
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together as best as you can. As far as we know, they were originally a Shoshone language
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group tribe, uh, and they were in the Wind River Mountains or basically the foothills
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of the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. And this would be now going back prior to the 18th
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century. And from, from what we know, they were back then, this was before the Spanish
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horses arrived and were, and were distributed throughout the plains. This was, they were,
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they didn't have horses. They were a foot bound band of nomadic hunter gatherers. And they,
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they were, as far as we know, a tribe that was not militarily powerful. And one of the reasons
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that is surmised is because their hunting grounds were not the rich hunting grounds of the Buffalo
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or Bison Plains, but they were, you know, they were, they were less, less good hunting
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grounds. And so you had this amazing thing that happened in history and it happened away
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from the eyes of white men. And again, you ask like, why do people know these things?
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Well, this little, this thing you can see in flashes or, or rather the Spanish and the French
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could see it in flashes. But suddenly, you know, that, well, what happens is that the Spanish
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arrive in the new world, right after 1492, after Columbus and the Spanish arrive in the new
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world and, and they bring horses with them and with them comes this incredible technology of
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horses that's thousands of years old, that's very specific. And the Spanish are really good at it.
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And they bring these little horses, mustangs that are really well adapted to the arid areas in the
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West. And they were very concerned initially about letting the technology out, right? They didn't want
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to let it out because they knew what might happen. Well, it got out. And without going into all of the
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details, basically the native Americans on the, on the planes and the American plane,
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North American planes got hold of the horse and the tribe that was by far the best at this
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were the Comanches. They were, for some reason, nobody really, nobody still understands what there
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was about them that understood it, the horse in terms of breaking, breeding, you know, whatever it
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was, stealing, selling, racing, hunting with fighting, whatever, they were better than anybody else at it.
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And, and endowed with this new power, this phenomenal technology of the horse and, and
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mastery of it starting in the, uh, in the 17th century, aided by such things as the great
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horse dispersal, which is when the Indians were Spanish were driven out of New Mexico briefly
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and 20,000 horses got out. Anyway, the horse Comanche with horses. Now, now they start to move
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south from those wind river mountains, which is where I said there was in Wyoming, right?
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They're going to move south. They're going to challenge everybody and anything in front of
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them. And what they're going to challenge for is the greatest food source on the planes,
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which is, uh, which is a Buffalo who are essentially in the South, the Southern planes.
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I mean, they were Buffalo on the Northern planes, but nowhere near the numbers. So the new power,
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the new great planes power is going to do what you think they would do. And then they move
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south and they migrate. And that is when essentially they, they enter this, they kind
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of enter history as they start to migrate South. And this is, so they, they became even more adept
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hunters because they were able to migrate more quickly with the Buffalo. It allowed, it gave them
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an advantage in hunting Buffalo as well, because they could chase them down from their horses.
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But as you note in the book, something else happened as they started colliding with other
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tribes in the area, particularly the Apache, their culture started changing from, uh, a
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hunter culture to a warrior culture. How did that, what, how did that manifest itself?
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Yes, that's, that's a really good point. The, the Comanche, the, the, the, the incredibly
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warlike, uh, it would, you know, you'd have to look to something like Sparta, you know, uh,
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a culture that was built on war where social status came from war, where everything was kind
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of oriented that way. It came from a fairly long war against the Apaches that amounted in the
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end almost to a genocide. The, uh, Comanches were sweeping south from Wyoming, what is now Wyoming,
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into the Southern Plains, which as you said, let's think of Eastern Colorado, Eastern New Mexico,
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Western Kansas, Western Oklahoma, Western Texas, the Southern Plains. This is where the Comanches
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are moving toward. There's ground occupied by Apaches. And, uh, you have this long war that's
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very bitter and mostly unrecorded and very, very brutal that the Apaches lose. And eventually,
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you know, by the time you see, you know, Geronimo running around the borderlands of Mexico,
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that that's kind of where the Apaches eventually ended up down along a strip along the borderlands.
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But what's interesting about this, getting back to your original question is, you know,
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in the Spanish, but before I get to that, the Spanish, by the way, see this in flashes and
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the, the, the Apaches are the Spanish. The Spanish had this kind of capital up in Santa Fe,
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what is now, what is now New Mexico. And they see this strange thing happening. Their enemies,
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their great implacable enemies, the Apaches, are going away. Something's going on. They don't quite
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know what it is. Something's happening to their enemies. At some point, they realize what's happening
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to their enemies. They're losing a war to the Comanches, but what's happening to the Comanches,
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so the Apaches are being driven South, but what's happening to the Comanches is because of this long
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war, it reorders their culture. As you say, it's not just a, it is, it is now a culture of war. It is
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now a culture, particularly because they're so good at it. They work at it. They get better at it. They can,
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they can subjugate other tribes, which they do. They can drive tribes off their hunting grounds,
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which they do. They can nearly commit genocide on the Apaches, which they do. And so you have this
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kind of amazing cultural shift inside the Comanche nation. And so by the time, you know, the first
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kind of Anglo-Europeans heading West, see them in Texas in 1832 or 1834, it's this unbelievably unified
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kind of military, militaristic tribe that controls a 250,000 square mile empire with 20 vassal tribes.
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And I mean, it's, it's, it's a, it's not an empire like Rome, but it's a plains empire and it's built
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on their martial ability. So you completely changed them and it turned them from, I guess, if you look
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at them originally kind of a bunch of nomadic stone age, you know, hunter gatherers into this kind of
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magnificent mounted war machine. And how did, so you mentioned Sparta, you know, Sparta is known for,
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uh, it's a goge, like how they raised their boys to become warriors. Uh, the Comanches had something
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similar. Like they had sort of a, a training for the, that starts very young, like as young as three
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for their boys to become these great cavalry men, these great warriors of the plains.
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They were indeed, indeed that is true. And they were very, uh, it was, it, as the culture evolved,
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it, the boys had to do really two things and really, really only two things. And the women
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had to do everything else. And the two things were hunt and fight. And yes, as, as they, as the,
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as the culture changed and as the, their abilities with, um, uh, the bone arrow, the abilities with
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the horse became more sophisticated, these rituals of passage, as you were a kid, you, you know, when
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you were first turned out to hunt, you know, small game and then later larger game and, and, uh, and
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particularly taught to ride. And the thing that the power, I mean, the Comanche power came from
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certainly their, their ability to fight, you know, with your hands and with, with the plains
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lances and with bows and things like that. But, but it also came and it primarily came from the
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horse. And so what was trained as much as anything or more than anything was, was horsemanship.
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They were just phenomenal horsemen. And to the point where you, where the tales told about them
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are, I mean, scarcely believable even today. I mean, you know what they could do on a horse.
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Yeah. There are things like, you know, they would hide, like they'd shoot a bow and arrow from
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underneath the horse of a, the neck of the horse, right. While it's still galloping.
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White men couldn't, couldn't believe that one. And the other thing they could do is they could,
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they could discharge arrows at a, at a rate, you know, that it just defies imagination. I mean,
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it is literally, I'm snapping my fingers now like that. And if you don't believe me,
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go to this website where this guy, Lars Anderson, he'll show you there's no quiver involved.
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It's a way of holding the arrows. Anyway, they, all the things that they could do from particularly
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shooting, but also just riding, you know, that trick that you're talking about, where you loop
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down a leather loop over the saddle, over the very minimal, minimal Spanish saddle. And they would hang
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over the, the neck of the horse, which would of course conceal them from their enemies and also
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enable them to discharge arrows. But with such force that they, you know, they go through the head of
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the buffalo. So very, very deadly. And as I say, when the white men first saw them, they couldn't
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quite believe what they were seeing and the skills with horses applied to, you know, everything,
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breaking horses. I mean, no, they, they watched them break these horses and they'd never seen
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anything. The white men had never seen anything like it before. You know, the Comanches would trail
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a horse or a couple of horses and they would just trail the horse. And every time the horse got near
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and you couldn't catch the horse, of course, cause the horse was wild, but every time the
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horse got near water, they would kind of bother the horse. It's the same way a wolf brings down
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a moose. And, and so this would go on for a couple of days. And eventually the horse was
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just completely, you know, foaming at the mouth and, and dying of thirst. And there were various
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techniques and ways this happened, but at one point the Comanche warrior would go and literally
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put his cup, his hands over the, the, the nozzle of the horse and blow into its nostrils. And suddenly
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the horse goes from this wild thing to being immediately gentled. And, and anyway, there
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were things, all these stories that people had told about the Comanches that no one had,
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not white men had never seen before. Anyway, you've got to be careful saying no one had never seen them
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before. Well, speaking of something that flummoxed Europeans when they first encountered the Comanches
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and going on this idea of their, the warrior culture of the Comanches, they had a specific
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type of warfare, a style of warfare that when the Europeans first encountered to the Spanish,
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like it just, it, they, they, they couldn't stop it. They, there was, they had, they'd never seen
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For one thing, I mean, the white men always insisted on this kind of Napoleonic confrontation,
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you know, where you would march out and, and there you were in your, in your, in your ranks,
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you know, you would, you would take your regiment and it would be standing in its ranks two or
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three deep in the regiment and then they would line up and, hey, ready, aim, fire, right? This was,
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this was not, this was not, the Comanches would never take that fight. They would never get near
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anything like that. They would never fight you like that. So they would, they would not obey all
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of the rules of white men's war, which in those days was essentially lining up two regiments against
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each other and firing at each other from a distance of about a hundred yards away. And they
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wouldn't play that way. They, they were all about stealth. They were all about, they moved making
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cold camps. So there was no fire. They swam their horses through frozen rivers that you,
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that you wouldn't think you could cross. I mean, they, they, they attacked by night. They,
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they gave no quarter, which is another thing that the white men weren't really used to. And,
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but especially, I think that, you know, this idea of completely mobile warfare,
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Comanches were, were mobile. They didn't, they, you know, a dragoon is a, is a thing
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what characterized a lot of the troops in Spain is something that a dragoon is a type of soldier who
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are usually pretty heavily mounted, heavily armed and heavily mounted. He rides the horse to the
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place of the fight, gets off the horse and fights. It's like driving a car to the battle,
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except it's a horse. Comanches were entirely mounted and fought mounted and did everything mounted.
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And, and it was the thing that distinguished them really from everybody else. It was the complete
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oneness with the horse. And, and it was, I think as much as anything, again, I keep coming back to
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the horse, but the, you know, the, as much as anything, it was the, it was the unity of warrior
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and horse that made the difference. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.
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And now back to the show. Yeah. Going back to that idea you said about how the Comanches were very
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similar to the Spartans. One thing, and I, I, as I was reading this book, your book, I was like,
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that's exactly right. So, you know, training to be a warrior as a sensitive little boy,
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same thing in the Spartans. The, the Spartans also loved to gamble. The Comanches men also loved to
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gamble, right? Loved to gamble. The Spartan men didn't do anything except for train for war,
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hunt. They didn't do anything else like that. Same thing with Comanche.
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Yeah. So I thought, as I was reading that, I thought it was really interesting.
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It's all, it's very, it's very similar. It's, it's, uh, and, and, and in both places,
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your, your social status was entirely based on war. Okay. That's where, how many horses you had,
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how many wives, whatever it was, but those things came from performance in war.
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Yeah. For the Spartans would have been like, uh, the trophies you brought home, shields, armor that
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you brought home from your, your Concord. Well, another part of Comanche warfare, uh, is that I,
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okay. I'll tell you how I found your book. So I, I'm a big lonesome dove fan and I've read,
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I've read the original novel like four times named my kid Gus after Gus McRae. And then this year I
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finally decided I'm going to read the other novels in the series. Cause you know, McMurtry wrote
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Dead Man's Walk, Comanche Moon prequels. And I was reading Comanche Moon and Dead Man's Walk and
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they're describing the torture that the Comanches did. And I was like, ah, McMurtry, he's got to be
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doing, doing some like artistic license. It didn't happen like this. And then I, I, so I started
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researching and I found your book and then I learned, yeah, the Comanches were like experts
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at torture. What was going on there? Yeah. So one of the things you have to come to terms with,
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if you're a historian writing about native Americans, and this isn't just confined to
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the plains is, is the practice of mistreating or torturing captives. And it is, it is all over
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America, North America. Uh, it is, I don't know much about the tribes south of the Rio Grande say,
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but I do know about the ones north and they were, it was part of the culture and, uh, certainly in
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the Plains Indians it was. And, uh, and it was, it was pretty simple. So let's, let's just go back
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for a moment to the time before the white men came. So you would have a, you know, Indian tribes that
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pretty much fought each other all the time. There was a culture of raiding and the, and the raid
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always produced a counter raid and then a counter counter raid. And then there were vengeance raids.
00:21:38.860
And this kind of went on and the code was pretty similar. And I don't, the Comanche certainly had
00:21:46.000
it, but so did the, we'll just look at the Plains Indians for the moment. The rest of the Plains
00:21:50.140
Indians did too. And what that said was, if you captured a baby, you just killed the baby. The
00:21:56.480
baby's useless and an annoyance and you can't take it on the road, so to speak. Young children might
00:22:03.280
be killed or they might be spared. The Comanches in particular had trouble kind of keeping their
00:22:07.880
numbers up. So they took captives and they were very welcoming all kinds of captives, captives from
00:22:12.680
Utes and Apaches and, and Navajos and people from Mexico and, and, you know, German Americans. I mean,
00:22:19.960
they would take whoever they could get. And usually those people were in the, those, the captives that
00:22:25.100
children captives that they allowed to live would be in the, you know, eight or nine, 10, 11, maybe
00:22:31.080
that range. There's a lot of famous ones and I write about them. Then you have, let's say,
00:22:36.060
a teenage girl or a 17 year old girl would be made a slave, probably a sex slave, as well as
00:22:41.120
a slave of labor, a hard labor forever. And then you had the, the, the warriors in the tribe,
00:22:47.840
they would be killed. They would be, if they were captured alive, they would be tortured either
00:22:53.500
slowly or quickly. And that all depended on how much time the winning tribe had or the tribe that
00:22:59.480
had them had. And so you had this idea of just absolutely crazy mistreatment by the standards
00:23:06.720
of that kind of enlightened culture of the Renaissance and, you know, the Judeo-Christian
00:23:11.260
tradition and all this, I, this, I, this culture that has this, these ideas of, of absolute good and
00:23:16.900
evil, which the Indians don't have. So, so suddenly this culture in Texas, anyway, from this Anglo-European
00:23:23.980
culture arrives on the frontier and looks at babies being killed and pregnant women being eviscerated.
00:23:29.800
And, you know, the people being tortured to death by their eyelids cut off and the penis tortures and
00:23:34.720
the ant tortures and the sun tortures and all the tortures that McMurtry writes about and that I
00:23:39.900
write about. And they're just absolutely horrified. I mean, these white people are horrified as
00:23:46.600
you are as I am. But it took the white people to be horrified. See if I can explain that. So
00:23:55.540
the, there was, there was, if you will, a golden rule, like it was a backwards kind of golden rule,
00:24:01.660
but it was still a golden rule. It was, you would expect your, you would, you try to treat your enemies
00:24:05.580
the way that you might expect to be treated. And all of the Native Americans out there, if you took
00:24:11.600
Navajos and Comanches, for example, the warriors had exactly the same expectations of what was going
00:24:17.280
to happen. The women with children had exactly the same expectations. In other words, if their child,
00:24:23.820
if their baby was taken, the baby would be killed. If their tribe took a baby from another tribe,
00:24:28.500
they would kill the baby. There was a kind of a, there was a stasis. There was a kind of a stasis of
00:24:33.560
expectation. I guess there was a, it was an interesting moment in history because you have a culture of
00:24:38.500
raid and counter raid. And then we're talking about just Indians now before the white's white
00:24:42.680
man gets there and all this stuff that just curdles the white man's stomach going on, except that it
00:24:49.600
didn't bother the Indians. Not only that, but you have the culture of raid and counter raid and torture,
00:24:56.240
but also you had this kind of, well, pretty much infinitely renewable and sustainable food source,
00:25:02.440
the Buffalo. So there was this kind, if you look at say late, let's say late 18th century,
00:25:07.380
early 19th century on the plains. This is a totally sustainable society. They understand the ground
00:25:13.580
rules that each other lives by. They got plenty of food and everything's fine. Now you wouldn't
00:25:18.620
think it was so fine if you, if you got caught and had your eyelids. Yeah, I mean, whatever,
00:25:23.120
I won't go on, but that's what it was. White men arrived. Oh, the horror, the shock. And lo and behold,
00:25:30.400
the white people learned from them too. And they, you know, uh, when the Texas Rangers were said to
00:25:37.320
give no quarter, that was true. They didn't give quarter and not giving quarter. When you think
00:25:42.400
about it is if someone's attacking a village with men, women, and children in it, it's not a very
00:25:46.740
pretty thing. So it happened to both sides, but it is an interesting thing as a historian. I think as
00:25:52.320
anyone who reads about it too, you have to come to terms with this. This is what they did. And it's a
00:25:57.860
fact and they did it all over North America. And not only that, but, uh, you know, the white people
00:26:04.160
learned pretty quickly about scalping and torture themselves and often employed it just as liberally
00:26:09.500
as the native Americans did. It's a very kind of touchy and difficult thing to, to come to terms
00:26:15.140
with. It is. Cause I think in America, I think you note this in the book in America, at least we have
00:26:18.880
that very, uh, Rousseau idea of the, the noble savage, you know, peaceful, et cetera. But, you know,
00:26:24.420
as you said, it is what it is. That's what, that's how it happened. Um, we'll talk about how
00:26:28.320
warfare, how Anglos changed their manner of war here in a bit with the Texas Rangers. But to note,
00:26:35.040
because of the style of warfare, the Comanches had, they were able, and also another thing that's
00:26:38.720
interesting about the Comanches, unlike a lot of other tribes, say like back East or the Cherokees
00:26:43.260
or the Choctaws, their political organization, there really wasn't a single chief for the entire
00:26:48.680
Comanche tribe there. It was more fluid and more, more flat.
00:26:52.860
It was. And white men never understood that. They knew Comanches were organized. A lot of
00:26:56.280
Plains tribes were, but Comanches were organized in bands. And, uh, it was entirely, uh, if you looked
00:27:02.800
at it as a management chart, it's a completely horizontal management chart. And you would have
00:27:08.800
within the bands, you would have a, you know, uh, a civil chief and a war chief technically,
00:27:13.880
but even then I, so not only was there not one big head guy and the white men always thought they
00:27:19.740
were making the treaty with the big head guy, there was any big head guy. They just, they totally got
00:27:24.640
that wrong. But not only was there not a big head guy, but even within the, the bands, Comanches had
00:27:30.760
five major bands early 19th century. But, uh, you know, even within the bands, it wasn't really
00:27:38.740
hierarchical. It wasn't like, well, the president and then there's the vice president, the assistant
00:27:42.440
vice president, you know, not like that. So let's just say that you were the young Quanta
00:27:47.040
Parker and you were 18 years old and, and you wanted to get a rating party up to go raid them.
00:27:51.900
Oh, the youths or the Navajos or somebody you were going to raid your ability to become a quote
00:27:57.900
war chief depended on your ability to recruit. So if you could recruit 50 people to go on a raid,
00:28:04.100
well, you were the war chief. That was your party. And no one was saying, and there was no,
00:28:08.180
you couldn't be overridden by somebody who said you can't do that. You could
00:28:12.100
recruit it. You could do it. So there was this, uh, again, if you look at like from,
00:28:16.500
from an American sort of management point of view, it's a completely flat organizational structure,
00:28:21.560
which gave it advantages in some ways. And it gave it also some great disadvantages
00:28:29.760
because of, because of a, of a, of a lack of, you know, the kind of militaristic central control
00:28:35.400
that, you know, you would have seen in, in, in, in an army, in an army of say the civil war or
00:28:41.200
something. So yeah, all these things combined, their style of warfare, their, their fluid political
00:28:45.860
organizations. So it kind of, it made, it made it hard for Anglos to figure out, you know, who's in
00:28:50.700
charge and make treaties or whatever that allowed the Comanches to fend off the Spanish empire, which
00:28:56.940
again, like conquered the Incans, the Aztecs, these great empires in South America and Mexico.
00:29:02.760
The Comanche was able to hold these guys off for over a hundred years and white people off in
00:29:08.940
general until the Americans started arriving in Texas around early 1800s. Right. Right. And the
00:29:17.100
term that historians used for, for what the Comanches were, and again, we're, we're looking at this 250,000
00:29:23.620
square mile empire that again, Eastern New Mexico, Eastern Colorado, Western Texas, Western Kansas,
00:29:31.580
Western Oklahoma, that chunk of land there. It was so powerful that it essentially stopped the,
00:29:38.460
or not essentially, it did stop the expansion of Spanish power into the new world. The Spanish
00:29:43.080
thought that the place was theirs. They ran into first Apaches and then, then Comanches, but more
00:29:48.560
particularly Comanches. You had Comanches stopping this kind of northward power surge of the Spain,
00:29:55.060
of the Spanish in, into, into North America. You had Comanches stopping this kind of westward surge
00:30:01.680
of, of French power coming out of the Louisiana territory. You had them stopping cold, the manifest
00:30:08.020
destiny, you know, the, the movement westward driven by the idea of manifest destiny of the Americans,
00:30:13.940
of the, of the, of the, of the United States of America. And so you had this kind of phenomenal
00:30:20.660
influencer of history, I guess, because, because nobody could do anything with this. It was one
00:30:25.380
of the reasons, you know, this was the last part of North America to be settled is you had an
00:30:31.040
impenetrable block. And roughly speaking, if you look at the war that the, well, the Texans, and then
00:30:37.280
later the, the, the United States of America fought against the Comanches, this was about a 40 year
00:30:42.900
war, essentially along a single line. I mean, it wasn't, the line would roll west toward Wichita Falls,
00:30:49.240
sometimes backward toward Dallas sometimes, but the United States never fought a war against any
00:30:54.860
tribe that did anything like that. It essentially just stopped everything for a very long time. So
00:30:59.980
yeah, so that it was, it was the, and the reason that in the title, in the subtitle of my book,
00:31:06.000
Empire of the Summer Moon, I say these guys are the most powerful tribe in American history. It's for
00:31:11.540
that reason. They held up everything. They stopped everything and they stopped it for a long time.
00:31:17.560
And eventually they, of course they lost, but, but the West wasn't quote one, you know, for the white
00:31:23.400
man and his civilization until the, really until the Plains Indians lost it.
00:31:27.380
So this brings us up nicely to where Kawanna Parker's story starts, because it starts with a raid
00:31:32.280
on some Texas settlers, I think in like the 1820s, thereabouts, the Parker raid. Tell us about the
00:31:41.580
Okay. So this is the, this is the great thing about this, this story is on the one hand,
00:31:45.740
you have the story of the Comanche tribe, which is a great dramatic story, great arc of the rise and
00:31:50.660
fall. The Comanches, you know, they're this little tribe that has no count tribe. They get the horse,
00:31:55.100
they become dominant. They sweep South, they change history. That's all big picture stuff. It's great.
00:31:59.820
It's cool. But, but buried in the middle of that story is the little personal family story about the
00:32:05.280
family, about the Parker family. So what happens is the, uh, Parker family has a, it has a, has gone
00:32:12.740
ahead and built its, they've, they've been given these great head rights from the Mexican government.
00:32:17.420
And one of the reasons the Mexicans are giving out all these head rights to people from the United
00:32:22.740
States is because they want to settle these lands, these borderlands in Texas, and by settling them
00:32:29.360
somehow kind of solve their Comanche problem. And so you have, there's this raid on the Parker fort. Um,
00:32:35.920
and this is 1836 raid on the Parker fort and they take a bunch of hostages among them, right? Cynthia
00:32:41.400
and Parker, and they ride off into the plains with little, little, little nine-year-old Cynthia and
00:32:47.600
Parker, blonde hair, cornflower, blue eyes, you know, the whole deal that they leave. Nothing. It was the most
00:32:53.680
typical raid you could possibly imagine. The Indians did this to each other all the time.
00:32:58.280
And this just happened to be, they, I mean, they were, these were white people, predestinarian Baptists
00:33:04.300
out of, uh, you know, Illinois by way of Virginia. And, and so this starts this incredible tale. So Cynthia,
00:33:11.560
little, little, uh, little Cynthia and Parker, she's kidnapped. She's taken away. She becomes part of the tribe.
00:33:19.320
She becomes completely assimilated into the tribe. She marries a war chief. She, she is over the years,
00:33:25.340
Indian agents and various people knew where she was, but she wouldn't come in, which shocked
00:33:30.520
everybody. Of course, that the, the white squaw as they called her could, could possibly, you know,
00:33:35.760
want to spend her life with these, with these horrible savages when she could have her wonderful,
00:33:41.740
you know, uh, European culture that she came from. And so the, the, this is the first part of the
00:33:47.680
story. Cynthia Ann goes out and she won't come back. She has children. She marries the war chief
00:33:52.560
and she has one of her sons is named Quanah. Then by complete accident, one day, a bunch of
00:34:00.500
Rangers, Texas Rangers and militia happened to attack a camp where she is located and they recapture
00:34:07.160
her. And this is one of this, the more amazing moments in the history of the frontier, because
00:34:12.980
you have this, you know, the, the, the, the squaw that would never return. They refuse to return to
00:34:17.480
her culture. Well, now they've got her and they put her up on a, on a box in Fort Worth and everybody
00:34:21.840
gawks out there and poke at her and pokes at her and, and, and, and gawks at her up on this box.
00:34:28.360
And when she was captured, she's captured with her daughter on a prairie flower, but her sons get
00:34:35.640
away. One of whom is Quanah. And so Cynthia Ann gets dragged back increasingly, you know, farther,
00:34:41.820
farther and farther away from the plains, increasingly into this kind of Anglo-Saxon culture of her family,
00:34:49.580
the Parker family. And she's ever more miserable. Meanwhile, her son who wasn't captured, Quanah is
00:34:56.200
out loose on the plains rising to become the next, the last great chief of the Comanches and the,
00:35:04.100
the man who finally surrenders what remains of his tribe after all the Buffalo are killed in, in,
00:35:10.680
in 1875. And so in a way you have this, this 40 year war that I talked about between the Comanches
00:35:17.100
and the first, the Texans, and then the people from the United States. And essentially that begins
00:35:24.660
with the kidnapping essentially of Cynthia Ann Parker. And it ends with the surrender of her son,
00:35:31.340
the last and greatest chief of the Comanches, Quanah in 1875. It's an amazing kind of,
00:35:36.140
they're amazing bookends. Quanah then goes, elects to walk the white man's way, goes onto the reservation,
00:35:41.940
becomes the wealthiest and most influential Native American of the reservation period,
00:35:46.140
and on and on. And when he finally, and among other things, he, he attempts to, and, and does
00:35:51.320
locate the grave of his mother. And anyway, the story goes on, but it's one of the great tales of
00:35:57.720
the frontier. And so when you write about it in my, when I write about it in my book, I get to tell
00:36:01.940
that, you know, that big picture tale of the Comanche tribe, but I also get to tell this, but when you're
00:36:06.520
reading that, you're never very far from the smaller story about this little girl and, and her son.
00:36:12.140
No. Yeah. When you mentioned that part where they, they found Cynthia Ann again, they, you know,
00:36:16.200
and I guess they gave her back to her uncle and her uncle just put her up on that box and she,
00:36:20.440
yeah, you said everyone was just gawking and she started crying.
00:36:23.100
She was curious. She was a curiosity. They, they, people really, I mean, it's hard to imagine that
00:36:28.620
the, the animosity that's today anyway, the animosity that people on the frontier felt for say Comanches.
00:36:36.100
I mean, everybody knew somebody who'd been killed or tortured or, I mean, it was very bitter and it
00:36:41.480
was very brutal. And so to have one of them kind of a live one, you know, right there, but she's
00:36:46.600
white. I mean, it was just astounded people. Yeah. And so you mentioned the Texas Rangers found
00:36:51.640
them and this is another part of this Comanche story and the story of the Parkers and Kiwana. Like
00:36:56.200
this is also the story of how the Texas Rangers, the mythic Texas Rangers came to power, came to rise.
00:37:02.840
Like what you, you mentioned this earlier. One reason why the Texas Rangers were so successful
00:37:07.580
at battling Comanches that they learned to fight basically like Comanches.
00:37:13.040
They imitated everything they did and that's where the Rangers came from. And one of the,
00:37:17.580
I mean, one of the things I loved about Lonesome Dove, which you and I both like, is, you know,
00:37:22.560
that the Gus and Captain Call were, were Rangers of that era. That's who they were. That's why they were
00:37:29.280
good. They, they fought, well, they fought Comanches and Mexicans as everybody did in San Antonio.
00:37:34.060
But yeah, I'll tell you a story. This is my favorite story that came out of my book and I
00:37:39.580
didn't know it before I wrote it. But so let's go to the 1830s and we're in San Antonio now. It's
00:37:44.540
just right in the edge of the Comanche frontier. And so back in those days you were, well, actually,
00:37:50.920
let's take it at, let's take 1836 and forward. 1836 is now, San Antonio is now part of Texas.
00:37:57.380
And what Texas would do, they were very generous with what they called head rights. So they would
00:38:03.220
give you head rights with being rights to land. Basically the land was free. And all you had to
00:38:08.800
do was go out and survey that land. And then it was yours. And so people flocked to San Antonio and
00:38:16.040
they would, they secured their head rights, which would be, I don't know, call it a few
00:38:21.400
hundred, 600, 800,000 acres, however many acres outside of town. And then the surveyors would go
00:38:27.480
out and survey it. And the surveyors would be killed in all sorts, talk about torture. And the
00:38:33.520
Indians knew exactly what the surveyors were doing. I mean, it wasn't like, oh, the machine that steals
00:38:39.120
the land. No, the machine actually stole the land. And they knew that machine stole the land,
00:38:44.420
the surveying equipment did. So they killed them in all sorts of imaginative ways. And so then
00:38:49.760
the people in San Antonio would send out armed guards with the surveyors. And now the death toll
00:38:55.660
rose. In fact, if you see the number of the percentage of dead in 1837, I think this is in
00:39:01.120
my book somewhere, 10 or 15% of the population of San Antonio died every year trying to do this.
00:39:08.260
Comanche's didn't like this. One of these surveyors was named Jack Hayes, and he was a skinny
00:39:13.840
little 23-year-old guy who had this ability to keep surveyors alive long enough to get the head
00:39:22.280
rights and secure the land. And so this group kind of coalesced around him of young guns. They were
00:39:29.040
all 22 years old, and they were all crazy. And they were all very tough. And the Texans had names for
00:39:35.220
them. They called them mounted gunmen and spies. They're called spies. I don't know why. Eventually,
00:39:40.720
they came up with a name for them that stuck. It was rangers. And yet what the rangers did was they
00:39:46.780
imitated everything that the Comanches did. Cold camps. Again, you don't build a fire because
00:39:51.300
they can find you. They learned from their various scouts that they used to find the Comanches,
00:39:56.280
how to track bird flight, how to cross frozen rivers, how to, particularly horse management,
00:40:03.720
which really the white men didn't really understand at all. They didn't understand how you fought on
00:40:09.140
horseback, just how you lived with a horse in an essentially combat situation. And so this goes on,
00:40:18.860
and Hayes makes a name for himself. He's the man. He's got one problem, though. When his mounted men,
00:40:26.280
who are really good on horseback now, confront Comanches, they've got only three shots. They've got
00:40:31.900
a Kentucky long rifle, bang, that's one. And they've got two single shot pistols, two, three,
00:40:36.600
and that's it. And you can't reload those on a horseback. Can't do it. They were going up against
00:40:43.840
Comanches that had the clusters of arrows in their hands that could shoot very rapidly. They were at a
00:40:48.060
great kind of disadvantage in firepower. And they couldn't do anything about it. They won their battles
00:40:56.100
largely by just being unbelievably aggressive. They would ride forward at full speed screaming,
00:41:02.960
and they would discharge their weapons. And they would often just win by panache, you know,
00:41:08.880
by just guts. And very much the Captain Call character in McMurtry. Okay, so now something
00:41:16.700
really interesting happens. So go to the East Coast. The East Coast, there's this guy named Samuel Colt,
00:41:22.320
this little inventor guy, and he's invented this weird little weapon. It's a five-shot pistol. I
00:41:28.880
think it's a .36 caliber five-shot pistol. It's got this, but what it's got is it's got a, well,
00:41:34.460
five shots, but it's also got a cylinder that is removable so that you can shoot the five shots,
00:41:41.160
remove the cylinder, and put another cylinder in. And it's just a great, he thinks it's a great,
00:41:46.020
you know, cavalry sidearm and everything. Well, at that moment, the United States did not have a
00:41:50.640
cavalry, and nobody wanted this weapon. It was a weapon, it was a clever weapon that had no use,
00:41:56.400
as far as anybody could see. Colt goes bankrupt, loses the blueprints, it's over. However, somehow,
00:42:05.580
the Texas Navy bought a crate of those things, of the five shooters, the Patterson Colt five shooters,
00:42:13.300
and somehow it sat in a warehouse in Galveston, and somehow Jack Hayes and his Rangers in San Antonio,
00:42:18.800
which is about, I don't know, maybe 200 miles from there, got a hold of it, got a hold of the
00:42:24.380
crate of guns. He immediately understood what it did. Hayes immediately understood that it would
00:42:31.640
equalize the thing. So you have, so now the Hayes Rangers, now they're training and training with
00:42:35.600
these five shooters, and they're getting really good at them. And in 1844, they take them out and
00:42:40.300
they try them out in Sisterdale, Texas, at the Battle of Walkers Creek, and they win. And everything
00:42:46.560
that Hayes thought would happen would happen, you know, happened. And so here, so you had this
00:42:53.140
incredible moment in history. Right then, the Mexican War, and the Mexican War happens, people figure out
00:43:00.640
that there are these crazy Rangers in Texas who go everywhere mounted, and they have these repeating
00:43:04.680
pistols. And they now design, I mean, Samuel Colt now redesigned something. Now this is called the
00:43:11.240
Walker Colt. It's this five and a half pound hand cannon that is a six shooter. And it's this, I mean,
00:43:17.360
if you've ever held one, they're just, it's just, it's a thing to hold. Anyway, it's the six shooter.
00:43:23.980
It changes everything. It kills more men than the Roman short sword. It saves Colt from bankruptcy.
00:43:30.640
Colt gets the military contract to make the six shooters for the Rangers who go into war in Mexico
00:43:37.760
and absolutely light it up. Nobody's ever seen this kind of ability to fight. They're used as
00:43:44.180
sort of anti-guerrilla warriors, and nobody can stand with them. And so it's the invention of the
00:43:50.760
six shooter. And it was invented in order to fight Comanches by people who had adapted warfare against
00:43:55.660
Comanches. And anyway, there's lots of stories like that. That's probably my favorite from the
00:44:00.560
book just because, you know, it reaches into capitalism in the East coast. And Samuel Colt,
00:44:04.700
who by the way, becomes the richest man in America because of this and on and on and on. It's a great
00:44:10.200
story. And, and you were asking earlier about why people don't know about this. I mean, take somebody
00:44:16.040
like Jack Hayes. I mean, he should be easily as famous as another guy running around San Antonio in
00:44:24.140
those same years named Davy Crockett. And then I don't know why he isn't, frankly.
00:44:28.280
Yeah. This is going back to Quanah Parker. He's, he kind of rose to power as a war chief, as the
00:44:34.680
Comanches were dwindling in power and that they're dwindling because, okay, the Rangers figured out how
00:44:40.480
to fight them. But the big reason the Buffalo were being exterminated. This is when, again, talking about
00:44:45.320
that, that cross section of capitalism intersecting with the frontier. This is when the Buffalo
00:44:50.720
Hunter came to power and they were just wiping out the Buffalo and that was their food source. So I think what
00:44:56.100
led Quanah to finally decide, because I think a lot of these Plains tribes, they, they fought going on
00:45:01.480
the reservation because they knew as soon as that happened, their way of life would be over. They
00:45:06.120
would no longer be the people or the Comanches. They were going to have to grow beans and corn.
00:45:11.200
Right. Exactly. So they fought it to the end. But why did Quanah, this great war chief who was an
00:45:15.440
adept warrior, why did he decide just to finally surrender and head over to Fort Sill?
00:45:20.040
Well, to go back to something you said a minute ago, I mean, what really killed most of the Indians
00:45:24.440
off was proximity to the white man and white man's diseases. The great, the great percentages of the
00:45:31.080
Indian tribes died, including Comanches from cholera and white man's diseases. And so you had this wave
00:45:38.000
of, of, well, starting, I guess, in the 1830s and 40s and 50s. I mean, it was just, I mean, half an
00:45:45.880
entire tribe would be taken out or two thirds of an entire tribe. And, and the problem was the closer
00:45:51.040
you were to the, to the white man's frontier, the more there was interaction with white men in trade
00:45:56.080
and so forth. And, and the more of the diseases spread. Quanah Parker happened to be part of a
00:46:01.960
band that lived way out in West Texas. If you've ever been to Amarillo out there in the panhandle,
00:46:08.340
and they were, his band, the Quahattis were, were remote, I guess they were the most remote band from
00:46:16.000
whatever white frontier you were looking at. One of, and one of the reasons they were able to
00:46:20.540
avoid disease is that they did not themselves go and interact. They didn't, when, so when,
00:46:25.380
when they wanted to trade with Santa Fe, with the Spanish and the, where the Mexicans in Santa Fe,
00:46:29.880
they would trade through the intermediaries, these intermediaries called Comancheros.
00:46:35.080
And so basically they, out on the plains there, they were, they were disease-free and therefore
00:46:40.400
their numbers stayed up. This was Quanah's people. And so what happened by, it's kind of a
00:46:45.120
cascading effect. The civil war came and both North and South governments turned their attentions
00:46:51.180
elsewhere and allowed the frontier to kind of fester. But after the war was over, you know,
00:46:56.180
the people in charge in Washington pretty soon decided that they were going to put a stop to this.
00:47:01.320
And in the 1870s, you have the first of these big expeditions being sent out. Okay, we're now going
00:47:06.460
to end this. We're going to end this nonsense. How could this tribe with 5,000 people in it, or whatever,
00:47:11.520
5,000 warriors be holding up the entire advance of, you know, Western civilization, which is the way
00:47:17.620
it was seen. And so you have this, not only is it a moment when you have military forces now being
00:47:25.240
unleashed against Quanah and his band and his out, out in the panhandle out of that in West Texas,
00:47:31.200
but you also have the phenomenon you were talking about, which is the deliberate tolerance by
00:47:37.460
Washington, by the military establishment in particular, of the wholesale killing of all
00:47:42.600
the buffalo and the plains. And for a Plains Indian, the buffalo was everything. The buffalo
00:47:48.120
was the food. The buffalo were the clothing, the lodging, the weapons, the food. It was an entire way
00:47:56.240
of life. Everything came from the buffalo. Without the buffalo, a Plains Indian wasn't really a Plains
00:48:02.060
Indian. And so you have a couple of, as I said, a couple of things going on. You have the military
00:48:06.920
now, you know, Quanah and his guys have Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Philip
00:48:13.400
Sheridan full attention. And these are some serious warriors who beat the South in the Civil War. And they
00:48:19.240
have their full attention. You have a military campaign being run against them. You have all of their
00:48:24.100
buffalo being slaughtered. And at the end of this kind of last great gasp of all this, the Red River
00:48:30.820
War, it's pretty much all over for the Plains Indians. Now, Quanah himself was, he was never
00:48:38.800
captured. He never lost a battle to the white men. He was out there. He stayed out. He could have stayed
00:48:44.280
out really possibly as long as he wanted to. But at some point, he realized that primarily all of the
00:48:51.160
food source was dead. He realized that all the buffalo were dead. He realized that the lifestyle was
00:48:54.980
going to have to change. So in 1875, he and the last of kind of the starving Comanches, you know,
00:49:02.120
who are now eating prairie dogs, if they can get them, they come in. There really is no choice.
00:49:07.500
They don't want to go farm beans and corns. And they never did. And when they were given land to do so,
00:49:12.440
they sublet it to white farmers. They never would do it anyway. They were never going to
00:49:15.960
be anything but who they were, which was hunters of bison or buffalo on the plains.
00:49:23.620
So Quanah essentially was the last gasp of that. He was the last holdout, one of the last holdouts,
00:49:28.780
the last Comanche holdout. And when he came in, he acknowledged that if they were going to
00:49:35.060
come into a reservation somewhere, they were going to have to change their ways.
00:49:38.780
And he did. I mean, I think a lot of Native Americans who went to the reservation,
00:49:44.000
sort of this stereotype of them becoming very sullen and, you know, sort of not working and
00:49:48.700
just sort of just living off the things they get from the government. But Quanah, he became
00:49:55.100
incredibly industrious, incredibly, I mean, he adapted to the white man's way to the point where he,
00:50:01.560
as you said earlier, gained an incredible amount of power, a great amount of wealth. And he also
00:50:06.020
became a celebrity during the late 19th century, early 20th century.
00:50:10.640
He did. He did this amazing transformation from being one of the most feared warriors of his era.
00:50:15.660
And he did things, I mean, he never talked about what he did. But of course, because he was a Comanche,
00:50:19.860
we sort of know what he did. And it was, he was, it was brutal. And it was, he was a young man,
00:50:25.060
but he was a, he was a true Comanche plains warrior. And when he had his vision and he went in,
00:50:30.880
he decided he was, he was going to walk the white man's walk. And he did. And one of the
00:50:37.080
interesting things that he, about that was his, he realized that cattle and land was the sort of
00:50:42.860
the name of the game. And he played it just as well as anyone ever did, certainly as well as any
00:50:47.680
white man did. I mean, he outfoxed the white man at his little cattle leasing schemes. He was
00:50:52.460
absolutely magnificent testifying for the Jerome Commission in Washington about, about Comanche
00:50:59.020
land allotments. He was a true leader of his tribe. And he was, he was the leader of his tribe
00:51:04.300
from the time that he surrendered in 1875 till his death in 1911. But yeah, he became wealthy,
00:51:10.320
built this giant house out on the plains or got his, sorry, got his, he tried to get the US
00:51:15.880
government to build it for him, of course, but they wouldn't. He got his cattleman friends to build
00:51:20.180
it for him. This magnificent place called Star House out, out on the plains said, if you had, if you
00:51:25.600
had come, if you had walked into Star House in say 1890, you just wouldn't believe what you were
00:51:31.160
looking at. He had, well, he had six wives in the house. He had, well, he had what, 20 or 21 children,
00:51:38.560
19 of whom survived to adulthood. He had children who were, sorry, the children married white people.
00:51:45.240
He had an adopted white son living with him. He had like a French, I'm sorry, a Russian Mexican cook in
00:51:50.720
there. He would have, you know, Geronimo and you and the army generals like Nelson Crook to dinner in
00:51:55.720
the house, around the house at any given moment that you would see lodges, teepees, as many as 80 or 90
00:52:01.880
of them, Comanche tribe members who would come in to get a loan or a gift or money or to be healed
00:52:07.940
because Quanah founded the Native American church with his peyote ritual, you know, to get buried. I mean,
00:52:14.020
this world of the, this reservation world revolved around him. And, uh, and as you said earlier,
00:52:21.220
it would, it would not be accurate to say that most Comanches were willing to follow him and to
00:52:29.220
follow his path. They mostly, they simply didn't want it to be what, what the American military
00:52:36.000
establishment and political establishment wanted them to be, which was bean farmers. They never wanted
00:52:41.360
to do that. And they never did that. And speaking of other people you might see at his star house,
00:52:46.760
Teddy Roosevelt, president, Teddy Roosevelt. Yeah. I'm sorry. I forgot. He made a visit down
00:52:50.680
to Quanah. He was there once. And it's just great. It's still sitting up there. It's falling down now.
00:52:56.440
It's just, it's just kind of, it's a true shame that star house has gone to, gone to seed up there in
00:53:02.760
Cache, Oklahoma. But, uh, one of the great thrills for me of writing the book was going up there and
00:53:08.080
discovering it, you know, sitting in the, in the room where that famous picture of Cynthia Ann,
00:53:15.240
um, sat on Quanah's wall and, uh, into the dining room where, where Geronimo had dinner with him and
00:53:22.000
so forth. So Sam, as you said, this, this story, it's a big story, an epic story of the American West
00:53:28.320
and the closing of the frontier, but it's also had these, these small stories of, of families,
00:53:32.600
of individuals. I mean, after you have, after someone reads this book, what do you hope they
00:53:38.420
walk away with after finishing it? I think what I, I didn't really, when I was writing it, I didn't,
00:53:44.220
I didn't have a, I didn't have an agenda. I wasn't trying to do anything in particular
00:53:49.040
except to present a balanced view of the frontier. And, and, but it was interesting because I was, uh,
00:53:56.820
I wrote the book and I started to get these questions that were, do you know who Don Imus is?
00:54:01.600
Yeah. Okay. So I'm being interviewed by Imus and I'm in some studio in Dallas and, uh, Imus loved the
00:54:07.600
book. And when it came out, he jumped on and I'm interviewing him. I'm in some studio in Dallas
00:54:11.560
wearing headphones. And he goes up and he goes, Sam, uh, you wrote this book. Did you have to stop and
00:54:16.900
take some couple of deep breaths before you wrote a complete revisionist history of Native American,
00:54:21.120
Native Americans? And I, and then I go, like, what are you talking about? I honestly didn't know
00:54:28.480
what he meant. Okay. A thousand similar questions later, I now know what he was talking about. And
00:54:34.340
what he was talking about was that you had all these kinds of myths and counter myths that were
00:54:39.420
flying around in this country anyway, in the 20th century, you had this kind of idea that early on
00:54:47.280
that the, that the army, and you can see this in Hollywood. Totally. It's the army is all good.
00:54:52.100
It's the cavalry coming in. It's right. It's the horrible, mean Indians. Right. And that was that
00:54:55.960
idea that Indians are bad. And then, then you had a complete kind of snapback from that. And the
00:55:01.720
poster book for which was bury my heart at wounded knee, which is that the Indians are right. They're,
00:55:07.480
they're noble, gentle people that we just steamrolled over and broke all our creedies and took their
00:55:13.740
lands and destroyed them. All of which is true, by the way. And, but there was that particular sign
00:55:19.080
and that, that the bury my heart side of the myth or the bury my heart myth had kind of neglected
00:55:27.140
this idea that Indians were powerful in their own right, cruel in their own right, powerful, cruel that
00:55:33.800
they, they, you know, they were, they had the Comanches were, were nobody's fool and certainly didn't
00:55:39.900
get rolled over by anybody. They put up a 40 year fight again. Well, they, they, they, they drove the
00:55:44.940
Spanish out of the new world and they put up a 40 year fight against the Texas and the Americans.
00:55:49.740
But it was that sense, I guess that, so, and I approached it just as a, I'm a, I'm a reporter.
00:55:55.040
I mean, I'm, I've been, I was a magazine writer and a newspaper writer. I just try to, you know,
00:55:59.480
you try to interview both sides, you know, and when you come to conclusions, but you try to be
00:56:03.980
balanced in your coverage. And that's, that's all I was. I was trying to be balanced.
00:56:08.380
So if I talk about Comanche's torturing babies, and I also talk about what the Rangers did to
00:56:15.300
Indians, which was just as horrifying, not because I was trying to make an ideological point with it,
00:56:21.880
but because it was true, but because, because the, the, the, the borderlands, the frontier were
00:56:27.320
an extremely violent and brutal place. And the violence came from both sides and you had a culture
00:56:33.260
of kind of vengeance that comes out of it. And if you've ever seen this, the movie, the searchers and
00:56:38.220
the character of John Wayne is just so brilliant. It's this guy who embodies the bitterness of the
00:56:44.080
frontier and what it's like to, you know, have to lose people. Both sides had that. And so I guess,
00:56:50.540
I, I, I guess what I would like readers to feel, if anything, and this is related to what I was just
00:56:55.080
saying is that I, as a reporter, I was balanced and I was sympathetic to both sides because, you know,
00:57:01.360
were the Comanche's noble? Yes, they were. They fantastic. Uh, they had a fantastic culture.
00:57:07.100
They're family oriented. I mean, they were also, you can go, go on about that. And they were also
00:57:13.480
warriors of a very high order who were exceptionally cruel when it came to hostages. So, and captives,
00:57:20.260
I guess that, I guess that's what I would want people to know is that it was, it wasn't,
00:57:25.740
both myths are, are incomplete, I guess. No. Yeah. That's what I took away. Human,
00:57:30.540
it's basically reiterated the point that human beings, all human beings are complex, messy
00:57:36.220
creatures. And, uh, and yeah, you can, I, as I read this, I was like, I was, I was horrified by
00:57:43.020
both what the, the Rangers and the Comanches did, but also inspired by both. I was sad, you know,
00:57:49.480
what happened with the Comanches at the end, just seeing that, like it was a, it was a people that
00:57:53.120
ended basically. Yeah. That is that story you told at the end where Quanta goes on one last
00:57:57.880
Buffalo hunt. Oh, isn't that sad? And they, and there's nothing there. And that's, I think they
00:58:02.700
realized it's over. And like, I was just like, this is, that's just devastating. So yeah, it's a,
00:58:08.840
it's a really great book. Sam Gwynn, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Well, it's been a
00:58:12.960
pleasure talking to you too, Brent. So we'll, maybe we'll talk again about the civil war someday or
00:58:17.600
something. No. Yeah. You got that book rebel yell about Stonewall Jackson and it's on my to read list.
00:58:22.480
So we're going to make that happen. All right. My guest today was Sam Gwynn. He's the author of
00:58:27.620
the book Empire of the Summer Moon. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can
00:58:32.300
find out more information about Sam's work at scgwynn.com or check out our show notes at
00:58:37.400
aom.is slash Comanches where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper into this
00:58:41.720
topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:58:52.340
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