The Art of Manliness - #526： The Rise and Fall of the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

00:00:00.000 the art of manliness podcast. For nearly 400 years, the Comanche tribe controlled the southern 0.97

00:00:14.320 plains of America. Even as Europeans arrived on the scene with guns and middle armor, the Comanches 1.00

00:00:18.680 held them off with nothing but horses, arrows, lances, and buffalo hide shields. In the 18th

00:00:23.200 century, the Comanche stopped the Spanish from driving north from Mexico and halted French 1.00

00:00:27.120 expansion westward from Louisiana. In the 19th century, they stymied the development of the

00:00:30.920 new country by engaging in a 40-year war with the Texas Rangers and the U.S. military. It wasn't

00:00:35.520 until the latter part of that century that the Comanches finally laid down their arms. How did

00:00:39.420 they create a resistance so fierce and long-lasting? Well, my guest today explores that question in his

00:00:44.240 book, Empire of the Summer Moon. Quanah Parker and the rise involved the Comanches, the most powerful 0.99

00:00:49.060 Indian tribe in American history. His name is Sam Gwynn, and we begin our discussion by explaining

00:00:53.720 where the Comanches were from originally, and how their introduction to the horse radically changed

00:00:57.820 their culture and kick-started the precipitous rise to power. Sam then explains how the Comanches

00:01:02.200 shifted from a hunting culture to a warrior culture, and how their warrior culture was very

00:01:06.320 similar to that of the ancient Spartans. We then discuss the event that began the decline of the

00:01:10.240 Comanches, the kidnapping of a Texan girl named Cynthia Ann Parker. Sam explains how she went on to

00:01:15.020 become the mother of the last great war chief of the Comanches, Quanah, why Quanah ultimately decided to

00:01:19.520 surrender to the military, and the interesting path his life took afterward. This is a fascinating

00:01:23.720 story about an oft-overlooked part of American history. After the show's over, check out our

00:01:27.580 show notes at aom.is slash Comanches. Sam joins me now via Skype.

00:01:43.400 Sam Gwynn, welcome to the show.

00:01:45.460 It's good to be talking to you.

00:01:46.720 So you're the author of the book, Empire of the Summer Moon, Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall

00:01:51.680 of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. I grew up in Oklahoma, I live

00:01:56.980 in Oklahoma, and you know, you have to do Oklahoma history, but they always talk about just the five

00:02:01.360 civilized tribes, which is an interesting history. The Comanches get like a passing, and the story is

00:02:06.660 just phenomenal.

00:02:08.420 It's kind of what, it's true in Texas, too. There's a lot of, I mean, they just blow by this. They

00:02:13.800 certainly did. My daughter was in high school, you know, 10 years ago here. They just blew right by it.

00:02:19.340 They never stopped.

00:02:20.760 Well, why is that? Why does the history of the Comanches get overlooked or blown by

00:02:25.640 in history classes?

00:02:26.840 I don't know. It's a really good question. The, you know, the plains are, the high plains,

00:02:34.280 Comanche plains are the last part of America to be settled, of course. You know, the east settles

00:02:39.380 and the west settles, and then you've got this thing sitting out here that is really the plains

00:02:45.060 extending down from the northern plains that were controlled by the Sioux through the central Cheyennes

00:02:50.500 and Arapahoes and then Comanches. And you had this very uncivilized, shall we say, middle 0.64

00:02:57.140 that took a very long time to settle. And on some level, I think that it may be because they're just,

00:03:05.160 because of that fact, there just wasn't anything out here, really. I mean, this was a frontier. And

00:03:12.000 because there was a frontier, you didn't, it wasn't crawling with our reporters necessarily.

00:03:17.040 And it just, it just never had the play. And it was a, even something like the Red River War,

00:03:21.660 which is an extremely significant sort of moment in American history. It was kind of, you know,

00:03:26.180 the end of the frontier and the frontier ended here in Texas. It didn't end in California. It ended here.

00:03:31.360 These things didn't get covered very well. They didn't get written about that well. And

00:03:35.400 I don't know. I mean, it's been a privilege and an honor for me to be able to restore it in some

00:03:41.080 ways, certainly here in Texas, because it wasn't that the Comanche period here in Texas was not

00:03:48.120 really part of the conversation. And so what led you down that path? Did you come across a story or

00:03:53.080 was it your, you know, your daughter, you know, going through Texas history in high school and like

00:03:57.180 Comanche sort of got a quick pass. I mean, was, did you come across something that there's,

00:04:02.120 there's a bigger story here that I need to write about and research?

00:04:04.700 Yeah. So it is all related to me, the Connecticut Yankee moving to Texas and having absolutely no

00:04:12.420 clue about the history here and kind of going around, walking around and saying, oh, wow,

00:04:16.800 look at that. Gee, I never, I never knew that. Really? That's, I mean, this is, you know,

00:04:21.460 the idiot Easterner who doesn't know any better. I mean, you know, that's who I was. And I thought, 0.99

00:04:26.220 this is just incredibly cool. And I went on in the high plains and then I heard about the,

00:04:30.500 you know, these nomadic tribes that lived out there in this whole kind of world that I had

00:04:35.440 never known about. I've never even heard about. And so living here. So, so what made me write it

00:04:41.140 was moving to Texas where, which I did 26 years ago and I'm still here. I came here. Yeah. Kind of

00:04:47.140 was, I was just kind of on the circuit as a, you know, I was a bureau chief for time magazine. I'd been

00:04:51.920 in LA, Los Angeles for time magazine and, and Detroit in Washington and New York. And this was another

00:04:58.220 stop on the way, you know, and I mean, it was like, okay, but I got here and I just started

00:05:03.320 hearing, first of all, you start hearing things because Texas is really close to its frontier.

00:05:09.580 And I mean, when I grew up in the East coast, the, whatever native Americans had been around

00:05:15.540 when a white man arrived had been pretty much killed off at least in, in, in large numbers by

00:05:21.940 disease mostly, but also by weapons and bullets and things like that. And, and this, this,

00:05:26.740 the subjugation of the Indians that happened hundreds of years before my forebears ever

00:05:31.120 got off the boat in Texas, that wasn't true. The history was, it was right here. It was just

00:05:36.240 in your face. You're from Oklahoma. You know, this, right. This is immediate. It's you, you 0.71

00:05:42.240 know, the, the last of the Indians did not surrender here until 1875. And there was a lot 0.93

00:05:46.880 of jostling on and off the res that went on into the 20th century. And I would just hear

00:05:51.980 these stories and these were, you know, stories that seemed like they were kind of almost current

00:05:57.500 day. It was a very different take on it, but yeah, it was all, it was all, it was all where

00:06:02.120 I was and this, this incredible sense of the land in particular, my, a love affair that I've

00:06:07.400 had with the land West of, uh, in the, in West Texas and just this incredible history that

00:06:13.740 happened down here.

00:06:15.180 Yeah. So let's talk about the Comanches because like I said, I didn't know much about

00:06:19.020 this tribe. I think when we talk about Native Americans, particularly here in Oklahoma, like

00:06:21.720 I said, you talk about the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, where you talk, if you're

00:06:25.880 in the East Coast, you're talking about the Iroquois, the Comanches don't get much, they 1.00

00:06:30.800 don't get talked about, but like, they're a fascinating, fascinating culture. They were

00:06:34.360 primarily in Texas, West Texas, Southern, Southwest Oklahoma, and went into New Mexico, but they

00:06:40.600 weren't originally from there, which I didn't know. Where were they from originally?

00:06:43.880 So the, the origin of the tribe is, uh, I mean, there's not, there's a, you sort of put

00:06:49.620 this together as best you can, or rather the people who were there at the time put this

00:06:52.960 together as best as you can. As far as we know, they were originally a Shoshone language

00:06:57.680 group tribe, uh, and they were in the Wind River Mountains or basically the foothills

00:07:03.300 of the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. And this would be now going back prior to the 18th

00:07:09.020 century. And from, from what we know, they were back then, this was before the Spanish

00:07:13.540 horses arrived and were, and were distributed throughout the plains. This was, they were,

00:07:18.080 they didn't have horses. They were a foot bound band of nomadic hunter gatherers. And they,

00:07:25.880 they were, as far as we know, a tribe that was not militarily powerful. And one of the reasons 1.00

00:07:31.060 that is surmised is because their hunting grounds were not the rich hunting grounds of the Buffalo

00:07:35.760 or Bison Plains, but they were, you know, they were, they were less, less good hunting

00:07:39.960 grounds. And so you had this amazing thing that happened in history and it happened away

00:07:45.400 from the eyes of white men. And again, you ask like, why do people know these things?

00:07:49.200 Well, this little, this thing you can see in flashes or, or rather the Spanish and the French

00:07:54.180 could see it in flashes. But suddenly, you know, that, well, what happens is that the Spanish 0.99

00:08:00.160 arrive in the new world, right after 1492, after Columbus and the Spanish arrive in the new

00:08:05.060 world and, and they bring horses with them and with them comes this incredible technology of

00:08:10.280 horses that's thousands of years old, that's very specific. And the Spanish are really good at it. 1.00

00:08:14.540 And they bring these little horses, mustangs that are really well adapted to the arid areas in the

00:08:19.900 West. And they were very concerned initially about letting the technology out, right? They didn't want

00:08:24.700 to let it out because they knew what might happen. Well, it got out. And without going into all of the

00:08:30.560 details, basically the native Americans on the, on the planes and the American plane,

00:08:36.200 North American planes got hold of the horse and the tribe that was by far the best at this 0.99

00:08:42.680 were the Comanches. They were, for some reason, nobody really, nobody still understands what there

00:08:47.380 was about them that understood it, the horse in terms of breaking, breeding, you know, whatever it

00:08:52.300 was, stealing, selling, racing, hunting with fighting, whatever, they were better than anybody else at it.

00:08:57.620 And, and endowed with this new power, this phenomenal technology of the horse and, and

00:09:03.740 mastery of it starting in the, uh, in the 17th century, aided by such things as the great

00:09:09.980 horse dispersal, which is when the Indians were Spanish were driven out of New Mexico briefly

00:09:14.100 and 20,000 horses got out. Anyway, the horse Comanche with horses. Now, now they start to move

00:09:19.220 south from those wind river mountains, which is where I said there was in Wyoming, right?

00:09:23.100 They're going to move south. They're going to challenge everybody and anything in front of 1.00

00:09:28.760 them. And what they're going to challenge for is the greatest food source on the planes,

00:09:32.500 which is, uh, which is a Buffalo who are essentially in the South, the Southern planes.

00:09:39.180 I mean, they were Buffalo on the Northern planes, but nowhere near the numbers. So the new power,

00:09:43.220 the new great planes power is going to do what you think they would do. And then they move

00:09:49.480 south and they migrate. And that is when essentially they, they enter this, they kind

00:09:54.660 of enter history as they start to migrate South. And this is, so they, they became even more adept

00:10:00.520 hunters because they were able to migrate more quickly with the Buffalo. It allowed, it gave them 0.99

00:10:04.320 an advantage in hunting Buffalo as well, because they could chase them down from their horses.

00:10:07.980 But as you note in the book, something else happened as they started colliding with other

00:10:13.640 tribes in the area, particularly the Apache, their culture started changing from, uh, a 0.94

00:10:19.260 hunter culture to a warrior culture. How did that, what, how did that manifest itself?

00:10:24.680 What do we know about that?

00:10:26.320 Yes, that's, that's a really good point. The, the Comanche, the, the, the, the incredibly

00:10:31.200 warlike, uh, it would, you know, you'd have to look to something like Sparta, you know, uh,

00:10:35.960 a culture that was built on war where social status came from war, where everything was kind

00:10:41.220 of oriented that way. It came from a fairly long war against the Apaches that amounted in the

00:10:46.680 end almost to a genocide. The, uh, Comanches were sweeping south from Wyoming, what is now Wyoming, 0.98

00:10:53.620 into the Southern Plains, which as you said, let's think of Eastern Colorado, Eastern New Mexico,

00:10:58.680 Western Kansas, Western Oklahoma, Western Texas, the Southern Plains. This is where the Comanches

00:11:03.520 are moving toward. There's ground occupied by Apaches. And, uh, you have this long war that's

00:11:11.420 very bitter and mostly unrecorded and very, very brutal that the Apaches lose. And eventually,

00:11:17.740 you know, by the time you see, you know, Geronimo running around the borderlands of Mexico,

00:11:20.980 that that's kind of where the Apaches eventually ended up down along a strip along the borderlands.

00:11:26.880 But what's interesting about this, getting back to your original question is, you know,

00:11:31.160 in the Spanish, but before I get to that, the Spanish, by the way, see this in flashes and

00:11:35.560 the, the, the Apaches are the Spanish. The Spanish had this kind of capital up in Santa Fe,

00:11:42.200 what is now, what is now New Mexico. And they see this strange thing happening. Their enemies,

00:11:49.380 their great implacable enemies, the Apaches, are going away. Something's going on. They don't quite

00:11:56.200 know what it is. Something's happening to their enemies. At some point, they realize what's happening

00:12:00.380 to their enemies. They're losing a war to the Comanches, but what's happening to the Comanches,

00:12:05.660 so the Apaches are being driven South, but what's happening to the Comanches is because of this long

00:12:12.600 war, it reorders their culture. As you say, it's not just a, it is, it is now a culture of war. It is 0.56

00:12:19.480 now a culture, particularly because they're so good at it. They work at it. They get better at it. They can,

00:12:25.180 they can subjugate other tribes, which they do. They can drive tribes off their hunting grounds, 1.00

00:12:30.040 which they do. They can nearly commit genocide on the Apaches, which they do. And so you have this

00:12:35.980 kind of amazing cultural shift inside the Comanche nation. And so by the time, you know, the first 0.96

00:12:42.700 kind of Anglo-Europeans heading West, see them in Texas in 1832 or 1834, it's this unbelievably unified

00:12:51.980 kind of military, militaristic tribe that controls a 250,000 square mile empire with 20 vassal tribes.

00:13:01.640 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

00:13:07.480 on their martial ability. So you completely changed them and it turned them from, I guess, if you look

00:13:12.940 at them originally kind of a bunch of nomadic stone age, you know, hunter gatherers into this kind of

00:13:20.800 magnificent mounted war machine. And how did, so you mentioned Sparta, you know, Sparta is known for,

00:13:26.580 uh, it's a goge, like how they raised their boys to become warriors. Uh, the Comanches had something 1.00

00:13:31.840 similar. Like they had sort of a, a training for the, that starts very young, like as young as three

00:13:36.400 for their boys to become these great cavalry men, these great warriors of the plains.

00:13:42.240 They were indeed, indeed that is true. And they were very, uh, it was, it, as the culture evolved,

00:13:48.360 it, the boys had to do really two things and really, really only two things. And the women

00:13:54.280 had to do everything else. And the two things were hunt and fight. And yes, as, as they, as the,

00:14:01.500 as the culture changed and as the, their abilities with, um, uh, the bone arrow, the abilities with

00:14:07.300 the horse became more sophisticated, these rituals of passage, as you were a kid, you, you know, when

00:14:12.880 you were first turned out to hunt, you know, small game and then later larger game and, and, uh, and

00:14:19.260 particularly taught to ride. And the thing that the power, I mean, the Comanche power came from 1.00

00:14:25.460 certainly their, their ability to fight, you know, with your hands and with, with the plains

00:14:31.220 lances and with bows and things like that. But, but it also came and it primarily came from the

00:14:36.500 horse. And so what was trained as much as anything or more than anything was, was horsemanship.

00:14:42.600 They were just phenomenal horsemen. And to the point where you, where the tales told about them

00:14:48.320 are, I mean, scarcely believable even today. I mean, you know what they could do on a horse.

00:14:53.040 It was part of that big cultural change.

00:14:55.560 Yeah. There are things like, you know, they would hide, like they'd shoot a bow and arrow from

00:14:59.240 underneath the horse of a, the neck of the horse, right. While it's still galloping.

00:15:02.900 White men couldn't, couldn't believe that one. And the other thing they could do is they could, 0.88

00:15:06.740 they could discharge arrows at a, at a rate, you know, that it just defies imagination. I mean,

00:15:14.260 it is literally, I'm snapping my fingers now like that. And if you don't believe me,

00:15:18.420 go to this website where this guy, Lars Anderson, he'll show you there's no quiver involved.

00:15:23.240 It's a way of holding the arrows. Anyway, they, all the things that they could do from particularly

00:15:28.400 shooting, but also just riding, you know, that trick that you're talking about, where you loop

00:15:34.000 down a leather loop over the saddle, over the very minimal, minimal Spanish saddle. And they would hang

00:15:40.840 over the, the neck of the horse, which would of course conceal them from their enemies and also

00:15:45.960 enable them to discharge arrows. But with such force that they, you know, they go through the head of

00:15:50.160 the buffalo. So very, very deadly. And as I say, when the white men first saw them, they couldn't

00:15:55.100 quite believe what they were seeing and the skills with horses applied to, you know, everything,

00:16:01.020 breaking horses. I mean, no, they, they watched them break these horses and they'd never seen

00:16:06.220 anything. The white men had never seen anything like it before. You know, the Comanches would trail

00:16:10.880 a horse or a couple of horses and they would just trail the horse. And every time the horse got near

00:16:16.980 and you couldn't catch the horse, of course, cause the horse was wild, but every time the

00:16:20.160 horse got near water, they would kind of bother the horse. It's the same way a wolf brings down

00:16:24.620 a moose. And, and so this would go on for a couple of days. And eventually the horse was

00:16:30.320 just completely, you know, foaming at the mouth and, and dying of thirst. And there were various

00:16:38.340 techniques and ways this happened, but at one point the Comanche warrior would go and literally

00:16:42.980 put his cup, his hands over the, the, the nozzle of the horse and blow into its nostrils. And suddenly

00:16:50.040 the horse goes from this wild thing to being immediately gentled. And, and anyway, there

00:16:53.840 were things, all these stories that people had told about the Comanches that no one had,

00:16:59.060 not white men had never seen before. Anyway, you've got to be careful saying no one had never seen them

00:17:04.380 before. Well, speaking of something that flummoxed Europeans when they first encountered the Comanches 1.00

00:17:09.720 and going on this idea of their, the warrior culture of the Comanches, they had a specific

00:17:14.040 type of warfare, a style of warfare that when the Europeans first encountered to the Spanish,

00:17:19.260 like it just, it, they, they, they couldn't stop it. They, there was, they had, they'd never seen

00:17:23.620 it before and it threw them for a loop.

00:17:25.900 For one thing, I mean, the white men always insisted on this kind of Napoleonic confrontation,

00:17:30.780 you know, where you would march out and, and there you were in your, in your, in your ranks,

00:17:34.720 you know, you would, you would take your regiment and it would be standing in its ranks two or

00:17:39.040 three deep in the regiment and then they would line up and, hey, ready, aim, fire, right? This was,

00:17:43.800 this was not, this was not, the Comanches would never take that fight. They would never get near

00:17:49.260 anything like that. They would never fight you like that. So they would, they would not obey all

00:17:54.780 of the rules of white men's war, which in those days was essentially lining up two regiments against

00:17:59.540 each other and firing at each other from a distance of about a hundred yards away. And they

00:18:05.000 wouldn't play that way. They, they were all about stealth. They were all about, they moved making

00:18:10.240 cold camps. So there was no fire. They swam their horses through frozen rivers that you,

00:18:14.780 that you wouldn't think you could cross. I mean, they, they, they attacked by night. They,

00:18:19.720 they gave no quarter, which is another thing that the white men weren't really used to. And,

00:18:25.000 but especially, I think that, you know, this idea of completely mobile warfare,

00:18:30.220 Comanches were, were mobile. They didn't, they, you know, a dragoon is a, is a thing

00:18:35.000 what characterized a lot of the troops in Spain is something that a dragoon is a type of soldier who

00:18:40.080 are usually pretty heavily mounted, heavily armed and heavily mounted. He rides the horse to the

00:18:45.300 place of the fight, gets off the horse and fights. It's like driving a car to the battle,

00:18:50.080 except it's a horse. Comanches were entirely mounted and fought mounted and did everything mounted.

00:18:56.500 And, and it was the thing that distinguished them really from everybody else. It was the complete

00:19:00.980 oneness with the horse. And, and it was, I think as much as anything, again, I keep coming back to

00:19:06.040 the horse, but the, you know, the, as much as anything, it was the, it was the unity of warrior

00:19:13.160 and horse that made the difference. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors.

00:19:18.620 And now back to the show. Yeah. Going back to that idea you said about how the Comanches were very

00:19:23.860 similar to the Spartans. One thing, and I, I, as I was reading this book, your book, I was like,

00:19:28.180 that's exactly right. So, you know, training to be a warrior as a sensitive little boy,

00:19:32.960 same thing in the Spartans. The, the Spartans also loved to gamble. The Comanches men also loved to 1.00

00:19:38.280 gamble, right? Loved to gamble. The Spartan men didn't do anything except for train for war, 0.68

00:19:43.240 hunt. They didn't do anything else like that. Same thing with Comanche.

00:19:47.360 Same deal.

00:19:47.860 Yeah. So I thought, as I was reading that, I thought it was really interesting.

00:19:50.420 It's all, it's very, it's very similar. It's, it's, uh, and, and, and in both places,

00:19:56.040 your, your social status was entirely based on war. Okay. That's where, how many horses you had,

00:20:03.260 how many wives, whatever it was, but those things came from performance in war. 1.00

00:20:06.960 Yeah. For the Spartans would have been like, uh, the trophies you brought home, shields, armor that

00:20:10.500 you brought home from your, your Concord. Well, another part of Comanche warfare, uh, is that I, 0.96

00:20:16.440 okay. I'll tell you how I found your book. So I, I'm a big lonesome dove fan and I've read,

00:20:20.980 I've read the original novel like four times named my kid Gus after Gus McRae. And then this year I

00:20:26.640 finally decided I'm going to read the other novels in the series. Cause you know, McMurtry wrote

00:20:30.580 Dead Man's Walk, Comanche Moon prequels. And I was reading Comanche Moon and Dead Man's Walk and

00:20:35.780 they're describing the torture that the Comanches did. And I was like, ah, McMurtry, he's got to be 0.92

00:20:41.260 doing, doing some like artistic license. It didn't happen like this. And then I, I, so I started

00:20:45.400 researching and I found your book and then I learned, yeah, the Comanches were like experts

00:20:50.320 at torture. What was going on there? Yeah. So one of the things you have to come to terms with,

00:20:54.640 if you're a historian writing about native Americans, and this isn't just confined to

00:20:59.020 the plains is, is the practice of mistreating or torturing captives. And it is, it is all over

00:21:06.480 America, North America. Uh, it is, I don't know much about the tribes south of the Rio Grande say,

00:21:12.520 but I do know about the ones north and they were, it was part of the culture and, uh, certainly in

00:21:17.780 the Plains Indians it was. And, uh, and it was, it was pretty simple. So let's, let's just go back

00:21:23.440 for a moment to the time before the white men came. So you would have a, you know, Indian tribes that

00:21:29.200 pretty much fought each other all the time. There was a culture of raiding and the, and the raid

00:21:34.540 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 1.00

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 0.89

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 0.95

00:22:03.280 be killed or they might be spared. The Comanches in particular had trouble kind of keeping their 1.00

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, 1.00

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 0.99

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 1.00

00:23:23.980 culture arrives on the frontier and looks at babies being killed and pregnant women being eviscerated. 0.70

00:23:29.800 And, you know, the people being tortured to death by their eyelids cut off and the penis tortures and 0.83

00:23:34.720 the ant tortures and the sun tortures and all the tortures that McMurtry writes about and that I 0.87

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, 1.00

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 0.93

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, 0.92

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, 0.68

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 1.00

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 1.00

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. 1.00

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 0.88

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 0.97

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 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.92

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 0.93

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 0.94

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

00:31:39.280 Parker raid and the ramifications of it.

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, 0.99

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 0.99

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, 0.90

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. 1.00

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. 0.76

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, 1.00

00:33:35.760 want to spend her life with these, with these horrible savages when she could have her wonderful, 1.00

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 0.57

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 1.00

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, 0.92

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 0.91

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 1.00

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. 0.99

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 0.58

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 1.00

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 0.81

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 0.98

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 0.96

00:45:24.440 off was proximity to the white man and white man's diseases. The great, the great percentages of the 0.96

00:45:31.080 Indian tribes died, including Comanches from cholera and white man's diseases. And so you had this wave 1.00

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 0.97

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 1.00

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 0.93

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, 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.99

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, 1.00

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. 0.92

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 0.86

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, 0.50

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 1.00

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 1.00

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, 0.67

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 1.00

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. 0.78

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, 1.00

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

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The Art of Manliness - July 17, 2019

#526： The Rise and Fall of the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

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