Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne
Perhaps no book on my list has garnered more ‘oooh you’re gonna love it’ predictions than S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon. Gwynne’s account of the Comanche people and their decades-long fight against white settlers in the Western plains was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and appeared in numerous Book-of-the-Year lists shortly after its release in 2010.
Gwynne has written other books set during the mid-to-late 19th century as well, including Rebel Yell, his well-reviewed biography of “Stonewall” Jackson and Hymns of the Republic, his study of the Civil War’s final year. But he’s also the author of what many believe to be one of the finest books on American Football in recent memory, The Perfect Pass, detailing the genesis of the “Air Raid” offense.
I enjoyed Empire of the Summer Moon enough that I’d happily read any of his three other books.
Though Parker graces the book’s cover and appears in its subtitle, he doesn’t really get much attention within its pages until about two-thirds of the way through, at which point his story dominates the book’s final third. This could potentially disappoint those that picked up the title primarily because of Parker, but it didn’t bother me much as Gwynne’s narrative of the Indian Wars of the West is generally thrilling.
Gwynne opens his history with the shockingly violent raid on the Parker family fort in 1836. The attack, carried out by Comanches at the height of their power against white settlers on the far edge of the West Texas frontier, is a famous bit of Texas lore, though I was ignorant of it entirely.
Gwynne describes it and other Comanche raids in great detail, not shying away from the terrible violence practiced by the raiding parties. Gang rapes, scalping, mutilations, the murder of women and children, torture, and even worse atrocities are all openly, though not gratuitously, detailed within the book’s narrative.
Gwynne openly addresses this:
This sort of cruelty is a problem in any narrative about American Indians, because Americans like to think of their native aboriginals as in some ways heroic or noble…Thus some chroniclers ignore the brutal side of Indian life altogether; others, particularly historians who suggest that before white men arrived Indian-to-Indian warfare was a relatively bloodless affair involving a minimum of bloodshed, deny it altogether.
Indeed, the Comanches were particularly violent because, well, they could be.
What happened to the Parker captives could only have happened west of the Mississippi. If the Comanches were better known for cruelty and violence, that was because, as one of history’s great warring peoples, they were in a position to inflict far more pain than they ever received.
After whetting the reader’s curiosity with the account of the Parker massacre, Gwynne gives a thoroughly fascinating history of how the Comanches became the most feared and violent tribe in the West.
In short, they were the first tribe to master the use of riding on horseback.
Horses were not native to North America but were imported from Europe via the Spanish conquistadors in the 16th Century. Soon these horses were being stolen, set loose, stolen again, and eventually, packs of wild horses roamed the plains, in time being put to use by not only the Comanche but the Sioux, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Arapaho, Blackfoot, and Crow. They would ultimately become the principal form of wealth on the plains.
The meat of the book details the Indian Wars throughout Comancheria, roughly the area surrounding New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Northwest Texas. As white settlers continued to push West, they were repulsed and terrorized by the Comanche and others as they protected their increasingly dwindling hunting grounds.
These raids would draw the ire of not only the federal government but also of the Republic of Texas and their eventual state militias. Gwynne details the rise of the Texas Rangers and we bear witness to the evolution in fighting tactics and weaponry as settlers learn to deal with the threat.
The story of Cynthia Anne Parker, abducted as a young girl during the Parker raid, her Comanche husband, Chief Peta Nocona, and her children, Quanah and Peanuts, are woven throughout as well.
While reading, I couldn’t help but think the entire story of Cynthia Anne and the years-long search for her felt familiar. Gwynne goes on to acknowledge what I began to suspect: her story was the primary inspiration behind The Searchers.
The book’s latter third details the collapse of the Comanches and the rise of Quanah. He was a remarkable character, both a fiercely brilliant guerrilla fighter of the plains and then reinventing himself as a savvy and accomplished representative of his people during their reservation years.
Quanah’s story is, somewhat ironically, quintessentially American in its tale of struggle, reinvention, optimism, opportunity, and triumph.
Empire of the Summer Moon is a terrifically entertaining book that never once felt like a chore. It pairs nicely with Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder, though it never quite reaches that book’s brilliance. I learned an awful lot about a culture and a family that I was thoroughly ignorant of, and for that, I found it a great addition to my studies. Definitely recommended.