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S.C. GwynneEmpire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Death’s Innocent Face”
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War, made possible the American dream of Manifest Destiny. The newly acquired lands opened up a new frontier for settlers eager to claim their fortunes. The Comanches, who had previously existed as a natural barrier between the French and Spanish, now found themselves completely surrounded by a single nation.
Texas had long been in a difficult position since its fight for independence from Mexico. It was alone and facing continuous incursions by the Mexican army; San Antonio was captured twice, and the Comanches to the west raided nearly unchecked. Eventually, the Rangers were created to fight back against the Indigenous raiders.
The Rangers were a new type of white man. They were dirty, ill-clad, aggressive, and fearless. They enjoyed killing Indigenous people. However, they were almost always outmanned. Battles followed a typical pattern:
The white men took cover, the Indians charged, men on both sides died, and the Indians finally withdrew, unwilling to take the losses it would require to pry the white men, with their fire-spitting Kentucky rifles, from their positions (137).
The Rangers, under the leadership and guidance of John “Jack” Coffee Hays, became a very rough bunch of men. They trained hard and began fighting on horseback. They recognized it as a necessity to fight the Comanches using the same tactics that the Comanches used against them. They were a formidable force, and Hays became a feared name among the Comanches.
Chapter 11 Summary: “War to the Knife”
Nautdah (Cynthia Ann) and her people noticed a change along the frontier with the Americans in the autumn of 1860. The outbreak of the American Civil War drew attention away from the struggles with Indigenous peoples. For the Comanches, it felt as though time had rolled back several decades. Comanche raids, therefore, increased.
One of the Comanche chiefs involved in many of the raids was Peta Nocona, Cynthia Ann’s husband. In an ironic twist, his chief raiding targets lay in Parker County, named after his wife’s uncle. His raids were an attempt to retake former land claimed by settlers whose numbers had steadily increased over the years, so “Peta Nocona’s brutal sweep through northern Texas was thus a political act, with political objectives” (157). In 1860, a group of Rangers rode out to punish the large Comanche camp that had been located, but they were not like the Rangers under Hays and were soundly repulsed, no match for the well-led Comanches under Nocona’s command.
Jack Hays left Texas for California in 1849. He had proved that the Comanches could be invaded and defeated, but no one followed in his footsteps, and his tactics were forgotten by following generations of Rangers. The Rangers were disbanded and reformed often: in 1850, 1852, 1855, 1857, and again in 1858. The army units that replaced them were equally inept at combating Comanches. It was all about tactics: “The idea of repelling mounted Indians, the most expert horsemen in the world, with a force of foot soldiers, is ridiculous” (161). Eventually, a treaty was made between Texans and Comanches in 1853. Neither side abided by the agreement, however. In 1858, a new Ranger commander emerged that followed the same vein as Hays, John Salmon “Rip” Ford. He beat back a sizable Comanche force at the Battle of Antelope Hills.
Chapter 12 Summary: “White Queen of the Comanches”
The killing of Martha Sherman in 1860 stood out in an especially bloody year. Her murder by Comanches instilled tremendous fear in Texas settlers. One man, Charles Goodnight, gathered a force to hunt down and destroy Peta Nocona and his group. This group of Rangers, soldiers, and volunteers, under the command of Sul Ross, found Nocona’s camp. It was a slaughter—Nocona was killed and Cynthia Ann was discovered. She mourned the loss of her husband and was sent back to her uncle Isaac Parker.
Cynthia Ann became a minor celebrity after her return to American society. However, she was never happy to be back and longed to be with her lost Comanche family. Her uncle had to lock her in the house when he left; otherwise, she would run off. She missed her two sons, who had escaped the raid. People were shocked to learn about how “native” she had become. “She could not, or would not, speak English” (184), and she continued to follow Comanche ways as best she could in her uncle’s house. She gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Prairie Flower.
Eventually, Isaac Parker sent for a man named John “Coho” Jeremiah Smith, who could speak Comanche, to translate for Cynthia Ann. Before Smith’s arrival, Cynthia Ann had been very sullen, despondent even, but when he showed up and spoke to her in Comanche, she came alive. She repeatedly asked him to help her return to her boys. Much of Cynthia Ann’s record comes from Smith, who wrote down much about his conversations with her. Cynthia Ann moved around a lot but was never able to go back to the Comanches.
A relative of Cynthia Ann’s, Tom Champion, best summed up Cynthia Ann’s life with her white family:
‘I don’t think she ever knew but that her sons were killed,’ he wrote. ‘And to hear her tell of the happy days of the Indian dances and see the excitement and pure joy which shown [sic] on her face, the memory of it, I am convinced that the white people did more harm by keeping her away from them than the Indians did by taking her at first’ (192).
Prairie Flower died in 1864 of pneumonia. Cynthia Ann was so devastated by the death of her daughter that she tried to starve herself. She died a few years later, in 1870, from influenza.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
The lauded Texas Rangers were created as a direct answer to the threat posed to white Americans by Indigenous people on the frontier, especially the Comanches. As the book points out, the Rangers were a rough and violent bunch of men, happy to accept the chance for adventure and bloodshed in lieu of steady pay. The Ranger paragon was embodied by John Coffee Hays. The Rangers were the tip of the spear in the fight against the Indigenous people of the frontier, and they were the only effective force against them until the latter decades of the 19th century. They were also less regulated than normal army units, which allowed them to be flexible in their methodology. Their adaptability is best seen in the way they learned from their combat experience against the Comanche and began fighting from horseback. The Rangers also discovered a weapon that would slowly become a symbol of the Wild West: the Colt revolver. The Rangers, especially Hays, noticed the potential advantage that such a weapon could gain the Rangers in their struggle against the Plains tribes. These innovations ended a long pattern of The Failure to Pass Down Knowledge. As the Rangers adopted military techniques better suited to their enemy and their environment, the Comanches’ advantage began to melt away.
The annexation of Texas and the Mexican lands surrendered to the United States through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo brought white Americans into even greater confrontation with the Comanche and illustrate just how much white America believed in Manifest Destiny. American attitudes toward Indigenous people in this era demonstrated extreme levels of Anti-Indigenous Racism and Cultural Misunderstanding, as the US government routinely ignored Indigenous land claims, believing that it was America’s destiny to control all the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. When Mirabeau Lamar firmly stated that Indigenous Americans did not possess any inalienable rights to the land, he was not stating anything new; he was simply saying what most everyone accepted as a matter of fact. The Comanche were not viewed by Spain, Mexico, or the US as an actual nation because their ways of living did not resemble what Europeans would describe as a nation: They had no cities, no capital city or building, no military uniforms or structure, no political body, and no firmly identifiable leadership. The European definition of civilization and culture was very specific, rooted in large-scale, permanent settlement and fixed political hierarchy, and the defeat of “non-civilized” peoples like the Comanches was a European tradition that extended back at least 2,000 years to the Romans’ encounters with the Gauls.
The killing of Martha Sherman frightened and enraged Texans, and her story, as pointed out in the text, is a tragic example of what occurs when two combating and competing cultures reach a boiling point. This episode illustrates how futile the treaties made between the United States and the Comanche were, as US commanders failed to communicate with one another, and the US government failed to understand the people with whom they were dealing. They seemed not to grasp that no one person could speak and engage in diplomacy in the name of all Comanches, nor did they understand that a reservation was never going to be acceptable to a people whose lands far exceeded those stifling confines and whose way of life depended on the freedom to roam and hunt over vast territories. The treaties were doomed before they were ever written down.
White Americans’ inability to understand the Comanches and vice versa is illustrated in Cynthia Ann’s biography. Understandably, people struggled to grasp how a woman who had witnessed the murders of her family could eventually come to identify more strongly with her captors than she ever did with her Parker relatives. People seemed not to take into account that she spent many more years with the Comanches than she had with her Parker family, and that she had loved, married, and borne sons. The destruction of settler families on the frontier at the hands of Comanches only reinforced the belief that the Comanches were savages with no regard for mothers and their children. This is of course untrue, as Cynthia Ann’s experience makes clear.
