57 pages • 1 hour read
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.
Themes
A Clash of Empires
By the mid-19th century, the Comanche were among the most powerful tribes of the Great Plains, having migrated southward from the colder high plains and mountains of Wyoming. They were innovative warriors and adapted quickly to the arrival of Spanish horses. By the time of the so-called “Indian Wars,” many people viewed the Comanches as the most skillful riders and breeders of horses in the world. Their mastery of the horse—a lifestyle perfectly suited to the Great Plains environment—made them virtually unstoppable. They raided other tribes as they carved out a huge new area of control, displacing other powerful groups like the Apache, with whom they carried out a long and bitter rivalry. In theorizing the Comanche people as a nomadic empire, S.C. Gwynne compares them to the Mongols, another nomadic people who conquered vast territories through their superior horsemanship.
Indeed, the Comanche were strong enough to successfully resist Spanish encroachment into their territories. While the Spanish thought of themselves as possessing a wide empire, much of this territory was theoretical, consisting of little more than a legal claim of dominion over lands the colonizers had scarcely laid eyes on. Gwynne emphasizes that the Spanish mode of imperialism—“conquering” vast territories in hopes of finding gold and other natural resources without establishing large-scale agriculture or permanent settlements—was ill-suited to the challenges of a skilled and motivated resistance like that of the Comanches. The Comanche territory was known to the Spanish as Comancheria. It expanded over large parts of present-day Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. Throughout much of the 18th and early 19th centuries, it remained largely unknown to the Spanish—a hostile expanse that they theoretically owned but could not use.
As Anglo settlers began moving into the area, they at first adopted the Spanish view of their Comanche neighbors. The experience of the Parker family illustrates this point. Determined to live on the edge of “Comancheria,” they built a home that was architecturally akin to a fortress, though it was not staffed with trained soldiers as a fortress would be. The home’s architecture amounted to little more than a testament to the family’s combination of fear, arrogance, and naivety. These combined traits led to their undoing, as a Comanche raid resulted in the deaths of several family members and the abduction of others.
However, the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signaled the arrival of a new kind of empire. American settler colonialism was radically different from the extractive colonialism of the Spanish, and in the long run it presented a far greater threat to the Comanche way of life. The settlers hunted the bison to the brink of extinction, introduced livestock that decimated the grasslands, and brought with them the force of the US Army. Though the US military—like the Spanish forces before them—took heavy losses in its conflict with the Comanche, the government refused to be deterred in its pursuit of “manifest destiny,” and by the time Quanah Parker came of age as a leader, the end of the Comanche empire was already assured.
Anti-Indigenous Racism and Cultural Misunderstanding
In Chapter 13, Gwynne describes Quanah Parker as white settlers of the time would likely have seen him: “He somehow looked completely Indian without looking Asiatic, and could have served as a model of how white people thought a noble savage ought to look, not the least because he looked a bit like them” (200). The term “noble savage” suggests the combination of awe and condescension with which white settlers viewed the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. Indigenous people were seen as innately good-natured and pure because they had not been “corrupted” by the degenerative qualities of civilization. This patronizing myth led to tragedy on a mass scale, as the US government initially assumed that the peoples of the Great Plains were naturally docile and would peacefully accept the destruction of their lands and livelihoods. Later, the darker side of this myth emerged, as settlers and their government came to believe that the Comanches and other Indigenous groups were so unlike themselves that white and Indigenous people could never live side by side. In both cases, the chance for a cooperative future, in which both groups learned from and adapted to each other, was lost forever.
Gwynne’s book serves to complicate oversimplified views of Indigenous peoples and to reveal how heterogenous tribes were, with their own sovereign aims, mores, and practices. By casting the Comanche nation as an empire in its own right, he implies that Indigenous tribes were more similar to European civilizations than their European and American colonizers assumed. In the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, or Prairie Flower, Gwynne offers a contrast to the misunderstanding with which most white settlers viewed the Indigenous peoples around them. Despite her white ancestry, Prairie Flower grew up as a full member of the Comanche people, and by the time she was forcibly “reunited” with her white family, she understood herself primarily as Comanche. The culture she remembered and longed for was as complex and unique as any European culture, far different from the stereotyped, generic vision of the “noble savage” common among her white relatives.
The Failure to Pass Down Knowledge
A common pattern quickly emerges in the book as the Comanches’ successive enemies repeatedly have to relearn how to fight them effectively. The Comanche did not fight in an orthodox, European style. They were highly skilled, mounted archers who fought hit-and-run skirmishes. Gwynne suggests that the Comanche art of war resembled that of the Mongols under the leadership of Genghis Khan more than that of any European power. However, the Comanches never had a single leader like Temujin (Genghis Khan), and so they remained a loosely connected group that nearly always fought and raided in small bands—never at an army-level size. The author points out time and time again how commanders sent against the Comanche either never learned from anyone before them how the Comanche fought or were unable to adapt their learned tactics to better combat their agile enemies.
Over the many decades of Euro-American colonialism in and around “Comancheria,” there were a few commanders who did learn how to fight the Comanche. Juan Bautista de Anza was one of the first recorded Europeans to have succeeded in combat against them. Not only could he defeat them militarily, but he also fought them deep in their own territory. De Anza studied past accounts and used spies to gain inside knowledge of Comanche movements. By adopting their own tactics, he was able to surprise them and gain the upper hand. It does not appear, however, that anyone learned from him. After his death in 1788, the Spanish colonists continued to suffer defeat after defeat in their efforts to subdue Comancheria. The US military later repeated many of Spain’s mistakes, attempting to fight the Comanches in open combat, using large and cumbersome infantry battalions rather than adapting to the Comanche’s fast-moving style of warfare.
One bold Texas Ranger arrived on the scene in the form of John “Jack” Hays. Hays had to learn the hard way, but he eventually did figure out that fighting the Comanches on horseback was paramount. He also was open to new technology and saw the benefits of the Colt revolver. No one learned from him either, and commanders and soldiers were continually baffled by the Comanche over the next several decades. It wasn’t until General Mackenzie became commander of the 4th Cavalry, and President Grant escalated aggression against the Indigenous peoples of the West, that the pattern of forgetting and learning was broken. Just like Hays, Mackenzie had to learn through failure. Toward the end of his campaign, Mackenzie had developed into a very formidable foe, and the Comanche lost nearly all their martial advantages.
