Empire of the Summer Moon
Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in U.S. History
S. C. Gwynne, Scribner, 2010, 371 pages
Book Review published on: July 25, 2025
S. C. Gwynne's book, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the most Powerful Indian Tribe in U.S. History, is written to the effect of capturing you and taking you back in time. I have an emotional bond to this book because my Texas ancestors were displaced from Leon County due to Comanche raids. Also, my great-great grandfather was in a militia operating against the Comanche. Thus, I must reveal that under the covering of the title, it is just as much a tale of the Anglo-American pioneers from the east and the Spanish Mexican fortalezas of the southwest. The Spanish attempt to expand from the southwest into the Midwest was stopped cold by the military prowess of the Comanches. The author elucidates this comprehensively. The military achievements of the Texas Rangers are given their just due.
The structure and cadence of the book is superb. It begins with one of the most notorious Comanche massacres at Fort Parker, Texas, in 1836. In that raid, Cynthia Ann Parker was abducted to eventually become the wife of a local chief. The book ends with her son Quanah Parker surrendering the last of the free Comanche bands to Capt. Ranald McKenzie at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1875. The structure of the book is divided into twenty-two chapters. Each chapter is a vignette of the overall forty-year conflict. Each of these vignettes are expertly interwoven into the overall tapestry of the book.
The historical saga of the Comanche is explained in a style that makes it effortless for the reader to ingest and comprehend. The origin story of the Comanche starts with a minor/bullied hunter-gatherer tribe in the hard scrabble hinterlands of Wyoming to conquerors of the southern Great Plains. In their quest for the prime buffalo herds, they ethnically cleansed if not outright genocided numerous other tribes in their path. What remains a mystery is why their introduction and symbiosis with the Spanish mustang was so much more efficient and powerful than other tribes.
The saga of the Spanish and subsequent Mexican legacy begins with reports of Apache migrating in a southwesterly direction, fleeing from something (the Comanche). It relates the incredible tale of the Apache, feigning a mass conversion to Catholicism. They lured the Spanish into the Comanche territory, which they recently expropriated from the Lipan Apache. The result of this Apache manipulation was the infamous San Saba massacre of 1758. The Comanches stopped Spanish northeast expansion dead in its tracks. Most readers are surprised to discover that the Spanish government invited the Anglo-American settlers in from the east to tie up the Comanche and lessen the pressure on the southwest. They did not foresee the settlers not only holding their own but eventually defeating the Comanche.
Gwynne struck the perfect balance of acting as an impartial observer. His narration style is superb. The public is generally inundated with the pop culture and Hollywood narration of this history. The media portrayal is almost completely fabricated. Gwynne remedies this by coming off as a classic reporter, just reporting the facts. He describes the absolute brutality of Plains Indian warfare. Tribes fought to the death because capture inevitably resulted in torture where its hideousness is only matched by its creativity. The pioneer settlers were subject to the most hideous forms of murder, torture, and rape. Gwynne sources heavily from J. W. Wilbarger's historical classic Indian Depredations in Texas (1888).
The lifestyle of the Plains Indians and their relationship to the buffalo is well documented. It's amazing to this day how close we are, in time, to a tribe from the classic "hunter-gatherer" period in human history. Described is the detrimental effect of cross-cultural pollination on the most southerly Comanche band, the Penateka. They became addicted to the Anglo-Tejano "stuff" and abandoned their classic hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Quanah Parker's band, the Kwahadi, purposely maintained isolation from the western world and were subsequently the last Comanche band to be subdued.
The book is full of amazing twists of fate and historical connections. The defeated and surrendered Quanah Parker ends up as a successful rancher building an enormous mansion whereas the man who defeated him, Ranald McKenzie, ends up insane and dying in an asylum. Another amazing twist is that the last Comanche to surrender was not actually a Comanche, but a German. Herman Lehmann was captured as a boy and led a group of Comanches that did not surrender until 1877. Quanah Parker had to personally ride to central Texas and plead with Herman "en ta" (pale boy) to go back with him to the reservation. Another amazing connection is the African American Buffalo Soldier who originally tried to rescue Lehmann was the first Buffalo Soldier to receive the medal of honor in the Indian Wars.
The book provides an in-depth study of the Texas Rangers tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). It explains how the rangers fought from a tremendous disadvantage that included firepower and horsemanship. Despite this, they never turned down a fight and their overall attrition rate occasionally reached a staggering 50 percent. It explains how the giga Ranger Jack Hayes modified TTPs to deal with this new asymmetrical threat. The disbanding and reconstitution of the rangers caused an institutional amnesia that justifies our own venerable institution—TRADOC. The need for a permanent doctrinal reservoir to receive, store, and maintain warfighting knowledge is paramount.
Considering my legacy, I must criticize Gwynne for lambasting the local militia's effectiveness against the Comanche. He admits that only a fraction of the raids, fights, incidents, and murders were historically recorded along the frontier. For him to make such a conclusive, negative statement about the effect of the local militias is inaccurate. The war was won at the local level. His own book documents that the Anglo settlers never backed down from a fight and aggressively pursued the raiders even when at a disadvantage. They fought back in the form of individual families and local militias. They always made the raiders pay some price. Thus, they eventually won the war of attrition. The final campaign by Capt. Ranald Mckenzie in 1775 was against an already weakened enemy.
In conclusion, the book is excellent. It is an epic New York Times bestseller and a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. The book is difficult to put down. The book makes you recognize the struggles that went into building this great Nation. One must conclude that this struggle to build this great Nation was neither free nor easy.
Book Review written by: Andrew K. Murray, U.S. Army, Retired, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas