S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon reveals the Comanche’s 250,000-square-mile empire, built on horseback warfare and buffalo hunting, with 6,000 warriors dominating the Great Plains until privatized land and barbed wire shattered their world by 1875. The book centers on Cynthia Ann Parker, kidnapped in 1836, who assimilated for 24 years before her son Quanah became the last great Comanche chief—bridging cultures as a cattleman and congressional witness. Gwynne highlights their erased history, elite archery (shooting from moving horses), and brutal raids clashing with Anglo-European settlers’ "no quarter" policies, like those of Texas Rangers. Their decline stemmed from systemic betrayals, not just military defeat, reshaping America’s frontier legacy. [Automatically generated summary]
I'm a Connecticut Yankee, Massachusetts, Connecticut guy.
I moved to Texas 25 years ago, and I've been there ever since.
And I didn't know anything about Texas history.
Nothing.
Beyond whatever you might know about the Alamo or something or Sam Houston or somebody like that.
I got there and I just started to hear about one, the Great Plains and what they were, which was an alien concept to me.
I wasn't sure what the planes were or why they were different than some other part of the country, the High Plains.
And I... It came into this idea, it came upon this idea that the last frontier was there, that this is where it all went down.
This is where, like, the end of freedom and limitlessness, it didn't happen, the frontier didn't push forward until it got to California and then hit the ocean.
California settled, the east settled, and then there was this one last place that did not.
And it went on for, and there were reasons for that, one of which was the most hostile Indian tribes in the country, another was that it was, there was no water, water, you know, There was basically only land, no water or timber.
But so I got into this and then, you know, lo and behold, there's this – I find out because I live in Texas that there's this principle that lives on this, that lived on this land, the Comanches, that determined everything that happened in the American West around them.
And that's not an exaggeration.
They were because until – You know, the West wasn't won until they lost it, and that was for sure.
And so there were two things.
One, this arc of the rise and fall of the most powerful tribe, most influential tribe in American history, the Comanches, which was very cool, from the Spanish and the horse and all sorts of big stuff that goes on.
And then in the middle of that story was this little story of this little nine-year-old girl with, you know, blonde hair and cornflower blue eyes who gets taken in a Comanche raid in 1836, who ends up becoming the, you know, mother of the last and greatest chief of the Comanches.
And in fact, her kidnapping and his surrender at the very end of the Comanche's, you know, sort of bookend of 40-year war.
We never fought a 40-year war against anybody except them.
So I ran into this story, and I'm just a kid from Connecticut, and it just seemed like the most obvious book in the world.
So there were rules of the frontier at the time, and we're talking about how savage it was, and the rules of the – at least of the Plains Indians, of which Comanches were one, that if you were captured as an adult male, you were killed, tortured to death, either quickly or slowly, depending on how much time they had.
If you were a baby, you were killed.
They couldn't deal with a baby.
They were nomads, and they were on their horse, and they were probably escaping from whatever raid they had just done.
They couldn't deal with babies.
A teenage girl or a young woman would possibly be killed but likely turned into sort of a slave.
The ones who had a chance of being adopted into the tribe were the 8, 9, 10, 11, 12-year-olds because Comanches had trouble keeping their numbers up, and so they instinctively kind of – they would take these captives, and not just from white people, the Apaches and the Utes and the Navajos and whoever and not just from white people, the Apaches and the Utes and the Navajos They would take them from.
And so what was interesting about the frontier, though, is that those rules applied – so long – forget about white people arriving in the early 18th century for the moment.
Those rules had applied to Indian tribes since forever.
You know, that was the assumption of a raid.
They all had – it was almost like the golden rule in reverse or the golden rule, do unto others.
They all expected that kind of treatment.
None of them were shocked when a baby was killed or a pregnant woman was killed.
It took the kind of, you know, the Anglo-European civilization of, you know, Newton and Leibniz and the biblical tradition to arrive on the Texas frontier in 1830 and be shocked at what they saw.
Well, Native Americans in general, Plains Indians in general.
And, you know, so Plains Indians, we could kind of start, you know, you would know the names of a lot of them, Arapaho and Cheyenne and Sioux, and these were people who operated out in the Great Wide Open.
They were all masters of the horse.
What made the Comanche special was that they became the preeminent horse tribe.
People forget that there weren't any horses in the continent until the Spanish brought them in the 16th century.
And so the tribes that got the horse and mastered the horse basically altered the entire balance of power on the plains.
And the tribe that got the horse better than anybody else in terms of breaking and breeding and saddling and riding and stealing and hunting on the back of and fighting with were the Comanches and nobody was their peer.
And so this was not just a Plains tribe.
It was the preeminent power on the southern plains.
So there's no evidence that any of the native people here really used them until Europeans came, whether it was Cortes or whoever, you know, Cortes with the Aztecs or whoever else came across.
So how did the Comanches figure out how to have all these horses and how valuable that was where some of the other tribes just hadn't kind of caught on?
No one knows, and it's interesting, no one knows that because it was only seen in flashes by the Spanish through their kind of northern outposts.
No one exactly knows what it was, you know, in the heart and soul of a Comanche that could do that better than anybody else.
And in fact, Comanches, by all descriptions of the time, were not...
I don't know, pre-horse anyway, graceful people.
They were kind of short and kind of, you know, bow-legged and they weren't especially graceful and they didn't look like perhaps you would think of the northern Sioux Indians with the nickel.
I mean that kind of tall and, you know, with the bone structure.
That wasn't the Comanches.
And then they got on a horse, and then everything changed.
And even though the Apaches were the first ones to actually get that technology from the Spanish, and they crazed, they raised havoc with it.
But the tribe that got it the best and the most were the Comanches.
They were the tribe that actually ended up supplying horses to a lot of the northern plains tribes that we just talked about.
And what they did with, once they had this incredible mastery of the horse and this ability to hunt like they never had and fight like they never had, they did what you would, I guess, expect the great new power in the plains.
The plains are a big place, by the way.
The great new power in the plains is going to challenge for the greatest food source out in mid-America, and that was the buffalo herds.
And they were in the southern plains.
So the Comanches, over a period of 150 years of sustained combat, moved south from the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, essentially into this 250,000 square mile empire.
Think of kind of headquartered in the Texas panhandle.
And this tribe, they were known for being buffalo hunters and they were also known, they weren't really like making artwork or doing a lot of the things that we sort of associate with other Native American tribes.
And things that we all would associate with Native Americans, you know, this wonderful abilities in dance and music, complex religion and complex religious social structures to go along with it, and all these different things, music and dance and all these things.
The Comanches, by the time that the kind of Anglo-Europeans run into them, They are a stripped-down culture that looks more like Sparta.
And one of the reasons they are is because they've been fighting this long war, primarily against the Apaches, but against other tribes over decades.
And during that time, as they became ascendant militarily, they became less interested in those things.
They became interested in war conveyed status, right?
War conveyed numbers of ponies and status and the thing.
And so, yes, they were a stripped-down war culture.
I guess to whatever extent we know or something about Sparta would remind you of Sparta.
And when you think about what they got themselves finally, it's about, I said 250,000 square miles.
This probably doesn't mean anything, but think of...
West Texas, western Oklahoma, western Kansas, eastern Colorado, and eastern New Mexico.
Gigantic chunks of that.
That was theirs.
And when you think also of the numbers of them that were there when, say, the Anglo-Europeans and the Americans came through in the 1830s, there was probably 25 or 30,000 of them out there.
Of which 5,000 or 6,000 warriors.
Now, I don't know what 5,000 or 6,000 suggests to you, but it suggests to me like the third baseline at Yankee Stadium or something.
It's not very many people occupying this gigantic area that became, as I was saying earlier, determinant of everything that happened around it.
Well, your depictions of how the raid happened where Cynthia Ann Parker got kidnapped and how all these other various raids happened was so terrifying because these people, the initial ones, really kind of had no idea what they were in for.
So the core – so as I say, my book's about the rise and fall of the Comanches as a tribe, which we've been talking about.
But then there's this little family, the Parkers.
And the Parkers did what so many other Texans did.
And this was the crazy Americans who moved across their frontiers in ways that just were – They were beyond brave and too foolhardy.
I mean, people, if you look at, say, what happened in Canada or what the Spanish did, there was always, you know, the soldiers would ride in first and set up the presidio, and then the priests would come in and, you know, the mission would be set up, and then the protections would be in place and the institutions, and then the people would come.
In Texas, it was just these rednecks from Tennessee and Alabama coming through with no protection of any kind.
There were no institutions.
They were out beyond any form of security or protection or institutions.
And so this is what the Parkers were in the 1830s.
They were about 90 miles south of Dallas.
And you had Spanish in New Mexico, but nothing but Comanches and Apaches between where these people were and that.
So, you know, 800 miles of nothing.
And so what they had done is they had taken these head rights or grants from Mexico, which owned Texas at that point.
They'd been given about 20,000 acres worth, which is a kingdom from their point of view.
And the Mexicans were giving them this so that they could provide a buffer against the Comanches, basically providing fresh meat for the Comanches.
And so they built this little fort out there, out right at the – and it was so cool.
It was not only out in the middle of nowhere, the absolute edge of the frontier, of the Indian frontier, where it was in great danger.
It was also right at a part where the rainfall drops, you know, below – 30 inches, where we go from around the 98th meridian, where we go from what we think of as the east to the west, where there's no trees.
It happens right there, too.
It also happens right at this raid in 1830 that started this out where the little blonde girl is taken.
This also happens.
At a time when this gigantic Comanche Empire with 20 vassal states and diplomatic relations touches this westward booming American empire.
All these guys in Washington wearing suits and running around.
That empire is – and they're touching right at this point and neither has any idea what the other one is.
The Comanches have no idea that these Parker family is sitting there attached in some way to cities in the east and the burgeoning industrial revolution.
They would not know what that was.
By the same token, the Americans coming west had absolutely no clue that they just hit.
They just did what they shouldn't have done, which was to push into Comanche territory.
I mean, I'm 52, so we're talking about three of my lifetimes.
Three of my lifetimes ago, it was on like Donkey Kong down there.
Just crazy.
I mean, it's hard to believe that that recently some unbelievably horrific, barbaric, hand-to-hand combat, killing people and slaughtering entire villages and other stuff that went back and forth between the Native Americans and between the white settlers. killing people and slaughtering entire villages and other stuff that I mean, it was just – it's – It's unbelievable.
It's one of the most, what you just said is one of the most striking things about this to me and was when I, you know, the Connecticut kid came to Texas, was that where I grew up, you know, Indians had been, well, when I say subdued, usually killed off by white man's diseases, but if not by bullets or treaties or something, I mean, a couple of hundred years before my forebears ever got off the boat.
There wasn't a frontier, in memory anyway.
I mean, there were Indian tribes around, and I played baseball with some of them in the summers and so forth.
I knew of them, but this was a really distant memory.
Okay, get to Texas.
1875 is when the last of the Comanches came in, and there was a whole bunch of jostling on and off the res after that into the 20th century.
And so the difference between that and – And if you go to Texas, there's an area west of Fort Worth, kind of Weatherford, Palo Pinto County, Parker County now, where you can talk to people, and they're still talking about Comanches.
It's also striking because you realize over the course of the book, and then more books that I've gotten into subsequently, that this was something that was going on before the white settlers even got there.
That this way of life and the raiding and the killing, that's not what we associate Native Americans with.
We associate us with taking the Native Americans' land and then them fighting back, and that's when things get ugly.
But it turns out this was just a wild way of life that they had had for who knows how many years.
One of the things that surprised people when I wrote this book – and I didn't know that I was going to be surprising people because I was just reporting what I found – Was that very thing, that this was – I think people are often used to the bury my heart at wounded knee narrative of Native Americans, which is as victims.
And there's no question that they were victims of a westward rolling empire and 378 broken treaties, and we can just go on and we know what that narrative is like.
But the narrative that I told was a narrative of power, of Dominance, power, which came with brutality too, and I think it surprised, it was a fact.
It was a fact that if you go back in time, these Native American tribes, that eventually got crushed, as the Comanches did, and put on a reservation somewhere and had their livelihood taken away from them.
But, you know, it really – anyway, it's a huge deal and a narrative that I think to me that doesn't take into account – The enormous power and dominance and behavior of Comanches is just missing half the narrative.
Well, it's so fascinating because it's essentially they were living like Stone Age people, and they were doing it very recently.
They were doing it like...
In terms of the way Europe is, you could go and see buildings in Italy that were built long before any of this stuff happened, long before the settlers started encountering them, and they were living like this.
It's very romantic.
The way they lived, just chasing the buffalo and killing them, and then eating only buffalo meat, and then doing very little farming, picking some berries and nuts, and that's about it.
I mean, it was just eating meat and raiding and killing.
They were nomadic hunter-gatherers, which is what they were.
And what the horse allowed them to do, which is what they had been before, the horse allowed them to do that only just really, really, really well.
In other words, they weren't in a position of becoming agricultural Indians.
The horse gave them this ability to – and as you said, they got everything from the buffalo, clothing and lodging and tools and saddles and bridles and food.
I mean everything came from the buffalo.
So the horse just enabled them to do this on an incredibly sophisticated level.
It's the most sad part of the story is the extirpating of the buffalo.
I mean, that's not the most sad, but one of their way of life.
It's almost like you know what happened, but I'm rooting for them in some weird way.
I mean, I know that they're not going to win, but there's something about the way they lived that seems so exciting.
And the other thing is the way you described Cynthia Ann Parker...
Post being, air quote, rescued.
Like how badly she wanted to go back to the Comanche and how she missed the way they looked at the world.
That the world was, in many ways, there was so much magic involved in the way the Comanche viewed the sky and the ground and that there was gods that were looking out for them and that they could literally have magic going into battle.
Like all this, the romance of this nomadic lifestyle.
was that's what she wanted and like when you talked about that one guy that spoke Comanche and then she she meets him and she's like please take me take me with you yeah it's crazy it it was so she was she was taken about the age of I guess it was nine and then she was with the Comanches for 24 years she completely assimilated she married a war chief she had three children she they tried you know at two different times they knew where she was and
Indian agents figured out where she was, and they made a push to get her back because the idea generally was to get captives back.
She wouldn't go.
And then suddenly, in a raid, purely by accident, she's captured in 1860 and is dragged back.
She has to show that she's a woman and white so that they don't kill her.
She barely escapes from that.
But she ends up being, you know, forcibly re-assimilated.
So here's someone who completely assimilated once with great success.
And then in her 30s now, she's taken back into this white culture.
And in fact, they put her up in a – they were so astounded to see her because she was – Indians weren't the cleanest people in the world.
I mean her job was to kind of, you know, tan buffalo hides.
She was kind of greasy looking and didn't look like a white God-fearing farm woman from Dallas.
But they put her up on a pedestal with her daughter and they kind of looked at her and stared at her as this kind of strange object, the white squaw who wouldn't return, this kind of object of curiosity.
And then she gets kind of shuffled ever deeper into the East Texas piney woods and ever farther away from her people.
And she never assimilated.
It was interesting.
Having assimilated once brilliantly, she was asked in effect to do it again and she couldn't and she never did.
But going back for just one moment to something you said was this idea of this kind of freedom and magic.
There was in Comanche, and it was, it was all there.
It was this, it was this world that was suffused with magic everywhere you look.
There was magic in everything.
And, but one of the things that also was, and this was, this was relayed by actually male captives of the Comanches.
Now the Comanches had a very flat hierarchical organization or a very flat hierarchy that, There was like – it may be a war chief and a civil chief, but there was really no – there were no priest clans and hierarchies.
It was just flat.
And if you were a Tuquana Park or a young warrior and you wanted to get together a raid on the Utes, you could just do it.
It was just – you could do what you wanted to do.
And so you look at these, this one particular captive was talking about this, and he was talking about being 15 years old.
This is before the Comanche men had to fight and really hunt.
They could do some hunting, but they weren't yet in the full responsibility of men.
There they are sitting there.
They've got no responsibilities except to go hunt and have fun and go swimming and learn how to become the greatest riders in the world.
They've got no institution around them of any kind.
They've got – and you start to think of why do people go west, you know, away from institutions, away from things that were going to make them less free.
And so I looked at it and I describe it this way – A 15-year-old Comanche boy may have been like the freest thing that ever existed in America, and I can feel the pull, you know?
And a lot of people wanted to be Indians, you know?
You wanted to wear those kind of Native American jackets with the frill, and there was so much of that that was attractive to us, and that was a big part of it, was that they were free.
You know, Dances with Wolves, obviously...
You know, when Kevin Costner gets assimilated into that tribe, there's something exciting about it.
Like, it's more noble.
It's sought to be like a more powerful alternative to this Western grind.
And again, you're out there and you are beyond the reach of any of the normal institutions that we think about – school and work and job and government and religion and church and all the things that bind people in, and most people are happy to be bound by them.
But many people aren't, and I thought that there was an idea of the West of kind of limitless freedom, this West that predates barbed wire and private property, and it just seemed, I don't know, I still find it just one of the most appealing things to think about.
But as far as interviewing them for things that happened two or three hundred years ago, that's not really a – that's sort of a non-starter as a historian.
Although the book itself is based on lots and lots of interviews with Comanches, but of the era, people who – this was the great – there were some great projects done in the 20s and 30s with Comanches who talked about – You know, who had memories of the 19th century.
And so a lot of what we know that's in my book that we know about the Comanches and who they are come from all of these interviews.
And there's a lot in my book that comes from Comanches, but again, of the era.
So, you know, I just figured that interviewing people today about things that happened a long time ago was probably not that efficient.
No, for sure not that efficient, but still, to me, it would be kind of fascinating to see where they are now.
I mean, the Native American reservations in this country have traditionally been pretty horrific, and it's very depressing and sad, and for the people that live there, just...
So little hope and so little opportunity.
As you were talking about before, the broken treaties and just to see them having gone from being this incredible war-like tribe to being resigned to these very small patches of land that are usually not very fruitful and not very resource-filled.
Well, the problem is the way – this is going to get into a lot of detail, but I mean Oklahoma, they basically – in place of reservations, they gave out individual apportionments of land.
They're pretty – I mean I think they would tell you – I mean I don't want to speak for Comanches or anybody else but that they're pretty strongly organized where they are.
They have a nation.
They do have a nation.
It's just they don't have a body of a reservation but they do have a nation.
And if you look at what, from the moment that the last Comanche surrendered, when Quanah and the last of the starving, all the buffalo have been killed now, and so they're coming in, and it's 1875. You know, that very year, their old kind of main, I guess, camping ground would be Palo Duro Canyon, one of the biggest canyons in the American West up in the Texas Panhandle, and that's kind of where their sanctuary was, or one of their big sanctuaries was.
Within that very year, white men already owned Palo Duro Canyon.
There was already a ranch on it.
It was already private property.
Within a few years, there's barbed wire going all the way up.
I mean, this is happening.
So, in other words, you have...
You have the transfer of ownership.
Suddenly white people own the land that the Indians used to be theirs, right?
The second thing that happens is now we have the cattle drives just before barbed wire and then there's only a few years of cattle drives and then the barbed wire goes up and this happens with just breathtaking speed.
And I mean from really the moment that they started killing the buffalo off in the, what, 1870 or something?
And the fact that this young girl, Cynthia Ann Parker, gets kidnapped and gives birth to this man who eventually becomes the last great Comanche chief and literally watches the entire empire change And shift into this what we now call Western world.
08 I think oh wait so what a insane relationship that must have been for those people to be experiencing first of all these enormous cities and going through Washington DC on horseback and knowing what you had come from and what a catastrophic titanic change had taken place inside of your lifetime and now you're experiencing something that you didn't even think was possible and it's the the new law of the land is Is that Quanta there?
You know, I did this partly while I was at a day gig, so I'm not really sure.
Probably three or four years, something like that.
There isn't as much as you would think.
And the reason is, I mean, there's a fair amount, and it's all in Texas, which is good.
But...
There is one curious thing about writing about Native Americans is that they didn't write anything down.
So if you're writing about, say, Winston Churchill, I mean, you can track him from, like, his bath in the morning to his seventh note to Asquith, to his notes to his wife, to all of his proceedings in Parliament, and everything he ever did.
It's like moment by moment.
You take someone like Quanah out on the planes, and you've got pretty much nothing.
And so what you have...
What you do have are, you know, flashes that are seen by, say, the Spanish originally or the French or Mexicans or Texans and Americans as they come through.
You're seeing them in flashes as they're presented to you because there are no parish records.
But that's one of the weirdest things about where they are today in 2019, this idea that they don't have really a reservation or specific giant chunk of land that's theirs.
They can sort of preserve at least some of this history.
Yeah, no, it was a peculiarity of Oklahoma that it went that way because there are other states, as we talked about earlier, who do have large reservations to this day.
Yeah, and if you're writing about them, when you get to sort of the post-reservation period, so let's say into the 1880s, 1890s, The world does change in terms of, you know, things are being written down.
You know, Quanah becomes a big part of his society.
He's setting up cattle leasing deals.
He's founding a school board.
I mean, he does all these things that, you know, that you wouldn't necessarily think a glorious chief of the Comanches would do.
But he does those things, and those are very trackable.
I mean, you know exactly what he's doing, and you can research them in conventional ways.
He adapted it from something that had gone on on the border, on the Mexican border, but he became the founder of the Native American Church, which had a peyote ritual in which he and it became famous for.
A place I would really like to go back to in American history would be to Quanah's house.
Quanah got his cattleman buddies to build him.
First of all, he wanted the U.S. government to build him the house because Quanah was a hustler and he said, could I please have a house?
They said, no, you can't have a house.
So he went to his cattleman buddies and they built him this house, magnificent house.
It was like 4,500 square feet, double porch with these giant white stars in the roof.
Is that his house right there?
That's Star House.
It's fallen down now.
But yes, in its heyday, it looked really pretty stiffy.
Yeah, it did, because he saw that U.S. generals had these stars in their colors, and he wanted more than they had.
Wow.
But that sits there in Cache, Oklahoma.
Now, I've been in it, but it's gotten so beat up now that they don't let you go in it anymore.
But it sits there.
So as long as we have that there, in 1895, if you went there in the early 1890s, it would have been one of the most amazing scenes.
We had people like Geronimo coming to dinner.
Roosevelt came to dinner.
Nelson Miles, the great general, came to dinner.
I think it was a Swiss-Mexican cook.
He had six wives.
He had 21 children, 19 who grew to adulthood.
The house is full of kids.
It would have been surrounded by lodges.
And the reason it would have been that is because people, his own tribe, had come in for help, money, or pay for a funeral, or going back to the peyote ritual, which is a healing ritual.
And so you would have seen one of the great scenes in the American West.
And people, when he died in 1911, people found out that he'd given most of his money away.
To all these people who had come in asking for his help, he had in fact helped them and given most of his cattle ranching money away that he had made.
No, the original location was out on what turned out to be later to be a Fort Sill Gunnery Artillery Range, and so they moved it, and so Quanah's A daughter, I guess it was, moved it down into cash, and then it was moved one more time into this amusement park, literally.
When I went into this amusement park, it was like something out of a, I don't know, a Spielberg movie.
I mean, you go, I was told the house was back there, and I couldn't really believe it, but so we go in, and You're going by these defunct old roller coasters that are all overgrown with vines like Sleeping Beauty's Castle, you know, and there's cows everywhere and rides and carousels all overgrown.
And then you go through a series of houses that were also moved there like Frank James' house or something.
And keep going, keep going, in the back there that thing was.
He's been approached, as I said, by all sorts of different people, consortiums of people with money who want to buy it or just save it, you know, from literally the Comanche nation I know has wanted to and Texas Tech has and some Dallas people and a number of people.
And so, to my knowledge, thus far, he refuses to sell or to take their help.
You would have needed some bolstering for sure, and the foundation would have needed some work, but it has gone way downhill because nothing's been done to it.
So now, I don't know, but when I walked in there, you really could have, a good carpenter team in a month, you could have shored that thing up.
And then you would have to actually really replace that wood.
So at the end of the day, it was going to be...
A certain percentage of it was going to be new.
But at least you could sort of get a semblance of what it was...
And do your best to sort of, I mean, if you had like a real good architect on hand and a real good engineer and someone from some sort of historical society where they could look at it and say, okay, this is, we want to maintain as much of this old stuff as possible while making sure this thing can last for more people to see it.
I think they could still do that, but I'm no expert, but it's, there's plenty of it that you can save.
And there's things like, you know, there's that famous, it's in my book, it's a picture of the table, Qantas table there, and you've got the tin ceiling, that's still there, and the floorboards are still there, and those are all the same, you know, the same stuff.
So, I don't know.
I'm no expert on it.
But until the owner, because it's his, until the owner decides to do something to it.
They didn't want to have the wives, they didn't want to have the braids, the long, long braids.
I didn't like that, didn't like the wives.
He quantited things his own way.
He also played politics brilliantly.
I mean, he understood from the early going that, quote, the chief of the Comanches was going to be appointed by the commander at Fort Sill.
You know, it wasn't just going to happen.
And there were all sorts of candidates jostling for this, and he made sure that it was him.
That didn't make him any less the leader of his It didn't make him any less of an independent person who the white men had to deal with, but he made sure he had that one buttoned up.
It's interesting historically that you don't hear about him and the Comanches when it played such a significant part in taking over the West and settling the West.
It was one of the great pleasures of writing this book is that these were largely unknown things.
I mean, if Quanah was one of them, another discovery was, you know, we all know about certain people running around San Antonio in the 1830s.
Davey Crockett would come to mind.
But we don't know about Jack Hayes, the world's greatest, you know, the Ranger, the guy who sort of invented this anti-Comanche warfare, invented the repeating, you know, he first, he didn't invent, but he first used the repeating five-shot pistol and then, of course, had a hand in the invention of the six-shooter.
But everybody should know who Jack Hayes is.
Everybody should know.
I mean, And Quanah was, I mean, Geronimo is Geronimo, and he's famous largely for one particular breakout in the late 19th century.
But, you know, Quanah was arguably the greater man in the reservation period.
And, I mean, Geronimo in some ways was kind of a curmudgeon.
Yeah, so Hayes, so the thing was, okay, San Antonio in the 1830s, late 1830s, you have about 2,000 residents.
It's the final outpost on the frontier.
And what's happening is Texas, which now owns Texas, having won its independence, is giving out what they call head rights.
So if you want to get a head right, meaning free land, so all you had to do to get your free land outside of San Antonio was go survey the land.
That's all you had to do.
And you had it.
And so the surveyors would go out.
And survey it, and the Comanches would kill them in ever more imaginative ways because the Comanches understood exactly that the instruments did steal the land.
The instruments were the mechanism of the theft of the land from them.
And so part of the deal was to keep – how can you keep the surveyors alive?
And Hayes was originally a surveyor, but he eventually just got good at keeping other surveyors alive.
And these guys who could do that eventually became known as rangers.
And they evolved as Comanche fighters, you know, fighting like Comanches did.
I mean, they learned bird signs to track people.
They would, you know, make cold camps.
I mean, you never made a warm...
You never made a campfire if you were around Comanches.
I mean, they would...
They learned these techniques and techniques of warfare.
And they got really good at it.
They just had this one problem.
And the problem was that they had three shots.
They had Kentucky long rifle, bang...
And two single-shot pistols.
And that's all they had.
Against Comanches, who I would encourage all of your listeners to go and look up this guy, Lars Anderson, on the internet.
But anyway, it's a five-shot thing with revolving cylinders.
And it was a great idea, right?
Absolutely nobody wanted it.
I mean, it was like a sidearm for cavalry, but the U.S. didn't have a cavalry, so it didn't really work out.
For some reason, Mirabel Lamar, the president of Texas, ordered 180 of these things, and they found their way to Texas.
The five-shot Patterson Colts.
And somehow Jack Hayes and his guys found out about them.
And they got a hold of them, they trained with them, and they immediately understood what it meant.
It meant equalizing the warfare against the Comanches.
Because now they had five shots, one interchangeable cylinder, now ten.
Ten shots in each pistol now.
So in close hand combat, the world changed.
And not only did that world change, but eventually...
Everybody was so stunned by this development that the U.S. government ordered a lot of what ended up being Walker Colt's six-shooters for the Mexican War.
Colt becomes one of the richest men in America, and basically Jack Hayes and Rangers redefine warfare, which is, and people said this about Jack Hayes and It's broadly speaking true.
Before Jack Hayes, people came into the West on foot carrying a Kentucky long rifle, and after Jack Hayes, they came mounted and carrying a six-shooter.
Right, because they didn't think you fought – the only people who fought mounted were the Plains Indians.
I mean, nobody thought – fighting mounted was not something anybody did.
If you used a horse, you used it in the Dragoon way, which is you would ride to where you were going to fight, get off the horse, and then fight.
But Comanches were fully mounted and Rangers were fully mounted.
And what they used the Texas Rangers for in the Mexican War, which is there were these terrible guerrilla problems and these Rangers just went and cleared out these whole areas and nobody had seen this type of warfare before.
Nobody had seen this kind of ability to fight and move and move mounted and move with these – well, nobody had ever seen these Walker Colts, these five-pound hand cannon, six-shooters that they had.
Nobody had seen those either.
And so these crazy – these rangers that dressed any way they wanted to, you know, sometimes with no shirts on and serapes and crazy hats.
Because I don't know if the way the Lars Anderson style of shooting, of keeping all the arrows in the fingers that he researched, did he research that from Native Americans or was that ever utilized in Europe or anywhere else?
His research is – I think he started – and I'm not an expert on him either, but I think he started with other – I mean, he started reading about, you know, anybody who were archers and famous for it and descriptions of them.
And I believe – I'm sure that did include Native Americans, but it was – no, it was a whole – he looked at the whole world.
And so, do you think Native Americans, well, we don't know, but I'm just speculating, did Native Americans develop this ability independently?
Or did they learn it from anyone else?
Like, it seems interesting that they were living, particularly the Comanches, this incredible nomadic life, and didn't really have a lot of interaction with other people from other places.
It's just – it's so interesting because I don't know if that style of multiple shooting, of being able to shoot so many arrows in a row, had been – I don't think it was implemented by the Europeans.
The question, though, the more – the question you're getting at is how did the Comanches in particular because when – When these Dodge and Catlin and these various people saw Comanches in Texas in the 1830s, they just flat couldn't believe what they were looking at.
They couldn't believe their abilities with horses, breaking them.
So the question there, I don't know the answer to that, and I don't know that anyone does.
What the white men saw just absolutely floored them with abilities with arrows.
And among other things, they would ask the Indian boys, they'd set up a dime in a tree or a coin, and they'd go, okay, now here, you stand here and close your eyes and aim and hit that.
It's interesting because this guy gets hated on a lot in the archery community.
It's very funny because they say that a lot of what he's doing is tricks and a lot of what he's doing is nonsense and it's not really true that people actually did that.
In these ancient depictions, the actual drawings from hundreds of years ago, the way he did it, holding the arrows in his draw hand, and so he can do it very quickly.
I mean, three times he hits, in a second, he hits three targets on a bike as he's riding by, which would emulate a horse, other than the difference between the elevation change.
You know, you go up and down on a horse.
But the other thing about the stories of the Mongols, that they had developed an ability to shoot as the horse was in the air.
Because the stomping of the horse's hooves would...
But it's one of the things that made Comanches Comanches, a mastery of the horse, plus that would now combine with this ability to shoot from a moving horse.
You know, I mean, someone really needs to make a movie about Cynthia Ann Parker, about Quanah, about the Comanche, just about what it must have been like for these poor hapless settlers that didn't know they were being used as a meat buffer.
It's an amazing book, and I can't recommend it enough.
It changed the way I felt and thought about this whole thing of these settlers traveling across the country and encountering these Native American tribes.
It completely changed my whole perspective of that era in time.
In my book, I... Objectively speaking, both sides are responsible for atrocities.
And, you know, one of the things the Rangers learned was no quarter.
You know, no quarter isn't, you know, when you, if you can imagine all the way into an attack on an Indian village, it's men, women, and children, and imagine what no quarter looks like.
It's not very pretty.
And that was certainly Comanche way of doing things, and that was the Texas Rangers way of doing things when fighting Comanche.
So, Yeah, you have any number of great massacres perpetrated against Comanches and other Indian tribes.
The center of everything that is, the heart of everything that is, which was a version – well, not a version, but it was a kind of doing for the Sioux what this book did.
That might have been a choice of mine, for example, would be to go, hey, I'll do the Sioux and Northern Plains Indians.
Won't that be great?
But there were some books like that.
But The Heart of Everything That Is is a very – I would recommend that one.
There was another book actually that came out just before mine called Blood and Thunder that's quite good.
But...
Anyway, it preempted me on some of the choices I might have made.
But I'd like to return to it.
I've been in the Civil War now for a few years and writing about the Civil War.
I have a new book out called Hymns of the Republic about the final year of the war.
I wrote a biography of Stonewall Jackson.
And so I've been kind of – I took a right turn.
Actually, because this book was very successful – I mean, sometimes when you're successful, a window opens and maybe it's never going to open again.
And that window – In this case, was that I could maybe do what I wanted to do.
And so I picked Stonewall Jackson, just because I wanted to do Stonewall Jackson.
And so that made me a right-angle turn into the Civil War, where I've been for a while.
But the answer is, I'd love to return to Native America.
It is a bit of – I mean, I think from my point of view, it's a bit of me being too dumb or naive to know any better.
I mean, I just went in as a reporter and reported.
Without any particular agenda.
Not because I'm a noble person, but just because I just didn't have any agenda.
I just reported the book and I thought, this is interesting and this is interesting.
And just laying that out actually means you're avoiding these sort of ideological extremes that, you know, of whatever it may be, that is painting a picture that isn't quite accurate for some other reason.
It's just the whole idea of going from a surveyor to protecting surveyors to becoming the original Texas Ranger, which is one of the – I mean, Texas Ranger is one of the most iconic – Groups of humans in the history of this country.
Well, that was what was fascinating about it, is like they had put together these sort of outcasts, and those are the ones that were able to do the job.
It's a great subject, and in some ways, I think the reason I was mainly attracted to it is it told you what happened in the American West on some level through this one lens, which is pretty cool.