Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

by S.C. Gwynne

This was the old fight between the army, who knew better, and the ‘rosewater dreamers’ in the Indian office, who called their uniformed adversaries ‘butchers, sots determined to exterminate the noble redmen, and foment wars so they had employment’.3 As General John Pope later observed, the army found itself in a no-win position. ‘If successful, it is a massacre of Indians; if unsuccessful, it is worthlessness or imbecility, and these judgments confront the Army in every newspaper and in public speeches in Congress and elsewhere – judgments by men who are absolutely ignorant of the subject.’4 Reports of Chivington’s massacre and white atrocities in Minnesota seemed to prove what the army’s critics were saying. The notion that the trouble with Plains Indians was entirely due to white men was spectacularly wrongheaded. The people who cherished it, many of whom were in the US Congress, the Office of Indian Affairs, and other positions of power, had no historical understanding of the Comanche tribe, no idea that the tribe’s very existence was based on war and had been for a long time.