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

Llano Estacado—Coronado’s term for it, meaning “palisaded plains” of West Texas, a country populated exclusively by the most hostile Indians on the continent, where few U.S. soldiers had ever gone before. The llano was a place of extreme desolation, a vast, trackless, and featureless ocean of grass where white men became lost and disoriented and died of thirst; a place where the imperial Spanish had once marched confidently forth to hunt Comanches, only to find that they themselves were the hunted, the ones to be slaughtered.

What happened next is one of the most famous events in the history of the American frontier, in part because it came to be regarded by historians as the start of the longest and most brutal of all the wars between Americans and a single Indian tribe.14 Most of the wars against Native Americans in the East, South, and Midwest had lasted only a few years. Hostile tribes made trouble for a while but were soon tracked to their villages where their lodgings and crops were burned, the inhabitants exterminated or forced to surrender. Lengthy “wars” against the Shawnees, for example, were really just a series of Indian defeats strung out over many years (and complicated by British-French alliances). Wars against the northern Plains Indians such as the Sioux started much later, and did not last nearly as long.

When the Spanish empire had moved ruthlessly north from Mexico City in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, dominating, killing, and subjugating native tribes along the way, it had done so in an extremely organized, centrally controlled fashion. Military presidios and Catholic missions were built and staffed first; soldiers arrived; colonists followed and stayed close to mother’s skirts. The westward push of the Americans followed a radically different course. Its vanguard was not federal troops and federal forts but simple farmers imbued with a fierce Calvinist work ethic, steely optimism, and a cold-eyed aggressiveness that made them refuse to yield even in the face of extreme danger. They were said to fear God so much that there was no fear left over for anyone or anything else.24 They habitually declined to honor government treaties with Native Americans, believing in their hearts that the land belonged to them. They hated Indians with a particular passion, considering them something less than fully human, and thus blessed with inalienable rights to absolutely nothing. Government in all its forms lagged behind such frontier folk, often showing up much later and often reluctantly.

Though the idea would have astonished Texas settlers of the time, the Comanche horsemen who rode up to the front gate of Parker’s Fort that morning in May 1836 were representatives of a military and trade empire that covered some 240,000 square miles,1 essentially the southern Great Plains. Their land encompassed large chunks of five present-day states: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It was crossed by nine major rivers, stair-stepped north to south across six hundred miles of mostly level plains and prairie. In descending order, they were: the Arkansas, Cimarron, Canadian, Washita, Red, Pease, Brazos, Colorado, and Pecos. If you counted the full reach of Comanche raiding parties, which ranged deep into Mexico and as far north as Nebraska, their territory was far bigger than that. It was not an empire in the traditional sense, and the Comanches knew nothing of the political structures that stitched European empires together. But they ruled the place outright. They held sway over some twenty different tribes who had been either conquered, driven off, or reduced to vassal status. In North America their only peers, in terms of sheer acreage controlled, were the western Sioux, who dominated the northern plains.

It is one of history’s great ironies that one of the main reasons Mexico had encouraged Americans to settle in Texas in the 1820s and 1830s was because they wanted a buffer against Comanches, a sort of insurance policy on their borderlands. In that sense, the Alamo, Goliad, San Jacinto, and the birth of the Texas republic were the product of a misguided scheme to stop the Comanches.

In spite of the indelible image of whooping, befeathered savages on horseback, most Indians in the Americas were footbound. There were no horses at all on the continent until the Spanish introduced them in the sixteenth century.

The horse Indians lived beyond the forests in an endless, trackless, and mostly waterless expanse of undulating grass that was itself terrifying to white men. They resembled less the Algonquins or the Choctaws than the great and legendary mounted archers of history: Mongols, Parthians, and Magyars.

They came from the high country, in the place we now call Wyoming, above the headwaters of the Arkansas River. They called themselves “Nermernuh,” which in their Shoshone language meant, simply, “People.” They were of the mountains: short, dark-skinned, and barrel-chested. They were descendants of the primitive hunters who had crossed the land bridge from Asia to America in successive migrations between 11,000 and 5,000 BC, and in the millennia that followed they had scarcely advanced at all. They grubbed and hunted for a living using stone weapons and tools, spearing rodents and other small game and killing buffalo by setting the prairies on fire and stampeding the creatures over cliffs or into pits. They used the dog-travois to travel—a frame slung between two poles, pulled by a dog—lugging their hide tipis with them. There were perhaps five thousand of them, living in scattered bands. They squatted around fires gorging themselves on charred, bloody meat. They fought, reproduced, suffered, and died.

They had no agriculture and had never felled trees or woven baskets or made pottery or built houses. They had little or no social organization beyond the hunting band.14 Their culture contained no warrior societies, no permanent priest class. They had no Sun Dance. In social development they were culturally aeons behind the dazzlingly urban Aztecs, or the stratified, highly organized, clan-based Iroquois; they were in all ways utterly unlike the tribes from the American southeast, who in the period from AD 700 to 1700 built sophisticated cultures around maize agriculture that featured large towns, priest-chiefs, clans, and matrilineal descent.

What happened to the tribe between roughly 1625 and 1750 was one of the great social and military transformations in history.

The Nermernuh were like the small boy who is bullied in junior high school then grows into a large, strong, and vengeful high schooler. Vengeance they were good at, and they had extremely long memories for evils done to them. It should be noted that the dull boy became suddenly very clever, too, and he went from being the least clever boy to the cleverest of all. The agent of this astonishing change was the horse. Or, more precisely, what this backward tribe of Stone Age hunters did with the horse, an astonishing piece of transformative technology that had as much of an effect on the Great Plains as steam and electricity had on the rest of civilization.

The Spanish horses were also, by the purest of accidents, brilliantly suited to the arid and semiarid plains and mesas of Mexico and the American West. The Iberian mustang was a far different creature from its larger grain-fed cousin from farther north in Europe. It was a desert horse, one whose remote ancestors had thrived on the level, dry steppes of central Asia. Down the ages, the breed had migrated to North Africa by way of the Middle East, mixing blood with other desert hybrids along the way. The Moorish invasions brought it to Spain.19 By that time it had become, more or less, the horse that found its way to America: light, small, and sturdy, barely fourteen hands high, with a concave Arabian face and tapering muzzle.

Abandoned by the Spanish, thousands of mustangs ran wild into the open plains that resembled so closely their ancestral Iberian lands. Because they were so perfectly adapted to the new land, they thrived and multiplied. They became the foundation stock for the great wild mustang herds of the Southwest. This event has become known as the Great Horse Dispersal.

Among other horse tribes, only the Kiowas fought entirely mounted, as the Comanches did. Pawnees, Crows, even the Dakotas used the horse primarily for transport. They would ride to the battle, then dismount and fight. (Only in the movies did the Apaches attack riding horses.)27 No tribe other than the Comanches ever learned to breed horses—an intensely demanding, knowledge-based skill that helped create enormous wealth for the tribe.

a Comanche warrior could loose twenty arrows in the time it took a soldier to load and fire one round from his musket; each of those arrows could kill a man at thirty yards.

But in its primeval state, almost all of North America, from the eastern coast to the 98th meridian—a line of longitude that runs north to south roughly through the modern cities of San Antonio, Oklahoma City, and Wichita—was densely timbered, and the contrast between the dense eastern woodlands and the “big sky” country of the west would have been stark.

Just west of the 98th, the annual rainfall dropped below twenty inches; when that happens trees find it hard to survive; rivers and streams become sparse. The ecology of the plains was, moreover, one of fire—constant lightning- or Indian-induced conflagrations that cut enormous swaths through the plains and killed most saplings that did not live in river or stream bottoms.

Indians were, in fact, heroic and noble in many ways, especially in defense of their families. Yet in the moral universe of the West—in spite of our own rich tradition of torture, which includes officially sanctioned torments in Counter-Reformation Europe and sovereign regimes such as that of Peter the Great in Russia—a person who tortures or rapes another person or who steals another person’s child and then sells him cannot possibly be seen that way. Crazy Horse was undoubtedly heroic in battle and remarkably charitable in life. But as an Oglala Sioux he was also a raider, and raiding meant certain very specific things, including the abuse of captives.

Thus some chroniclers ignore the brutal side of Indian life altogether; others, particularly historians who suggest that before white men arrived Indian-to-Indian warfare was a relatively bloodless affair involving a minimum of bloodshed, deny it altogether.16 But certain facts are inescapable: American Indians were warlike by nature, and they were warlike for centuries before Columbus stumbled upon them.

For westering settlers, the great majority of whom believed in the idea of absolute good and evil, and thus of universal standards of moral behavior, this was nearly impossible to understand. Part of it had to do with the Comanches’ theory of the nature of the universe, which was vastly different from that of the civilized West. Comanches had no dominant, unified religion, or anything like a single God.

The Comanches lived in a world alive with magic and taboo; spirits lived everywhere, in rocks, trees, and in animals. The main idea of their religion was to find a way to harness the powers of these spirits. Such powers thus became “puha,” or “medicine.” There was no dogma, no priestly class to impose systematic religion, no tendency to view the world as anything but a set of isolated episodes, with no deeper meaning. There were behavioral codes, to be sure—a man could not steal another man’s wife without paying penalties, for example. But there was no ultimate good and evil: just actions and consequences; injuries and damages due.

Enemies, meanwhile, were enemies, and the rules for dealing with them had come down through a thousand years. A Comanche brave who captured a live Ute would torture him to death without question.

The discovery of agriculture, which took place in Asia and the Middle East, roughly simultaneously, around 6,500 BC, allowed the transition from nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies to the higher civilizations that followed. But in the Americas, farming was not discovered until 2,500 BC, fully four thousand years later and well after advanced cultures had already sprung up in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The Celtic peoples, ancestors of huge numbers of immigrants to America in the nineteenth century, offer a rough parallel. Celts of the fifth century BC were described by Herodotus as “fierce warriors who fought with seeming disregard for their own lives.”

The old Celts, forebears of the Scots-Irish who formed the vanguard of America’s western migrations, would have had no “moral” problem with the Comanche practice of torture.

There was no big chief, no governing council, no Comanche “nation” that you could locate in a particular place, negotiate with, or conquer in battle.

Historians generally agree that there were five major bands at the turn of the nineteenth century. Most of the discussion in this book will focus on them. Each contained more than a thousand people. Some perhaps had as many as five thousand. (At its zenith, the entire nation was estimated at twenty thousand.)

The Comanche male was thus gloriously, astoundingly free. He was subject to no church, no organized religion, no priest class, no military societies,

no state, no police, no public law, no domineering clans or powerful families, no strict rules of personal behavior, nothing telling him he could not leave his band and join another one, nothing even telling him he could not abscond with his friend’s wife, though he certainly would end up paying somewhere between one and ten horses for that indulgence, assuming he was caught. He was free to organize his own military raids; free to come and go as he pleased.

In Central Mexico the Indian population in 1520, the year after Hernán Cortés arrived in his galleons, was eleven million; by 1650 that number had plummeted to one million.

The Indians who survived were enslaved under an economic system known as encomienda in which the conquistadors were authorized to occupy Indian lands, tax the inhabitants, and force them to perform labor. In return, the encomenderos provided the teaching and ministrations of Catholicism, instruction in the Spanish language, food, and defense. It was, in short, imported feudalism, in which the indios played the role of serfs.

Their style of colonialism worked best on sophisticated, centrally ruled tribes like the Aztecs and Incas. It did not work at all on the low-barbarian, precivilized, and nonagrarian tribes of northern Mexico.

(So many raids were made by moonlight that in Texas a full, bright spring or summer moon is still known as a Comanche Moon.)

Anza waited for him, surprised him on the trail in Colorado near a place that is still known as Greenhorn Peak, and in a piece of brilliant battlefield strategy, engineered one of the great Spanish victories in North America. He had ventured into the heart of Comancheria, to the very homeland of the Comanche, where countless others had perished, and where they had never been beaten in a major fight, and he had triumphed.

Anza treated the Comanches as equals, did not threaten their hunting grounds, and refused to try to declare sovereignty over them. He offered them trade. They liked and respected him. In one of the more remarkable diplomatic pirouettes ever seen on the border, Anza then managed to concoct an overweening solution to all his problems.

The Texans were not the Spanish or the Mexicans. They were tougher, meaner, almost impossible to discourage, willing to take absurd risks to secure themselves a plot of dirt, and temperamentally well suited to the remorseless destruction of native tribes. They did not rely on a cumbersome, heavily mounted, overly bureaucratized, state-sponsored soldiery; they tended to handle things themselves, with volunteers who not only were not scared of Indians but actually liked hunting them down and killing them.

The Battle of Plum Creek, as it would go down in history, signified the beginning of the shift in fighting style that would find its true form in the next few years in the Texas Rangers. It is noteworthy that one of the men fighting for Texas at Plum Creek was John Coffee Hays—one of those fearless young men who had come looking for adventure. He was destined to become the most legendary Ranger of them all.

The infertile Comanche women and statistically death-prone Comanche men were undiscriminating in whom they invited into the tribe. Their captives included Mexicans, Spanish, members of many other tribes (including hated foes like the Utes and Apaches), whites of all descriptions, and slave children. Their bloodline, as twentieth-century studies would show, was extremely impure compared to other tribes.

What happened to the Penatekas in the 1840s destroyed them as a coherent social organization. They did not go down quickly and they did not go down without a fight—in their death throes they were in some ways more lethal than ever, particularly in their Mexican raids—but they never recovered.

Only ten years before, such a thing would have been unimaginable. At the moment of the raid on Parker’s Fort, the moment when a weeping Lucy Parker placed her terrified daughter on the rear flank of a Comanche mustang, the Comanches, and the Penatekas in particular, had been at the peak of their historical power and influence. They had defeated the Europeans, cowed the Mexicans, and had so thoroughly mastered the far southern plains that they were no longer threatened by other tribes. They had enough enemies to keep them entertained and supplied with a surfeit of horseflesh. But none to really worry about. Their source of food and sustenance, the buffalo, roamed the plains in record numbers and still ranged into every corner of Comancheria. The tribe’s low birth rates virtually guaranteed that their nomadic life following buffalo herds was infinitely sustainable. Their world was thus suspended in what seemed to be a perfect equilibrium, a balance of earth and wind and sun and sky that would endure forever. An empire under the bright summer moon.

Between 1836 and 1840 alone, the Penateka were thought to have lost a quarter of all their fighting men.29 With such small numbers, it would normally take years to recover from such setbacks. But the Penatekas were already out of time. What was killing them steadily and surely was not the warlike policies of Lamar, as harsh as they were. Or even the catastrophic disappearance of game from their eastern ranges. The agent of destruction was the same one that had destroyed the majority of the population of almost every Indian tribe in the Americas, starting with the Aztecs: white man’s disease.

Then, in 1849, came the most devastating blow of all: cholera. The disease had first appeared on earth in India’s Ganges River delta in the early nineteenth century. It broke out in Europe in 1830, crossed the ocean to America in 1832, and spread rapidly from there. It came west on the wagon trains with thousands of Forty-niners who were traveling to the gold fields of California.

They were a dirty, scurvy lot themselves, with hygiene scarcely better than the Indians, gold-crazed hilljacks from the poorer parts of the East and trans-Appalachia. They carried death with them (they had smallpox, too), and spread it in hundreds of Indian villages.

Cholera was not subtle; it killed fast and explosively. Its incubation period was from two hours to five days, which meant that, from the moment of infection, it could and often did kill a healthy adult in a matter of hours. The disease is marked by severe diarrhea and vomiting, followed by leg cramps, extreme dehydration, raging thirst, kidney failure, and death.

Though the Texans were dealing with only a fraction of the Penateka—the treaty’s signers were only Old Owl and Buffalo Hump (Pah-hah-yuco and Santa Anna were not there)—they persisted in referring to the “Comanche tribe” and the “Comanche nation” as though all of the bands had been part of the negotiations. Sam Houston himself, old Indian hand that he was, persisted in the mistaken belief that Comanche chiefs wielded power over other bands and Kiowas.37

But Guadalupe Hidalgo created the physical nation itself.

Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico gave up its claims north of the Rio Grande, made the dream suddenly, and completely, real. It added the old Spanish lands that lay, enormous and sun-drenched, athwart the Southwest. They included the modern states of Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, California, and Nevada. There was Texas, too, in a sense, though it had been subsumed in 1845.

In all, the United States of America acquired 1.2 million square miles of real estate, an instant 66 percent increase in its total landmass. In terms of land gained, on a percentage basis, it was as though France had acquired Germany.

The problem for the Comanches was that, where once they existed as a buffer between two huge land empires, they now stood directly in the way of American nationhood.

Now for the first time, came a serious challenge. It came in the form of dirty, bearded, violent, and undisciplined men wearing buckskins, serapes, coonskin caps, sombreros, and other odd bits of clothing, who belonged to no army, wore no insignias or uniforms, made cold camps on the prairie, and were only intermittently paid. They owed their existence to the Comanche threat; their methods, copied closely from the Comanches, would change frontier warfare in North America. They were called by many different names, including “spies,” and “mounted volunteers,” and “gunmen,” and “mounted gunmen.”1 It was not until the middle of the 1840s that they finally had a name everybody could agree on: Rangers.