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

But in an era of grave misjudgments the greatest miscalculation of all took place in the year 1758. It happened on a lovely bend of a limestone river, amid fields of wildflowers in the hill country of Texas, about one hundred twenty miles northwest of San Antonio, and resulted in a grisly, era-defining event that became known as the San Saba Massacre. The massacre, in turn, would draw Spain into its greatest military defeat in the New World. Both came at the hands of the Comanches. There were many reasons for what took place, and many Spanish officials played a part. But the man to whom history assigns responsibility was an officer named Don Diego Ortiz de Parrilla. That he was ill-fated, unlucky, and undeserving of much of the blame for what happened did not make it any easier for him. Parrilla’s story offers one of history’s clearest windows into what it was like in embattled, Comanche-tormented New Spain in the middle of the eighteenth century.