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

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 Benjamin Parker reached the assembled Indians, alone, on foot and unarmed, they told him they wanted a cow to slaughter and also directions to a water hole. He told them they could not have the cow, but offered other food. He returned to the fort through the open gate, told his thirty-two-year-old brother, Silas, what the Indians had said, remarked on the absurdity of their request for directions to water when their horses were still dripping wet, then gathered up a few staples and bravely went back out, even though Silas warned him not to.