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

That was bad luck. However she landed with them, it meant that she was thrown into the middle of a social and cultural disaster of epic proportions. To use a later historical parallel, it would have been like being adopted into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1932. There was not much future in it. She thus became the helpless victim of huge, colliding historical forces utterly beyond her control. 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. Much of what was left of them, starving and demoralized, limped on to a tiny reservation in 1855, despised even by other Comanches.