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

No one really knew what happened to her, and no one ever knew what she thought. People were thus free to indulge their prejudices. Though she became, in lore, legend, and history, the most famous captive of her era, the fact was that, at the age of nine, she had disappeared without a trace into the incomprehensible vastness of the Great Plains. Most captives were either killed or ransomed within a few months or years. The White Squaw stayed out twenty-four years, enough time to forget almost everything she had once known, including her native language, to marry and have three children and live the full, complex, and highly specialized life of a Plains Indian. She was seen twice, and only briefly: The first sighting happened ten years after her capture; the second, five years after that. Almost every other moment of that time is, in conventional historical terms, completely opaque. Plains Indians did not write letters or journals or record their legal proceedings, or even keep copies of treaties—history meant nothing to them.