"If Custer illustrates how the spotlight of history sometimes shines on the wrong actor, Quanah Parker exemplifies the more deserving who get left in the shadows. One hopes a better fate awaits “Empire of the Summer Moon,” S. C. ­Gwynne’s transcendent history of Parker and the Comanche nation he led in the mid- to late 1800s.

Born the son of an Indian warrior and his white wife (who had been captured at the age of 9 during a raid on a Texas ranch), Parker grew up to become the last and greatest chief of the Comanche, the tribe that ruled the Great Plains for most of the 19th century. That’s his one-sentence biography. The deeper, richer story that unfolds in “Empire of the Summer Moon” is nothing short of a revelation. Gwynne, a former editor at Time and Texas Monthly, doesn’t merely retell the story of Parker’s life. He pulls his readers through an American frontier roiling with extreme violence, political intrigue, bravery, anguish, corruption, love, knives, rifles and arrows. Lots and lots of arrows. This book will leave dust and blood on your jeans.

Gwynne opens with the May 1836 Comanche raid on the Parker homestead. The Parkers were a clan of Illinois pioneers working 16,100 acres near present-day Dallas. In 1836 they represented the leading edge of white westward expansion into Comanche territory, which the tribe didn’t like one bit. They expressed their displeasure by killing the Parker men (though a few escaped) and taking two women and three children captive.

The term “Indian raid” glosses over the atrocities. Men and babies were killed as a matter of course. Mutilation, rape and torture were common. The lucky died quickly. “This was the actual, and often quite grim, reality of the frontier,” Gwynne writes. “This treatment was not reserved for whites or Mexicans; it was practiced just as energetically on rival Indian tribes.” "

Get the Story:
Men on Horseback (The New York Times 6/13)
Excerpt: ‘Empire of the Summer Moon’ (The New York Times 6/13)

Another Review:
Empire of the Summer Moon (The Christian Science Monitor 6/11)

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