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Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
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Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Rise of Quanah”
Quanah and his brother, Peanuts, were 12 and 10, respectively, at the Battle of Pease River. They escaped the battle and demonstrated Comanche survival skills by tracking down the rest of the tribe while evading Goodnight and his troops.
Quanah was born in 1848 near the Wichita Mountains. As the son of a powerful war chief, Peta Nocona, he led a privileged life by Comanche standards. He learned early on to hunt and ride, and he became an adept archer. When he reached puberty he went on a vision quest, and the bear became his puha, or helping spirit. However, following Nocona’s death and the capture/return of his mother to the US, Quanah’s life changed drastically. He became an orphan, and because of his white blood, he was treated poorly by others.
Nevertheless, Quanah became a full-fledged warrior at the age of 15. He was taller and stronger than the average Comanche, who were typically shorter than other Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains. When he became an adult, Quanah was six feet tall, while the average height for both Comanche and white men in this era was around 5’6”. Because white men had killed his father, Quanah developed an intense hatred for them. In 1868, he took part in a raid into Mexico. It wasn’t as easy or successful as previous raids had been: “If [Quanah] hadn’t been so young and carefree and enthusiastic about his life, he might have noticed that time was running out for the Comanches. But this would not be in his thoughts until much later” (202). Quanah soon became a war chief. He showed himself to be courageous, cunning, and fearsome.
However great a warrior Quanah was, he also exhibited a softer side, illustrated in his marriage to his first wife. The girl’s father opposed the marriage, so Quanah risked everything to elope with her, running away with friends and supporters. In a year’s time, Quanah and his men had accumulated several hundred horses by raiding white settlements and those of other Indigenous groups. Quanah was able to make a deal with the girl’s father, a powerful war chief who could have forced his daughter’s return. In exchange for 19 of Quanah’s choicest horses, the girl’s father allowed the couple to return to the tribe.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Uncivil Wars”
With the mounting violence of the Civil War, the “Union and Confederate governments alike had no choice but to leave the west to its own devices” (207). Once again, soldiers who knew how to fight the Comanches left the region, going east to fight in the war and taking their knowledge with them. Prior to the war’s outbreak, Comanche fortunes appeared to be on the wane, but with the neglect of the frontier, they experienced a quick surge in power. It took the Comanches a while to realize what had happened.
Comanche raids increased against other Indigenous tribes first, because tribes that had been protected by US troops lost this protection with the war’s outbreak. They were left virtually defenseless against the Comanches. By 1862, raids against white settlers increased. The Sioux in the north took advantage of the demilitarized border along the Minnesota frontier and “killed as many as eight hundred white settlers, the highest civilian wartime toll in U.S. history prior to 9/11” (211). Those Sioux were eventually defeated by Union soldiers and were dealt with severely.
The increase in raids made an aspect of Manifest Destiny painfully clear to Americans: It “only worked, after all, if you could conquer and subdue the nation’s midsection” (212). One of the greatest raids led by the Comanches during the war years came to be known as the Elm Creek Raid, which occurred in 1864. In response to the raid, Brigadier General James H. Carleton sent the storied Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson on a punitive campaign deep into the heart of Comancheria, the Llano Estacado, something few had ever attempted before, and where no one had ever succeeded.
This time, however, Carson and his troops carried a decisive weapon: the Mountain Howitzer. The Howitzers were small cannons that were often loaded with canister shot, making them basically giant shotguns. During an encounter with the Comanches, Col. Carson made a tactical mistake, but the canons were used to such effect that the mistake was not fatal. However, in something that would later resemble the events that led to Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn, more Comanches came to the battlefield from a large camp not far away. Carson had his troops withdraw. This was the Battle of Adobe Walls, and it was one of the largest battles ever fought on the plains.
Other punitive attacks were launched against the Indigenous people in 1864. The one led by JM Chivington resulted in a terrible slaughter against the Cheyenne. It became known as the Sand Creek Massacre, and it was met with condemnation by people in the eastern US.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Peace, and Other Horrors”
As chaotic as the frontier was during the war, it became nearly anarchic in the Southern states after the war ended: “For a period of months, there could be said to be no government at all in Texas, no systems, no authority, no power” (222). It began to feel like old times for the Comanches. As lucrative as stealing horses was, the Comanches began stealing cattle, too. They would then use Comancheros to sell those cattle to white men. Sometimes they sold the cattle back to the same ranchers they had stolen them from in the first place.
The raiding became so bad that the governor of Texas pleaded for US troops to secure the frontier. The politicians in Washington were hesitant. There was a belief that Indigenous people were docile at their core and could live peacefully with their white “neighbors.” In Kansas in 1867, this hope for peace led to the “last and most comprehensive treaty ever signed by the Indians of the southern plains” (224).
During the proceedings, each side condemned the other for breaking treaties. The Comanche chief Ten Bears stated that the Indigenous peoples were not to blame for the war or the violence, as the white men had invaded their lands and killed their buffalo. General Tecumseh Sherman was present, and he was just as direct. The Indigenous people were given an ultimatum: Abide by the treaty or be destroyed. The treaty required them to move onto reservations but stipulated that the US government would support them and give them what they needed. The treaty was signed by most chiefs on October 21, 1867.
Due to corruption in the Office of Indian Affairs, The US government failed to provide the Indigenous people with the promised provisions. In 1868, the agent JH Leavenworth quit his job in disgust at the negligence. Many Comanches and others left the reservations to hunt and raid in order to provide what the government had failed to give them.
In 1869, the US government disbanded the Office of Indian Affairs and created the Indian Bureau in an attempt to better the situation. Quakers were placed in charge of the bureau to stop the corruption.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
Chapter 13 provides a brief glimpse into the life of a young Comanche. Earlier, the author pointed out that numbers among the Comanche were so problematic that the Comanches often willingly adopted foreign children, Cynthia Ann being a prime example. It’s difficult, therefore, to understand why Quanah and his brother wouldn’t have been easily adopted by another family rather than shunned by the rest of the tribe. Unfortunately, there is little information offered about this behavior.
Chapter 14 points out how long it took tribes like the Comanche to realize just how weakened the frontier borders had become during the outbreak of the Civil War, in no small part due to the Union and Confederate governments using new treaties as a smokescreen—an act of appeasement since they both needed all their troops and weapons for the eastern theater. As empty as these treaties always were, they were typically preceded by an exchange of gifts, which did serve both sides in one way or another: Indigenous people received desired goods and foodstuffs, and the Union or Confederate government had a brief, unofficial ceasefire agreement at a time when their military resources were needed elsewhere. Chapter 14 thus points out that the repercussions of the Civil War extended far beyond the Northern and Southern battlefields.
One treaty, however, backfired on the Indigenous people who had agreed to it and had been living by its conditions. The treaty, the Indian Removal Act, went back to 1830. With the denuding of troops along the border, the Indigenous tribes (namely Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creek), were left at the mercy of the warring Plains tribes, foremost the Comanches, and suffered greatly. It was an example of the US government’s disinterest in upholding its treaty obligations, and it led to large-scale slaughter of Indigenous people on reservations at the hands of free-roaming, warring tribes like the Comanche, who realized the relatively easy pickings of lightly defended encampments.
In Chapter 14, Gwynne briefly mentions a little-known detail in the history of American racism: the fact that Indigenous people on reservations within the area of the southern states were allowed to possess enslaved Black people: “Many members of the Five Civilized Tribes were slaveholders, which both angered Union Indians and caused deep rifts within their own ranks” (210). The history of enslavement among the Five Tribes is convoluted, but enslavement was most likely introduced to the tribes via white traders looking to obtain furs and skins (Doran, Michael F. “Negro Slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 68, no. 3, 1978, pp. 335-50). Despite the pervasiveness of Anti-Indigenous Racism and Cultural Misunderstanding, Indigenous people in the South were at least sometimes placed above Black people in the racial hierarchy. As was the case throughout the antebellum South, the position of Black people at the bottom of this hierarchy served to secure other groups’ acceptance of a deeply unjust social system.
In Chapter 15, the author makes clear that the violence and warfare that occurred between the Comanche, the other Plains tribes, and white Americans was not unique to any one side. This continues to challenge the romanticized idea of the “noble savage,” in that a core aspect of Comanche culture was conquest, much as it was in the cultures of white Americans and Europeans. In this narrative, the conflict between the Comanches and the Americans was A Clash of Empires, and not even the first that the Comanches had faced, as they had previously repelled Spanish incursions into their lands for over a century. There is no denying that European/white American settlers encroached on lands long held by Indigenous people, nor that the buffalo hunters destroyed the central pillar of the Comanche way of life by nearly hunting the North American bison to extinction. Gwynne does not deny the genocidal intentions of the US—as evidenced by his use of the term “final solution” to describe the concluding phase of the “Indian Wars”—but neither does he depict the Comanche as passive victims.
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