Read an extract from The Empire of the Summer Moon
Empire of the Summer Moon, SC Gwynne’s excellent and Pulitzer prize-nominated tale of the violent birth of the American West, springs to life “on the warm and fragrant spring morning” of May 19, 1836.
That day, somewhere on the epic, featureless grasslands of frontier Texas, a pioneer family, the Parkers, were working on their newly settled farm. Most of the two dozen relatives were in the fortified compound, and should have been well protected from the lawless Indian country beyond the fences, “but for some reason the massive armoured gate had been left wide open”.
A band of Indians rode up to the defenceless stockade — they were Comanches, “the most warlike tribe on the continent”. The Parker women and children scurried into hiding, while the men had no option but to walk forward, smiling, for what they knew would be the friendly, chatty prelude to their deaths. And sure enough, after a few pleasantries and some futile gifts of food, the killing began. Four men were pinned to the earth with lances and scalped alive; a fifth, the elderly clan patriarch, had his genitals hacked off; women were gang-raped for hours. Horsemen ran down survivors as they scampered through the grass, and took two women and three children hostage as the rest of the Parkers cowered in a riverbed, watching their life burn. In a moment of small justice, four Comanches raided the medicine cabinet and mistook arsenic for face paint: “All of them died, presumably in horrible agony.”
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This malevolent episode was one of many in the bloody early history of Texas, but one character would elevate the Parker’s Fort massacre to national folklore — Cynthia Ann Parker, a blue-eyed nine-year-old girl claimed by the Comanches as one of their hostages. While her fellow captives died or were ransomed off, Cynthia Ann stayed with the tribe for 24 years — joining a family, learning the language (quite forgetting her English) and ultimately marrying and bearing three children.
That story alone would merit this book, but it gets much stranger — one of those children, Quanah, would grow up to be the warrior chief of the last band of free and fighting Comanches in America. Ultimately, 39 years after his mother’s abduction, he would surrender his people to a subjugation and penury that would have been unthinkable to those blood-smeared, triumphant raiders who watched the flames rise over Parker’s Fort. Rarely can the story of one family and the history of their homeland have been so intimately intertwined.
This regional history does make up a substantial, at times frustratingly large portion of Empire of the Summer Moon — as there is almost no documentary evidence covering the 24 years Cynthia Ann spent with the Comanches, the family melodrama is rather forced to give way to the broader historical background. But anyone with an interest in the American West will enjoy Gwynne’s enthusiastic expositions on everything from rifle design to horse breeding.
The Comanche culture that Cynthia Ann joined was, in 1836, a giant militaristic empire of 30,000-40,000 people that had ruthlessly flattened 20 other tribes to dominate perhaps 240,000 square miles of the continent. One American general called the Comanches “the finest light cavalry in the world”, capable of absurd feats of horsemanship in battle, from firing 20 arrows in the time a soldier could load and fire a single musket shot, to leaning over and lifting a fallen comrade from the turf at a full gallop. They were also in some way addicted to shocking violence — at various junctures in this 18-rated thriller, enemies are roasted alive, hot coals are piled into open abdomens, and more than a few infants perish dreadfully. Gwynne has no truck with myths about “heroic or noble” aboriginal Americans.
But during Parker’s years as a Comanche the tribe faced — and gradually succumbed to — a new and implacable enemy: Texans. In its 10 years as an independent nation (1836-46) the Lone Star Republic was never at peace, constantly battling Mexicans, Comanches or other tribes for the right to exist and expand. Toughened by that perpetual violence — especially their infamous state-sponsored Indian killers, the Texas Rangers — the pioneers fought back against the Comanche terror and (with the assistance of the new Colt revolver and the usual barrage of deadly, unfamiliar germs) slowly ground down the great Indian empire. And in 1860, a vicious raid on a Comanche village turned up an entirely unexpected prisoner — a blue-eyed woman who could speak only three words of English: “Me Cincee Ann.”
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Cynthia Ann — renamed Nautdah — now endured the second great tragedy in her life. She didn’t want to be rescued. She constantly tried to escape her saviours and return to her Comanche family, and spent 10 utterly miserable years as a national celebrity, “the White Squaw”, before fading and dying in 1870, aged 43. Her young daughter also died in the white world, aged five, and Cynthia Ann never again saw her two sons, who had both escaped capture.
Her elder son, Quanah (aged 12 when they were separated), took after his mother — much larger and more athletic than the typically diminutive Comanches, he was a warrior chief before his 20th birthday, fearlessly leading his forces in the many battles and bloody farm-raids that punctuated the steady, relentless decline of Comanche power. One US cavalry captain who met the young man in battle said “he seemed the incarnation of savage, brutal joy”.
His greatest victory came in 1871, when the exasperated US government sent an army of 600 soldiers (at the time the biggest Indian-chasing force ever assembled) to track his village down. Quanah audaciously attacked the force’s camp by night, stealing 70 of their best horses, before leading his village of several hundred men, women and children on a three-day flight from the pursuing army. His people escaped, under cover of a crashing hailstorm, and Quanah’s reputation for generalship was sealed.
But history ran against him, the buffalo that sustained Comanche life were soon wiped out, and by the middle of the 1870s almost all the tribe had surrendered to the humiliation, confinement and alcoholism of reservation life. Quanah’s village was the last to come in — on June 2, 1875.
There is a downbeat, compromised end to this apparently cinematic tale, which perhaps explains why it has never made it to the silver screen (though John Ford’s 1956 film The Searchers was partly inspired by the capture of Cynthia Ann). Quanah, in truth, prospered a little too much in captivity, enjoying fame and a cattle-ranching career while his Comanche collapsed as a people. But that slightly dissatisfying fact doesn’t diminish the great pleasures of reading Empire of the Summer Moon — a ripping yarn well told, in concert with a fine, authoritative piece of all-American history.