The whole concept of a homeland is total bullshit. I don't care if it's the Nordic race, the Jewish people, the Serbs of eastern Europe, the Hispanic southwest, or the Comanches of the Comancheria, from the staked plains of New Mexico to the Arkansas River. It was also taken from someone else a bit earlier. Towards the end of S. C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon, Quannah Parker is asked how the Comanches came to lose their "ancestral homeland." He responds by steadily pushing his questioner down the log that they are sitting on until that person falls off the log. That's how, he says. Yet that's how the Comanches themselves came to be the "Lords of the South Plains." They came down out of Wyoming sometime between 1625 and 1750, breaking off from the main Shoshoni tribe, and pushed the Apache and all other tribes off the southern plains until they had it all to themselves.
The Comanche were an ugly people, not only or even primarily physically ugly--"short, dark-skinned, heavy-limbed, squat-legged and ungraceful"--but culturally and spiritually ugly as well. Gwynne describes them as the most primitive of the primitive. Prior to their emergence on the south plains, they were culturally impoverished and pushed into marginal living conditions by the more powerful tribes of the northern plains. But then they became the baddest bad-ass motherfuckers on the block. Gwynne ties this transformation back to Pope's rebellion in 1680 when the Spanish hightailed it back to Mexico, leaving most of their horse herds behind. Somehow the Comanche developed the skill and the culture to become better horse warriors that anyone else. "Few nations have ever progressed with such breath-taking speed from sulking pariah to dominant power."
The Comanche became so powerful that they chased the Apache off the plains and out of Texas. They kept the Mexicans from expanding further from the Rio Grande River, and they kept the Tejanos from venturing east of what is now Interstate 35 from San Antonio to Dallas. Even that was risky, as the Parker clan found out when they tried to homestead over 10,000 acres on "the absolute outermost edge of the Indian frontier." They were soon raided--in 1836--by a Comanche party that left five men dead and five women and children captured. One of the kidnapped girls was Cynthia Ann Parker who was adopted into the tribe, became the wife of the powerful leader Peta Nacona, and gave birth to Quannah Parker, the last of the great Comanche leaders.
The Comanche were a warlike and vicious people who employed brutal tactics against their victims. Anyone who has read the Lonesome Dove saga, especially Dead Man's Walk or Comanche Moon, knows the detail: torture, rape, murder, mayhem. It worked. The Comanche stopped western expansion in Texas until a new technology changed the balance of power, again. With repeating revolvers and eventually repeating rifles, first the Texas Rangers (under John Coffee Hays) and later, after the Civil War, the U. S. Cavalry (under Ranald Mackenzie and Nelson Miles) learned to take the fight to the Comanche. More importantly, the annihilation of the southern buffalo herds starved the remaining Comanche into submission.
Empire of the Summer Moon is a sordid tale. The savagery of the Comanche was matched on numerous occasions by the anglo culture determined to wrest the land away. It was in retaliation to the Council House treachery in 1840, when 25 Comanche leaders were killed and another 30 taken hostage (later to be killed) in San Antonio under the pretence of peace negotiations that Buffalo Hump led his famous raid through the heart of Texas to the Gulf of Mexico, vividly described in Comanche Moon. In any case, after the Civil War, the Comanches had a few tricks left, such as Quannah's eluding Mackenzie's forces in the Palo Duro with his whole village, but it only became a matter of time until the remaining Comanche were competing for space in Oklahoma with the other tribes that had been removed there. And the whites eventually took most of that land as well. How soon will it be until another people arise and dispossess the culture that claims the land now? Really, it is only a matter of time.
Author: Gwynne, S. C.
Date Published: 2010
Length: 15h 4m
Narrator: Drummond, David
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