Empire of the Summer Moon - S.C. Gwynne

On the great high plains of western Texas, and extending as far west and north as Utah, out into New Mexico, across and up to Oklahoma, was perhaps the greatest inland indigenous empire the Americas have ever seen. From the introduction to the new world of the horse by the Spanish, until the second-half of the 19th century, the Comanche ruled as unquestioned masters of what was thought to be the Great American Desert. Taking buffalo and making war, covering vast distances and raiding remote homesteads, only to return to the immense fastness of the Llano Estacado escarpment, the Comanche held off the Spanish, punished the French and stopped Manifest Destiny cold.

But, seemingly, the end of their empire was written in the stars. Unable, or unwilling, to pursue military victories to the extirpation of their foes, the Comanche were satisfied with minor, albeit bloody and destructive, raids to steal horses and captives - fighting for a spot of land occupied by a village, homestead or fort was, to a nomadic people, entirely inconceivable. Whether a nomadic horse-people could have ever survived the onslaught of western settlement, we will never know, and the author does not provide any simple answers (as none are available) for why the Comanche were extirpated. Yet it came to pass nonetheless that the scourge of the plains diminished and their way of life disappeared; subsumed by a rising United States of America. By the beginning of the twentieth century the free-ranging Comanche would be a memory only, as the tribe became confined to reservations.

S.C. Gwynne's scholarship brings together a very complete story of this people situated within their time and place. How the Comanche impacted (and nearly halted) the expansion of the American empire, is a lens through which to understand the transformation of the country and the land. Gwynne interrogates the People's demise with an equitable and fair eye: while we can lament the destruction of a culture, the reader is left wondering how to reconcile our own vision of Indian peoples with the destructiveness of the Comanche. Though it seems that Gwynne may give short-shrift to some of the more thoughtful nuances to Comanche culture, he has, in a sense, cast them as they impacted the outside world. For better or worse that seems to be any people's doom. So we are left to wonder what has been lost, and, in our effort to create a more "civilized" world, are we all truly better for it?