The book “Empire of the Summer Moon” by S. C. Gwynne presents a riveting tale of the powerful Comanche empire. The Spanish conquest of south and central America introduced wild horses to the Great Plains.1
These horses provided a technological revolution for the Comanche tribe to become dominant raiders and hunters. The tribe numbered only a few thousand people and their reign over the plains was brief. Yet they made enormous impact on the history of the American Great Plains.
Thanks for reading Kaldun Prosperity and Liberation! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
I tip my hat to the enormously popular comedian and podcaster Joe Rogan for introducing to this book. I have yet to listen to Joe’s 2019 episode with author S.C. Gwynne. In the book Gwynne describes a cast of compelling historical characters to build his narrative.
There are several intriguing themes that run through the book. This is my first post in a multi-part series that addresses each of these themes.
Thanks for reading Kaldun Prosperity and Liberation! This post is public so feel free to share it.
The history of settlement by European Americas is dark. I will cover that in more detail in my next post in the series.
My Wisconsin public school experience left me with a naïve understanding of the Native American experience. As a kid you learn the pilgrims come over, meet the Indians, and have a nice Thanksgiving turkey dinner together.
In later history classes a more complex narrative emerges. Christopher Columbus was not an amiable explorer, but the first in a line of brutal expansionist conquerors and slavers. In fact, the Vikings had visited America earlier but forgot to write home. 2
The Aztec empire that was a precursor of Mexico was a culture of both magnificent accomplishment yet depraved human sacrifice. Conquistadors like Hernan Cortez rallied the Aztecs’ rival tribes to topple Montezuma and claim the Americas for Spanish imperialists. 3
But where did all the Indians go? There’s some left around the country. There’s black and white American folks who have a sprinkling of Native blood. Some natives succeed in the modern economy. Yet many live in grinding poverty in reservations.
European settlers killed and enslaved many Native Americans in cold blood. The natives fought back savagely with unequal weaponry and technology. But the Indians were massacred primarily by disease.4
The eastern hemisphere had been ravaged by diseases for thousands of years. These diseases came from the domestication of animals across Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Millenia of husbandry, trading, and raiding across the continents spread deadly pathogens far and wide. The Black Death, syphilis, smallpox, cholera. These diseases ravaged the old world for centuries before modern science, hygiene, and nutrition.
In his book “Guns, Germs and Steel” Jared Diamond argues that Europeans and Africans carried these germs in their persons, equipment and livestock. They had at least some resistance to these diseases. When they came to America they unleashed horrors on the indigenous people who had no exposure and immunity.5
Science did not exist in the Age of Discovery. But European imperialists had a basic understanding of germs and malicious intent. Disease was wielded as a weapon to slay the Indians and steal their land. An estimated 95% of the indigenous populations are believed to have been killed off by diseases brought by the Europeans.
A common narrative that emerges from the education system is that Black Indigenous People of Color are a monolithic group of people oppressed by colonial settlers and white discrimination.
There is absolutely truth to the history of oppression, slavery, genocide, and discrimination. Progressive activists commonly peddle a simplistic narrative that paints whites as oppressors while black and indigenous people of color are helplessvictims.6
Yet studying history and population statistics seriously reveals a more complex situation. For today I want to focus on the real lives of plains Indians.
Indigenous America Was Not the Garden of Eden
Prior to reading “Empire of the Summer Moon” I knew of the Aztec and Incan empires. My understanding of the rest of indigenous America was the Myth of the Noble Savage. I generally believed natives outside of those empires lived peaceful lives of hunting, trading, and fishing. 7
Gwynne reveals that indigenous America was not the Garden of Eden. Indians like the Comanche had rich and beautiful traditions. They also practiced polygyny, raiding, murder, and rape across the continent.
This started long before the Europeans came. It happened well outside the Aztec and Inca imperial power centers. Hunter-gatherer tribes like the Comanche considered their own tribe and their allies to be people. Other Indians were attacked with impunity.
Women were commonly treated as chattel. Indian women, called squaws, labored hard to keep the tribe alive through grinding poverty, war, and famine. Here’s a few of many examples in the book of the brutality of Comanche raids.
In May 1836 the Comanche raid the Parker estate in the Republic of Texas, taking children as captives. Rachel Parker described the events of the raid holding her fourteen-month-old son James.
As Rachel watched in horror, the Indians surrounded her uncle Benjamin and impaled him on their lances. He was clubbed, shot with arrows at extremely close range, and then, probably still alive, scalped…
[Rachel] was quickly caught… “a large sulky Indian picked up a hoe and knocked me down… I made several unsuccessful attempts to raise my feet before I could do it.”
She saw her son in the arms of an Indian on horseback. Two Comanche women began to beat her with a whip. “I supposed,” Rachel recalled, “that it was to make me quit crying…”
“To undertake to narrate their barbarous treatment,” she wrote, “would only add to my present distress, for it is with the feelings of deepest mortification that I think of it, much less to speak or write of it….”
Later a grisly murder of a pregnant woman inspires a counter-raid by Texas rancher Charles Goodnight and his posse.
Even in one of the bloodiest years on the frontier - 1860 - the killing of Martha Sherman stood out. Maybe it was because she had been gang-raped and tortured while she was pregnant. Maybe it was because of her dead baby or because of the precise, horrific details of what happened to her, which she herself related in the few days she lived, spread so quickly in Parker, Jack, and other counties.
This counter-raid foreshadows a massive change in the lives of the Comanche. The Comanche chieftain Peter Nonoca is allegedly slain and his family is destroyed. Cynthia Ann Parker, one of the young captives of the 1836 raid, is forcibly taken back to Anglo civilization.
Cynthia Ann with her daughter Prairie Flower
Yet Peter and Cynthia’s oldest son Quanah rises as the principal war-chief in Comanche history. Captain Carter offered this description of Quanah in the Battle of Blanco Canyon in 1871:
A large and powerfully built chief led the bunch, on a coal black racing pony. Leaning forward upon his mane, his heels nervously working in the animal’s side, with six-shooter poised in the air, he seemed the incarnation of savage, brutal joy. His face was smeared with black war-paint, which gave his features a satanic look….
Moments later, Quanah wheeled his horse in the direction of an unfortunate private named Seander Gregg and, as Carter and his men watched, blew Gregg’s brains out.
Near the end of the narrative comes an account from the Texas frontier.
Many residents of the frontier, especially those in the Palo Pinto country southwest of Forth Worth, thought that 1872 was the worst year ever for Indian raids. A district judge from that area wrote a letter to President Grant that year, begging for relief. He described the worsening horror, and said that
I might give your Excellency scores of instances of recent date of murder, rape, and robbery which [the Indians] have committed alone in the counties composing my judicial district. It was but a few days since the whole Lee family, three of them being females, were ravished, murdered, and most terribly mutilated. Then Mr. Dobs, Justice of the Peace of Palo Pinto County, was but last week murdered and scalped, his ears and his nose were cut off…. Wm. McCluskey was but yesterday shot down by those same bloody Quaker pets upon his own threshold.
This precipitated the end of the Comanches reign of terror on the Great Plains. President Grant commissioned Ranald Slidell Mackenzie to bring the Indians to the reservation by all means necessary.
Lose Your Illusions and Gain Intellectual Self-Defense
History is complex. One person who I’ve learned from tremendously is forensic historian Richard Grove. Richard is a reader, thinker and content creator who dives deep into controversial topics to discover the truth. Richard hosts a variety of free events as well as the flagship Autonomy course and weekly Grand Theft World podcast.
You can discover proven methods to lose your illusions and gain intellectual self defense. Discern truth, navigate tough conversations, and protect yourself from hidden agendas and mind control.
Get instant access to the Autonomy Mindset lecture and workshop for FREE below:
Taras,
Empire of the Summer Moon was great. I wrote about it a while back, too.
https://open.substack.com/pub/briandoleary/p/why-the-beatles-owe-their-success