Empire of the Summer Moon has been highly praised and rated, and nearly won a Pulitzer.

This book, like Quanah Parker, is full of conflict. Her son, however, was more famous still - Quanah Parker, last of the Comanche chiefs, first and only 'Chief of Chiefs' (in a tribe that had no precedent for such a title), a 'reformed' Indian warrior who once murdered and scalped his way across the American Southwest, but later became a politician, a school board member, and as he told a Texas State Fair crowd towards the end of his life, 'A taxpayer, just like you.' There are a lot of chapters about warfare between the Comanche, other Indian tribes, and the Spanish and the Americans, and woven through it, the stories of Cynthia Ann Parker, one of the most famous white women of the Old West who was captured as a child by the Comanche, raised as one of their own, later was 'rescued' (actually recaptured) by whites, and lived a miserable life in captivity as the celebrated ex-squaw of a Comanche war chief. First, there is the history of the Comanche people themselves from their earliest beginnings to their final fate as reservation Indians, plains warriors made to become farmers. It actually covers several separate 'stories' over the course of the book. This book is about the Comanche, one of the most powerful and warlike tribes of the American Southwest. Gwynne's exhilarating account delivers a sweeping narrative that encompasses Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, and the arrival of the railroads - a historical feast for anyone interested in how the United States came into being.

The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the new American nation. So effective were the Comanches that they forced the creation of the Texas Rangers and account for the advent of the new weapon specifically designed to fight them: the six-gun. White settlers arriving in Texas from the Eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands.

They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. The second entails one of the most remarkable narratives ever to come out of the Old West: the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son, Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches.Īlthough readers may be more familiar with the names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how and when the American West opened up. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories.

Empire of the summer moon audio book