And they also figured out that buffalos were not smart enough to realize that if a buffalo next to the buffalo dropped, that there was something wrong. Then they figured out they could ship these hides east on the new railroads. Hunters figured out they could get $3.50 a hide. The buffalo hunting began as a simple market exercise. All of the Plains Indians, once they got the horse from the Spanish, buffalo hunting became easier for them. "Their lives were built on two things, really - it was war and buffalo. How the slaughter of 31 million buffalo between 18 contributed to the downfall of the Comanches So within that culture the boys learned to hunt and ride at a very early age and they would become a warrior in their midteens." And they were amazingly stripped down in that they didn't have social organization or religious organization. Because of that, it was a military community and their old way of life was supplanted by the new way of life which mainly had to do with war. Because of their incredible military mastery, which derived from the horse - they were the prototype horse tribe, the tribe that could do more with the horse than any other tribe could. "The Comanches were kind of like the Spartans. Not only that but torture was institutionalized during things like the Counter-Reformation and the Spanish Inquisition and the Russian Revolution." We - being white European - did all of those things. In a lot of ways, I think we're looking back at earlier versions of ourselves. And you know, if you look at the Comanches and you look back in history at Goths and Vikings or Mongols or Celts - old Celts are actually a very good parallel. They swept everyone off the Southern plains. "There was even an attempt at one point to deny that Indians were warlike. On rewriting history to leave out Native American atrocities You have to come to terms with this - with torture, which they practiced all across the West - and these kind of grisly practices that scared white people to death." And it's an interesting kind of moral question as a historian about Plains Indians or American Indians in general.
And all of the people in those settlements back in those years knew what a Comanche raid was - knew what a Comanche raid meant. The women were often raped and often killed. A lot of the children in say, the 3-10 range were often taken as captives. The white men were astonished by it but they were assumed that they would be killed. That was one of the reasons that Indians fought to the death. But the automatic thing in battle is that all the adult males would be killed. "This is what Indians did to Indians and this just happened to be Indians meeting whites. On what the raid on the Parker fort was like When I started to read a little bit about them, I realized that they were just this enormous force - this enormous force of nature sitting in the middle of the North American continent who determined how the West opened."
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I think I had heard about Comanches in a John Wayne movie or something but I really didn't know who they were. "I grew up in the Northeast and I moved to Texas about 16 years ago and I started hearing stories about Comanches and I really didn't know what a Comanche was. On telling the story of Quanah Parker and his mother Gwynne has written for Time, Texas Monthly and The New York Times. Here was why there was basically a 40-year wait before you could develop the state of Texas or before other Plain states could be developed." Here was why the West Coast and the East Coast settled before the middle of the country. "Why did the French stop coming west from Louisiana? Comanches. "If you go back through Comanche history, you see that they were the ones who stopped the Spanish from coming North," he explains. Gwynne tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he became interested in telling the Comanche story because of their integral role in preventing - and then opening up - the American West to white settlers. Gwynne traces the rise and fall of the Comanche Nation against the backdrop of the fight for control of the American Midwest. Gwynne's book, Empire of the Summer Moon. The story of Cynthia Ann and her son, Chief Quanah Parker, is told in S.C. She eventually married a highly respected Comanche chief and gave birth to three children, including Quanah - who would grow up to become the last and greatest Comanche leader.
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Parker became a ward of the chief and later, a full member of the Comanches. She was strapped onto the back of a horse and taken north, back into the Plains where the powerful American Indian tribe lived. In 1836, a 9-year-old pioneer girl named Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped during a Comanche raid in North Texas. Empire of the Summer Moon is now available in paperback. This story was originally broadcast on June 23, 2010.
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