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Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “High Lonesome”
Six days into Rachel’s captivity, Rachel’s aunt, Elizabeth, was given to a band of Kichai people who were on friendly terms with the Comanches. Cynthia Ann and her brother John went with one band of Comanches while Rachel and her son James went with another; however, as soon as the Comanches learned that Rachel had breastfed James, they removed him from her, and she never saw him again. The motivation behind this act was simple: The Comanches always divided the spoils of their raids among themselves as equitably as possible, and captives were just part of the bounty to be divvied up, just like furs and horses.
The Comanche economy was solely interested in three things: horses, buffalo hides, and captives. The Comanches were a polygamous people, mainly because it was the women who performed all the labor in producing hides, and thus, a Comanche male with many wives could obtain more hides. If he didn’t have many wives, a Comanche male could have enslaved captives. Therefore, Rachel became exactly that.
Rachel quickly became proficient in the Comanche tongue. She was pregnant at the time of her kidnapping, and when she gave birth, the Comanches killed her son by dragging him behind a horse. “‘My little innocent one was not only dead, but literally torn to pieces,’ wrote Rachel” (41). Such acts of brutality fueled the Anglo-European belief that Comanches were devoid of human sympathy, decency, or mercy. Another captive, Herman Lehmann, who eventually grew to become a full-fledged Comanche warrior, told an illustrative tale of Comanche violence. He told of how Comanches came across a band of Tonkawa, whom they innately despised. The Tonkawa were known cannibals and had roasted a few Comanche tribe members. This sent the Comanches into a frenzy. They tracked down the Tonkawa and mercilessly tortured them.
Anglos thought of the Comanches as having no religion or moral code. The idea of the “Great Spirit” didn’t actually exist among the Comanches. They weren’t concerned with a creation myth. A Comanche named Post Oak Jim said, “We just knew we were here. Our thoughts were mostly directed toward understanding the spirits” (45). They did not speak of good and evil as the whites did. Yet the Comanche warriors were also loving husbands and fathers. Their families were important to them. Thus, their moral code manifested in ways ignored by the Anglos.
The Comanche Nation consisted of a loose confederation of five major bands: the Yamparika (Yap Eaters), Kotsoteka (Buffalo Eaters), Penateka (Honey Eaters), Nokoni (Wanderers), and the Quahadi (Antelopes). They lacked centralized unity. Each band had two chiefs who wielded very limited power over the tribe. The civil chief was in charge of determining when the tribe should move and where it would go. The war chief was in charge of raiding parties. There was no heredity in leadership. Leadership instead was based solely on merit. They were, however, a strictly patriarchal society.
Such was the culture in which Rachel Plummer found herself.
Chapter 5 Summary: “The Wolf’s Howl”
Comanche warriors first came across white men in 1706, when they raided the lands of Spanish New Mexico. The struggle the Spanish led against the Comanches was like nothing they had encountered before. The “battles” resembled what would later be known as guerrilla warfare: “The Comanches did not beat the Spanish so much as render them irrelevant” (53). Like the Americans who would arrive a century later, the Spanish had never encountered mounted Indigenous fighters.
The Spanish conquest style of colonialism, which had been so successful in Central and South America, did not work against the roaming tribes of the plains. Further exacerbating the Spanish inability to subdue the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains was the fact that they knew little about any of them. They couldn’t tell Apaches apart from Comanches. The 18th century was a time of change along the Spanish frontier. The Apache were being slowly defeated by Comanches, who had a “deep and abiding hatred of Apaches” (57), and thus, Comanche raids increased.
By 1750, the Comanches had conquered a large expanse of land and had formed a peace treaty with the Kiowa. They patrolled and enforced their borders with ruthless efficiency. The relationship the Spanish held toward this new enemy on their borders was ambiguous. On the one hand, they recognized that the Comanches were no friendlier with the French and English than with them, and Comancheria was a natural barrier that separated Spanish ambitions from those of their European rivals. However, to the Spanish, the Comanches were a violent nuisance that needed to be curtailed. The Spanish launched many counter-raids, but none met much success.
In 1759, then governor Juan Bautista de Anza sent out a war party to attack the Comanches—led by a powerful war chief whom the Spanish called Cuerno Verde—in their homelands. This attack was more successful because de Anza adapted his soldiers to fighting against the Comanches using their own tactics rather than relying on old Spanish tactics. The result was a peace treaty with the Comanches and a trade agreement. The trade became dominated by Comancheros, a new breed of “mestizos.”
Chapter 6 Summary: “Blood and Smoke”
In 1838, the new Republic of Texas elected a president named Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, a poet and “truculent Indian-annihilator and would-be empire builder” (73). Lamar staunchly opposed the vaunted Sam Houston, who desired peace with Comanches and other Indigenous groups. Lamar did not believe peace was possible and wanted to eradicate or expel all Indigenous peoples from Texas. Many Texans felt as he did. Lamar stated that Indigenous peoples did not possess any rights to any territory, and thus he began a campaign to remove them from Texas. The new policy was popular and successful. By the end of July 1839, “the cornfields and villages of all the Cherokees, Delawares, Shawnees, Caddoans, Kickapoos, Creeks, Muskogees, and Seminoles in east Texas were burned to the ground” (77).
All of those tribes were relatively sedentary and agrarian, and so they were easier to hunt down and destroy. This process did not work when the Texans came against the nomadic tribes, especially the Comanches. In 1839, the Texans established a militia under the command of Colonel John Moore. He was one of the first to use Indigenous scouts to help track down and fight Comanches. The trackers were of utmost importance for the Texans and were pivotal for any success gained: “It was Indian trackers, as much as white soldiers under famous generals like George Crook, Nelson Miles, and Ranald Mackenzie, who were responsible for the destruction of the Plains Indians” (79).
For the Comanches, the Texans represented a new kind of enemy—one more determined than any they’d never known before. One incident in 1840 illustrated this. The Comanches came to San Antonio to talk with the Texans about ending their increasing encroachment on Comanche lands. The Texans refused to talk with the Comanches unless they released all captives. The only captive the Comanches had brought with them was Matilda Lockhart, whom they had kept in terrible conditions. Her wounds and scarring incensed the Texans. The Comanches expected gifts, but what resulted was a skirmish that led to several dead Comanches. The main misunderstanding was that when making a deal with Comanches, it was only possible to make it with that one tribe. No tribe could speak for the rest of them, nor did they ever try to.
Many of the Comanches were taken prisoner. Only a few escaped from San Antonio. The Texans sent a woman to other Comanches with an ultimatum: If all white captives were not released, the Comanche captives would be killed. The Comanches were at first devastated, then angry, and they killed 13 of their captives. What became known as the Council House Fight was the first sign that neither the Comanches nor the Texans would make any compromises.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The information that outsiders received about Comanche culture from the pen of Rachel Parker Plummer, and others like her, is significant in that hers is one of few written, first-hand accounts of the Comanche way of life, especially since the Comanches did not possess a form of writing themselves. However, many of the sources used to illustrate Comanche society in Chapter 4 do not come from Rachel’s memoirs but rather from many other sources, even though the chapter uses her captivity to frame the narration.
An important point is made in Chapter 4 regarding the Comanche political system: The Comanches did not have a centralized political structure—rather, they were a loose confederation of bands, each of which governed itself. White colonizers repeatedly failed to understand how Comanches interacted with one another, and the combination of Anti-Indigenous Racism and Cultural Misunderstanding often exacerbated conflict, as illustrated in Chapter 6 with the account of the Council House Fight.
Incomprehension and misunderstanding appear to have been continual themes throughout relations between the Comanches, Europeans, and white Americans. Chapter 5 illustrates how even the mighty Spanish Colonial Empire struggled to deal with Plains tribes, namely the Apaches and Comanches. Hubris seems to have played the greatest role for the Spanish and the Americans, as they continually underestimated Comanche abilities because they considered the “savages” inferior in every way. Because they underestimated their Comanche adversaries, generations of colonizers failed to adopt a fighting style that was capable of defeating Comanches on the battlefield. Even when an occasional, brilliant military commander like Juan Bautista de Anza did achieve some success, his knowledge typically died with him, and future commanders repeated the mistakes of their forebears. The Failure to Pass Down Knowledge is a recurring theme throughout Gwynne’s account of the century of warfare between Europeans and Comanche. This inability to adapt and understand is one reason why the Comanches were able to hold out as long as they did against powers far larger than they, and it allowed them to become dominant over other tribes.
An important fact briefly mentioned in Chapter 6, though not further elaborated upon, is that Indigenous scouts used by the Americans played a pivotal role in the ultimate defeat of the Comanches. The fact that Indigenous groups often fought against one another and aided Europeans and Americans in tracking and attacking other tribes is significant. While the colonizers generally thought of all Indigenous peoples as a monolith, they realized that Indigenous groups did not see each other in this way, and they were happy to exploit conflicts between tribes for their own advantage. It was not until the later years of the “Indian Wars” that a sense of Indigenous identity emerged to unite tribes that had previously seen one another as enemies. As Indigenous peoples began to realize that the US government saw them all as an obstacle to be removed, they began to work together against their common enemy, a phenomenon illustrated by the “ghost dances” that swept through many tribes of the Great Plains in the late 19th century as disparate groups became united in the belief that the Creator would soon rid them of their colonizers. When Anglo-Americans first arrived in the West, they found a complex patchwork of nations vying for power and territory.
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