S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Autumn Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Power Indian Tribe in American History is a wonderful book in spite of its cumbersome subtitle. I confess to having known next to nothing about this subject and only noticed the title because it was reviewed in the Times alongside Nathaniel Philbrick's book about General Custer, to which, as it happens, it is far superior. And what did I learn from Gwynne? For one, that Texas is indeed a different place from the other 49 states and for another, that the story of the settler's treatment of the Indians is even worse than one might imagine. And yet that's too simplistic a way to put what was an inevitable tragedy, or so I think. Gwynne has a talent for putting the clash between the Indians and the whites who moved into the West in the 19th century in perspective, as a confrontation between a Stone Age civilization and the modern age. This is not to say that he considers the Indians savages in a derogatory sense, merely that we need to understand the basis of the conflict between the two sides in the broadest possible sense.
His tale abounds in fascinating characters, beginning with Quanah Parker, who was able to reinvent himself after surrendering as a "white" Indian. But then he was half-white, the son of a mother who was captured by the Comanches as a child. That woman, Cynthia Parker, is quite a person in herself. Recaptured by whites in a raid in which her husband was killed and at which time she was nursing her daughter Prairie Flower, she never re-adapted to "civilization" and died a broken, unhappy woman. And there are so many others, Indian fighters, Comanches, soldiers, the first Texas Rangers--the list goes on and on in Gwynne's colorful, heartbreaking and highly informative book.
A thought for the day: "A book must be an axe for the frozen sea within us." Franz Kafka.