An Evening With Sam Gwynne

good evening and welcome on behalf of the Briscoe Center for American history here to say that we are delighted to have you here this evening for an evening with SC Gwyn author of empire of the summer moon which has become a smash bestseller so we look forward to hearing from Sam tonight interestingly enough in the book in the Biblia bibliographical note sam writes I was extremely fortunate living in Austin to be able to avail myself to the astounding literary and archival materials at the University of Texas libraries especially the Daath Briscoe Center for American history which Thank You Lizzy which in the pursuit of Comanche history must be regarded as ground zero I am going to bring on my dear friend the executive director of the Daath Briscoe Center for American history and ground zero for histories relating to the Comanche tribe Don Carlton who will in turn introduce Steve Harrigan our moderator and Sam Gwynn our author and an featured guest so please join me in welcoming my friend Don calm Thank You mark very much thanks to all of you for coming out tonight to witness another joint venture of the LBJ library and the university's Brisco Center I started to say joint adventure mark but I guess it's more of a joint venture we have a real treat for you tonight something very different from our usual focus on politics although we do know that very little in life is actually free of the political and certainly the history of the violent clash between Europeans and Native Americans that played out from the very beginning of European settlement in a new world until the end of the 19th century was really chock-full of politics we'll hear more about that from Sam Gwyn our special guest tonight whose magnificent book was published by Scribner's last fall two to much acclaim now in his review of empire of the summer moon in the new york times bruce bark i'd noted that Sam Gwen's book as his quote nothing short of a revelation he doesn't merely retell the story of Quanah Parker's life he pulls his readers through an American frontier roiling with extreme violence political intrigue bravery anguish corruption love knives rifles and arrows lots and lots of arrows sounds like the state legislature this book will leave dust and blood on your jeans if you like that analogy that's sue unquote as we all know book reviewers don't always get it right but this one certainly did empire of the summer moon is history the way it should be told with excitement and liveliness yet based on solid research in the archives and with the well-informed point-of-view Sam Gwynn is an award-winning journalist whose work as appeared extensively in Time magazine for which he worked as bureau chief national correspondent and senior editor from 1988 until 2000 he has also served as executive editor of Texas Monthly Sam's writings have also appeared in the New York Times Harper's California magazine and other publications his previous book outlaw Bank co-authored with Jonathan Beattie detailed the rise and fall of the corrupt global bank BCCI Sam Gwyn attended Princeton and Johns Hopkins and he lives in Austin Texas with here was a local boy now with his wife Katie and daughter Maisie we're also fortunate tonight in having as our other special guests another acclaimed author my good friend Steven Harrigan for many years Steven was a staff writer in senior editor at Texas Monthly and his articles and essays have appeared in a wide range of other publications as well including the Atlantic the New York Times Magazine Life magazine National Geographic and slate Steven is the author of four novels Aransas Jacob's Well the gates of the Alamo and challenger park his latest Nam novel was titled remembered Ben Clayton and that will be published by Knopf later this year Steven is also written award-winning scripts for several television programs as well as for the movies a 1971 graduate at the University of Texas Stephen and his wife Sue Ellen also live here in Austin now because Steven read Empire the summer moon while it was still in manuscript and he's done his own research on this topic mark Updegrove and I felt that he's the perfect person to engage Sam when in a discussion about the Comanches in Quanah Parker so please join me in welcoming Sam Wynn and Steven Harrigan we should check the mics for us can everyone hear us all right no you hear me all right is this better if I okay maybe I'm just mom testing when she's young definitely I'm on all right sure thank you all for coming tonight this is a real pleasure for me to get to talk to Sam at some length about his book which which I read it admired a great deal and I I'm not the only one who feels that way Sam there was a you had the cover of the New York Times Book Review which is the most sought-after a real estate for an author you had you what you're a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award you won the TCU allure the Oklahoma Book Award you're a finalist for the car Pete Collins award from the Texas Institute of Letters I look you up on Amazon which I'm sure you never do yourself and notice that there were a hundred and eighty-nine reader reviews adding up to four and a half stars that's a pretty good good ratio so it's clear to me that you've really touched a nerve with this book and I guess my first question is what nerve did you touch why why there have been other Quanah Parker books and other Comanche books but this one is really special and do you have an any insight into why it's become such a such a big it's an interesting question Steve I mean it's it has I was once that I was in a book club where I gave a talk and and somehow the book club you know book clubs are smaller and they're more intimate and you get into more of the exchange and we spent about 45 minutes talking about this subject and everybody had theories there was one theory and this is interesting because I didn't intend it to be this way was that it was revisionist in some way about the frontier and and and I'm speaking I'm saying now what other people have told me but what they've said as they said look there was this impression I had maybe from books that were done in the 60s or something perhaps the berry' my heart at Wounded Knee kind of books that Indians were victims and and there's kind of overwhelming sense that they were victims and they were always victims in the Trail of Tears and so forth and and at the end Indians of course were victims ultimately they were all steamrolled by the Western movement of the American Empire but you know to portray a powerful a tribe this powerful this brutal this ruthless if you were that in themselves had in fact been engaged just as white Americans were in the in the subjugation of Native American tribes for hundreds of years I think on some level it's that surprised people I think I mean I I don't know if it struck a nerve but I think it surprised people the this idea that Indians were not just only victims and in fact if you go back and you look at the early years of the you know the Choctaws or the Chippewas or the Chickasaws or somebody there they weren't victims originally either so I think that was one that would that would be one component of it I think another component was one of the things that yeah you and I were talking about at lunch the other day was that how many of my readers of this book are women you would not necessarily automatically expect that you know in kind of a blood-and-guts western with lots of military history is automatically going to appeal to female readers but certainly some but maybe not at all but but I think partly the nerve was the the family itself that you know there was I told a story of the rise and fall of the Comanche tribe but inside that story is a smaller story a very intimate story of a little nine-year-old girl who gets taken from her family and then in fact builds her own family with the with the Comanches and then and is forced to adapt to this to alien cultural environments twice so I think that in some ways it may have been the combination of the big sweep epic sweep of history you know with with something much smaller and more intimate and then I think that either the small and intimate version all by itself or the big epic sweet ball by itself probably doesn't work that well yeah well I want to talk about both of those elements of the book is the you know the emotional story of Cynthia Ann Parker and Quanah Parker is embedded as you say into this giant narrative about the Comanches themselves and let's let's start off talking about the Comanches everybody thinks they know who the Comanches are and were back in those times but tell it give us a little brief summary without destroying the the the reason the Comanches were so compelling to me and the first one I first encountered them I counted many of you here have probably read Walter Prescott Webb who's a wonderful writer I think he's a workman like writer but he's a wonderful writer and he wrote a book called the Great Plains which in it had I believe it wasn't even a full chapter but it was a sub chapter and it had this this thesis embedded in it that was not his it was actually I think Rupert Richardson's from the 30s but the thesis was that the it was the thesis that Richardson called the Comanche barrier and what it said essentially was that out here in the southwest and this 250,000 square mile piece of land sat this thing that nobody could deal with that really affected and changed and determined the way that the West was open in the way that the way that the West was settled by white people so you had the Comanches who in effect stopped the northward migration of Spanish power stopped the westward migration of French power from Louisiana they are the reason I argue in the book or one of the reasons anyway that white settlement was allowed into Texas in the first place it was a way to stabilize Mexico's northern boundary with settlement it backfired on them a little bit at San Jacinto but but you know if the Comanches are the reason for the invention of the Texas Rangers the principal reason the reason for the adaptation of the five shooter which became the six-shooter you know the reason that the frontiers stalled for 40 years along a single line of latitude I mean these this just never happened before so to me the Comanches were in the broadest sense the the way to understand if you will the way that West was won because then at least of what I argue in the book is it wasn't one for the white Anglo Europeans until the Comanches lost it and yet the Comanches weren't this monolithic people I mean you call them an empire which I guess is it's a handy way to do it it's a handy way but but you go to great pains to sort of dissect the various Comanche bands the cool hotties and the pen attackers and the yawn perico's and tell us how that how that all all those aggregate bands sort of work together and then add it up to a to one sort of you know force like you're talking about they were is there something about Plains Indians that white men never really got and never really understood the Comanches are a good example is that they were organized in bands there were two aspects two large aspects one is that they were very horizontally we would say these days the management was very horizontal as you will know words there were there was technically a war chief and technically a civil chief but in fact anybody could be a chief who could recruit a war party to get anybody who could go out and say hey let's go get the osage's and if they got enough people they went and got the osage's and they didn't need the blessing of anybody above so you had a very flat organizational structure if you will for one thing and this confused white men because they always thought there was a big chief up ahead of everything but in fact not only was there not a an absolutely powerful big chief within each band you had a bunch of bands most historians agree that there were five major ones as of the time the white white civilization encountered the Comanches running in the 1820s and 1830s these bands were it was a really interesting organizational structure because they were just kind of affiliated they were back to the corporate model they were affiliates they they could members of bands could cross into other bands relatively freely they never fought against each other they more or less respected each other's terrain they the Comanches were in that sense of this extremely democratic extremely stripped-down kind of form of government that that rose above certainly at the level of the primitive hunting ban but not that much above the level of the primitive hunting but they were they were a stripped down power and as they they themselves became more powerful they this this worked to their to their benefit and one of the things I argue in the book is that you know the this structure which was really without hierarchy allowed the Comanche male not the female but the Comanche male to be it's kind of astoundingly free I mean you could do what you wanted to do you could affiliate with this band the Yampa Rica's or you could affiliate with the coatis quanah's band or or the pen Atticus or whoever you could you know you had your choice you could if you like Kawana became a successful war chief you could recruit your own war parties and go to Mexico or go get the Navajos or do whatever you wanted to do so it was this kind of amazingly free model of civilization and it created a fairly distinct culture I mean there were there were similarities of course with other Plains Indians and other other Native Americans but it you know when we when we read in your book and in accounts of captive narratives and and you know battles you know ferocity there was a certain level of ferocity that that you don't encounter that many other places I mean Texas was a really nasty place in those years and do you think it was there their culture grew out I mean reach this this this kind of attitudinal thing because of the way they were they were nomadic they were warfare was a way of life for them by necessity or or was there something else that was my sense my sense is that the I mean Sparta is the obvious point of comparison but but only only broadly but I mean Sparta where military success at some point begins to breed upon itself and and and where you can see this happening particularly you know after their conquest of the Apaches you see that the social status and the tribe begins more and more to be related to that and that and that's really the I think the shift do you see that if social status social status it relates to military exploits and real eteri conquest at some point during or immediately after the final conquests of the Apaches this was a militaristic Society and they were so good at it so much better than everybody else that it it really determined who they were and it also I think it also stultified them I mean they I don't think Sparta isn't famous as far as I know for producing fabulous art and you know the Comanches also were I think you you see them as they move toward a martial culture they're there they're certainly not moving any close closer to anything that would be that we would call you the higher civilizations you know like agriculture and and and and priests castes and sophisticated multi-layered clan systems and all these things that you see in in the in the tribes that were sort of more sedentary or more civilized as we would call it civilizing quote work but uh but yeah i think i think they became kind of the spartans of the plains and that was who they were spartans with horses with horses yes and that is that technology as historians call it is just crucial to the story of the Comanches I mean they I mean you describe that so well in your book they they you know totally revolution changed who they were and what just a generation that the taking up of the horse or the discovery of the horse that Europeans brought to to the to you know to America that's and that's my favorite in a way it's it's my it's it's my favorite part about the Comanches is that is is that they figured it out although that the the the wonderful mystery I guess is how they did this because you know you can take a snapshot at a given point in time and you know they didn't have the horse certainly they didn't have the horse before horses showed up in Santa Fe and then you can take a snapshot of them later as the world's greatest horseman and nobody could match them in Europeans are saying this is the greatest light cavalry on earth and white men saying they've never seen people do this with horses and that includes breaking breeding riding stealing every conceivable hunting everything you can do with a horse and to me I kind of love it in a way because it's it's it all of that great meeting between the horse and the Comanche and this is a tribe that as far as anybody knows based on where they were and how big they were they weren't a terribly effective tribe I mean they existed they were primitive hunter-gatherers but that that great transformative meeting of tribe and horse when and when the tribe begins to understand it begins to figure out that it can do this that it knows this better than anybody else it's invisible to history no one will ever see it all you can see is the kind of the snapshot of them if you will sort of you a sense of what they were before and a very clear sense of what they were after so I love the and you know the just the whole as you say horses technology and it was technology on the plains and as I explained it it's funny but I think a lot of people have a sense that the horse was always here you know it's kind of this this the whooping kind of be feathered Indian you know circling the wagon train is such a cinematic image from from Hollywood I think a lot of people believe or just well or have a sense anyway that Indians always had horses and of course no white men saw anything like a mounted warrior a Native American warrior until they hit the plains so it was an entirely different experience of trying to fight Indians when you were fighting instead of sedentary tribes who were agriculture from the east you had nomadic tribes who were mounted in the West and it changed everything so that was a transformative moment in in a cultural and and militaristic way for the Comanches but the transformative moment personally for Cynthia Ann Parker and for her son quanta and her her other son and her daughter happened in 1836 a great heart you tell us again without spoiling the narrative of the book can you give us a little bit well it was it was a raid and you know by you know in the face of it it was just like an Indian raid and in fact it was the kind of Indian raids that Comanches had been raining down on other tribes for for a long long time so was it yeah and in raids you you had a couple of goals you wanted to get horses absolutely you wanted to get captives if you could captives were good you wanted to get any kind of booty and Treasury you could get so it was a raid on the Parkers fort but what happened to it and I'll get in a moment to what to what actually happened to the people inside Parker's for it what had happened was this this clan of some like crazy scots-irish people and I say semi crazy because you know it's I might let's say alone be willing to go out on the prayer on the frontier all by myself surrounded by Indians and put a homestead there and maybe I would even be crazy enough to have my wife go do it when there's when there's literally no no defense of any kind no security forces nothing to help you out there but I but yeah I would really stop even if I were willing to do that at bringing the entire family and all my children out there but the Parkers were part of this Vanguard this kind of folk imperialism that move west and they they were they built a farm out there in effect well they built a fort too but they built a farm that was really the farthest point if you had to chart the absolute farthest point on the American frontier on the hostile on the plains frontier that was where it was and so what had happened was sort of inadvertently you had this kind of the tip of the kind of probing westward pushing American Empire if you will that had swung down it had not swung up into the upper States at all Nebraska all Kansas all that stuff to the north was would not be settled yet that was not a human frontier so they had pushed here and so what you had was this this little this little point right in the town of Groesbeck near mejia where in effect the the absolute tip of the westward pushing american empire touched the eastward most tip if you will of this 250,000 square mile empire as i call it of the Comanches and unknown to either side either sighted any idea of what it was if you told the Comanches that these guys out there these scots-irish settlers were connected to something called Washington with you know navies and armies and things like that that we would have been inconceivable and by the same token the Parker clan had no idea what was out there beyond them or whose empire if you will they were they were encroaching on so so here so you have this moment so it's it's and not only is that the touching of these two empires it's the beginning of a 40-year were the longest Indian war in American history it's just many many things but what happened that day was a bunch of Comanches actually a few there were a few other Indians from other tribes with them rode up to the gates of Parkers fort and you know kidnapped five people and killed a bunch of people and and did what Comanches do on a raid and the net effect of that and the reason that we know about that rate is that there were two men to two people two women sorry one young woman named Rachel Parker Plummer who was taken who wrote about it in the very famous diary and Cynthia Ann Parker who was nine years old at that point and who became you know who disappeared from the point of view of the Parkers anyway into the great vast wastes of the Great Plains never to be seen again she assimilated completely to the Comanche culture and of course later gave birth to quanta who became the last chief of the Comanches and so that moment if you will it sets in motion all those things Cynthia Ann becomes famous once for being taken twice for being the white who refused to return the third time for being the mother of Kwan and the fourth time well actually the third time for having been recaptured Massell Ross and and and being unable to fit back into American society finally for being the mother of Quanah Parker so this little this kind of this is what I you know I this this raid to me in my book is a focus of a lot of American history there's a lot that's coming to bear right on this little farm in fact there's a great if any of you are curious about this up in Groesbeck again it's near Mejia which what anybody knows where Mihai is the there's a replica of Parkers for that is you know as any as far as anyone knows pretty close to what it was it's just great it's wonderful it tells you I mean I I didn't I truly didn't understand anything about what happened before until I went and saw the replica of it but anyway so to me it's it's one of these great infused moments of American history that at the time just kind of seemed like a Comanche raid and what what grew out of that of course was one of the most heartbreaking stories in American history I think which is the story of Cynthia Ann Parker and one of the most amazing stories in American history which is the story of Quanah Parker her son who we see here and on the cover of Sam's book one of the things I wanted to ask you is generally what happened Quanah Parker became the leading war chief of the Comanches he was a realist who understood that it that it was over at some point and led his people on to the reservation and and surrendered more or less but he thrived on on on the Comanche Kiowa Reservation became a big dog my curiosity about that is why was he so adaptable was it was it something he got from Cynthia and you think or was it something inherent in his character that that was sort of culturalist that just arose in him I have a very strong opinion about that actually the the one of the issues about why he thrived there's an issue about why he thrived that has to do with whether the the white soldiers like Ronald Mackenzie at Fort Sill gave him a boost because they knew he was half white that's a different that's that's a different question I think it was probably true although no one's ever been able to pinpoint it you there's no memo that anybody found that said well we treated it well but to get back to the original like why Quanah sort of the toughest most hardened of of the Comanche warriors of his era who hated White's burned with a fury that nobody has because they had killed his father and and and taken his mother why Quanah why this guy of all people becomes the most successful Indian of the reservation period becomes wealthy becomes starts his own school district I mean he becomes this great was owned railroad his own he becomes this great kind of citizen citizen Comanche and and my answer to that question is because of the Comanches were who they were because they were not as what I was saying before intensely hierarchical you did not have a big chief in a sub chief and chief vice-presidents and then chief bureaucrats on down it was it was really a Singh layer' society and as success if you were again this is a marsh a tribe oriented around war so success came in effect if you were warrior from the ability to recruit people to go on a raid and pretty much came down to that and because there was no chief who was saying okay no Steve and you and Sam and Mike and Bill and Fred you're all going on this raid and we're going to go down and we're going to attack the the tonka was there something it didn't work that way it arose spontaneously and it arose out of the tribe and it arose because an individual in this case quanta was able to go persuade people to go on a rate and that tech that skill is very much that of a I don't know a Salesman on some of us I'm hey guys look I got this great idea here we're gonna go down here this week what I just a lot of horses we can get if we have confidence that we can win this raid and then to be successful there's I think a lot of so in other words that skill is consensus building getting people to like you getting people to trust you Quanah was cheerful well it went as far as we know and what and and we as far as the rest of the world knows when we see and he is cheerful he is intensely optimistic he is collegial he is consensus building he is the guy that everybody likes and so it's funny to look at that way but the guy who is this killer Comanche word that the same skills feed that that feed Quanah being president of school board it's hilarious on one level I guess but I really I really believe it's true it doesn't seem plausible but he because Kawana himself one of the things that characterized him as a Comanche was this unbelievable optimism I mean I'm sorry as a what in the reservation period and beyond this great optimism things were going to get better things were gonna work out he was that kind of a guy we're gonna get we're gonna make it better look you got a problem in Washington I'll go testify will fix it I can just see that guy riding through a Comanche camp and going go get in a small group together and say look I got an idea yeah it's fascinating you look at what happened to Sitting Bull or Crazy Horse or some of the other great you know Plains Indians leaders it was they're killed by their own people in some cases and it a lot of jealousy and resentment I'm sure there was someone oh yeah he definitely was but but he exactly he was a politician as you say I mean yes that's the word I fits the word I forgot to use a politician how could I forget sitting in this particular place I forgot to use that word yes politician there there's some other fairly interesting characters in this book my favorite I think is Ronald Mackenzie who I think you you really portray him as in a way nobody else has tell us about him you call him the anti Custer and for those of us who don't know yeah I'll get a little I mean I think I'm sort of proud of that because nobody ever twinned him with Custer before at least that not that I've read anyway and I wind it with custard because they were at West Point at the same time they were just complete opposites of each other I mean Custer was this flamboyant guy bottom of the class world record four demerits you know Mackenzie was was kind of dark and inwardly turned and you know a good student and and you know that they they were and yet every step of the way they were both incredible heroes during the Civil War and they were promoted with both with astonishing speed faster than almost anyone else in in the Union Army they were you know it was interesting it and they sort of they fought at the same battles it was curious that when Custer lost at Little Bighorn the person sent to send out to clean up his mess was Mackenzie it was Crazy Horse it was Mackenzie to whom Crazy Horse surrendered and Mackenzie was just one of these guys who who who there's a bunch of several of these in my book John Jack Hayes is another one who they just somehow miss being household words I mean Custer is it affect famous in failure and Mackenzie is it is absolutely unknown in success it was Mackenzie you can argue it to some extent Nelson miles I think but that who really taught Americans how to fight Indians and his record of fighting in the is astonishing and what happened to him is he rose to pee came to power just at the end of really the end or just before the reservation period like quanta they both did they both came to power as very young men just at the end McKenzie was just one of those characters you know this this kind of irascible guy difficult to get along with moody but but but but quite brilliant and as I say that you know it's it's it's amazing to me that that the Custer can be so famous considering his performance in the West and the McKenzie can be virtually unknown and as I think we going back to something you said earlier about the book hitting a nerve I think that I think most Americans have never heard of Reynolds Slidell McKenzie period never even heard of him you know you could certainly argue he's our greatest Indian fighter the people never heard of Jack K's the greatest ranger you know these were I think things that were revelation certainly to me when I wrote the book but I think to the average person who isn't already at kind of a Texas history buff yeah and I think for many Texans those names are are obscure at best and one other thing things about your book I like so much is it for many Texans the geography is obscure as well or unnoticed and you know you can drive from here to Lubbock and you can go up the cap Rock and never know what happened there or you know see these play you know there's a lot of non scenery in tech that's so true but there are but all those little pockets of sort of aridity and nothingness are filled with just this amazing history that you detail in your book and you know it's just I think reading it as a revelation that way because not only do you discover these people that you you know you didn't really know existed that you discover the landscape that you never really understood as well the landscape is one of the heroes of the book it's one of the main characters in the book and and on some level this book is about my love affair with the land in Texas west of i-35 I mean sometimes it takes Yankees to do these things I hate to break the news to you guys you know the you know the Yankee comes down right and goes Wow and look at that Palo Duro Canyon I've never seen anything like that and you drive up on that that road from Amarillo to Lubbock and you go look at this this is this is like the ocean there's there was so much to me about or the hill country and and the the the gorgeous limestone streams of the hill country there was so much to me about Texas that was a revelation so to me writing this book was in a way you know it was a way for me to indulge in my love of this landscape and I really do love this landscape and there's a lot a lot of it true is that the the as I say that my book grew out of one paragraph or two paragraphs in that Walter Prescott Webb book I read 15 years ago but that book was about the Great Plains and the plains in effect are one of the major characters here and I don't it's interesting if I give a book talk or somewhere at a Book Festival in New Jersey or Florida or something you really have to explain to people you know what we're talking about here cuz you know I was like what what the plains are even but even beyond that though this whole idea that that in America the kind of primeval America you had this very dense kind of Grimm brothers forest extending all the way close to the 98th Meridian which runs very close to here whereupon it kind of thins out and suddenly you are in an area that has no trees and actually not very much water either and Walter Webb's famous formulation was that civilization in the East was built on on three legs you know land water timber and you get to the 98th Meridian which as I say runs somewhere close to here two of those things go away how are you building your cabin you know what are you using for firewood where are you getting your water from these things were problematic and they define the land that the Comanches inhabited and so in a way understanding what the plains were and how they you know how they worked and how they functioned as a habitat those for for Buffalo and Comanche and everybody else and what it meant for white people to come to a place suddenly where not only was there was this gigantic barrier in the form of a tribe that you weren't getting by you were also confronting the land itself the physical barrier the land but as you say there's places I mean you stand out there in adobe walls battlefield and if that marker wasn't there it's just you and the great lonesome out there there's not much out there you know the kanay oh I'm sorry the Canadian River is there ever that's it so well I want to talk to you about how you how you wrote this book and there was a passage in the book that really struck me some page 102 where you write this is the beginning of a chapter there is history that is based on hard documented fact history that is colored with rumor speculation or falsehood and history that exists and what might be termed the hinterlands of the imagination and my guess is you had to deal with all three of those at a time I mean the the historical record here is sometimes very sparse and sometimes I would guess not too reliable how did you train yourself to to figure out what sources word we're worth using which which had to be taken with a grain of salt how did you you know coordinate all that I mean it's that's a question I get rarely asked his mother Steve has worked in this vein Steve understands this and when you have you understand that the issues that you're dealing with and one of which is and the principle of which is that this history is not being told by Indians you know Indians didn't write I was reading recently the Manchester Churchill and I'm reading through it and you know it's like he wrote ten notes to his wife a day you know my stomach's upset at 10 o'clock you know I talked to Asquith today boy he pissed me off Sunday at 10 o'clock and you go through this and you know the notes between the ministries and and you can almost track this guy's life hour-by-hour and not only W if you couldn't then if you were in World War two or World War one you would have just oceans of documentary material generated by various departments ok Indians did not write memos they did not have a judicial system they did not write memoirs I mean really the the to some extent the the only real Indian accounts well Kawana gave some accounts certainly but you know came when interviews were done in the 30s these various projects and ethnographic projects and so forth that with Indians who remembered those old days but in that's the first and worse problem that you have because you're then dealing with okay which which white person is the most reliable it's you know it's funny but there isn't what my sense anyway with the Comanche history is that there is not that much of it then you know this there just isn't I mean it's finite because the you know the documents kind of end with Indians and you can go and you can really go deep into the white documents but you don't have anything on the other side and so I've often told people I sometimes feel like I'm in a very small and very stuffy room with like all the other historians who have done this and you're trying to figure it out all I can say is that you I think any historian has to it's um ultimately use common sense and judgment and that's just the best that you can do and also to acknowledge I think to readers which I tried to do anyway that you do have this limitation and particularly when I was looking at that great Comanche raid down to the coast the Linville rate and so forth of bet and the battle that followed it I think I tried I try to acknowledge to readers that you know we were trying to piece our way through this try and trying to see sometimes you can pierce in that particular case the you can actually in a way see through you know the the accounts I mean you can actually make your own conclusions if you strip away the rhetoric and just look at the facts of the matter for example with the the the the Rangers of militia claimed a great victory here and and that they just but but in fact the women and children and this livestock got away so okay well that suggests that they didn't can't they certainly they killed people but they didn't get my theory is that this was partly a screening action by Comanches to to block the retreat of their women and children because they were all traveling together in this particular rain and their livestock with most of which got away so you would think well okay on that level at least that worked and that comes through none of nope nobody wrote that but you consider the facts dictate that anyway I think it's a problem for any Native American historian and I faced it like everybody else and you just kind of do the best you can I mean I hate to say that but it's I I personally came in most cases to a point where I really thought that my that what I was writing was very very very likely to be true and to this extent that I could defend it well you were faced not just with the kind of blankness of the record from the Native American side but the prejudicial oh right from from the Anglo side as well and how did you navigate that because you know there's a lot of emotions that we're running pretty high during this pure you can really do I guess it's sort of like the way the like the judicial process in a way and I'm sure you've done it yourself which is you just you you absolutely must you know if you're if you're looking at San Antonio in in 1836 you cannot use only the Mary maverick account it's a great account but you can't but it was all you can do is get as many accounts as you can and line them up next to each other look at the larger context and make a judgement and I think that's all I can tell you but there's it's one of the characteristics again let's take San Antonio in the 1836 as an example there weren't a lot of journalists out there as in none you know there's there are real limitations on what you can do when you don't have kind of a record a daily record being done and anyway I just that's all I can say as you is the historians mandate is to get as many sources as you can line them up next to each other and make your best judgment I mean that's really all I can and it is tough because some of them I mean some of that stuff you know for example in the will Barger book which I'm sure you've read which is a kind of a story about Indian depredations some of those are just wild and crazy tales you know Nelson Lee's account of being with the Rangers is the first half of the book is so so it's there it's all over the place and it's I think it's waiting for you if you're not if you're just gonna say look at Nelson Lee's account and go oh I'm just gonna take that then you're dead yeah so what you weren't in a store and until you wrote this book right right so you're a you're a newspaper guy in a magazine guy yeah now if you say you were teaching yourself how to be in a store in yes and yeah I know this feeling how did you go about it I mean did you start doing the research the way you would do it as a magazine writer or did you adopt some other technique no in fact I ended up well first of all it's a little bit daunting when you when you start even though my whole life has been you know in effect doing stories were you know we'll see when I come out of the same world which is magazines both were for Texas Monthly and and on a Texas Monthly story for example I did a cover story on Karl Rove many years ago and my story idea and the angle on it was how he kind of arrived in 1978 working for Jim Baker and then rebuilt the Republican Party from the ground up where he was one of the main guys who did it by the time he left with Bush in 2000 the state had gone from entirely Democrat to entirely Republican in that time so but in order to do that story I had to do not only interviews with people like Bill Clemens and you know the old people who remember the old days but it was a lot of documentary research because I was dealing with 1978 in 1982 and 1984 so and my story was really it wasn't at all about Carl the modern guy the guy who was in Washington at that point it was about how Carl did this going back 30 years so to some extent and I've written a lot of stories like that to some extent as a journalist I've been dealing with the past but of course going back and dealing with 19th century or the 18th century in Spain it really is an entirely different thing and you know I guess all I can say is that that's I guess when you write your first history you teach yourself to do it I really do feel and I mentioned this done but I do feel fortunate that that the the Briscoe Center is here that was where eighty to eighty percent of my research was done I was in a place where I could basically sit there and you fill out these little cards and then they bring you these things and you go you know you you find what you found and there was so much of it was there I think that that that really helped me going through it for the first time but to ask you yes your question I also concluded at some point as a magazine journalist that I could never be the kind of guy who goes off and spends three years reading everything and making little bitty note notations and then squirreling it all the way and cross-indexing it and then three years later kind of you know in front of the you know computers sit down and with a blank screen okay with my three years of research behind me I I don't think I can do that and so what I concluded and I think this is probably unconventional for a historian is I basically I read my hundred books that I needed to read that just the background books and then basically I just went chapter by chapter by chapter you know and if I encountered something that I didn't need in Chapter two I would indeed file that away with cross index cards back for chapter 16 but I really I reported wrote reported wrote so I would go up to you know wherever I was gonna go it was I did the research in Oklahoma into in West Texas and here I would research the thing and come back and then write it and then go back and research and then write the next chapter and and I think for me anyway it lent a freshness I was very very close to my material all the time I was never a long way away from it and I was I think that worked for me but I I don't know is would you guess that very many historians operate that way probably not I wouldn't think you know there are different kinds of story historians but I think I think that teaching yourself as you go along it's often a good way to do it but but you know you make it sound a little easy when you're talking about you know writing this chapter going out reporting necks when riding it but it's is anybody here has tried to write a book knows it's the structure of a book that's the that's the killer right and how did you how did you find this structure of this book and how did you know that you know what the next chapter was going to be the next chapter after that I think the structure it's interesting you asked whether the structure I think is the key to the success of this book and and it was when I first when I first started writing it I had this idea I think that I was gonna kind of write a James Michener book you know where you know we start back in the mists of the dawn of time you know and we and we move we move inexorably forward you know in the great arc of whatever in those land migrations and then there's something and okay finally we get to the Parkers and we get to the Comanches and then along that same arc again with kind of a James Michener approach and I thought that was my first idea of the way to do the book and then I I quickly realized that I don't know that people were going to sit through the first you know 400 pages of that book and and so so what I decided to do was to literally alternate chapters so we have two there's two narratives here one is rise arc and fall are arc of the rise and fall of Comanches as a tribe which takes you from you know the early days in the Wind River mountains through the Spanish and the horse and so forth to the end the reservation period and then the second and parallel plot was the Parker family so this is Cynthia and her family and the Parkers Ford and and that whole drama that goes on and so the the real the key revelation to me as a book was structural it was that you could basically alternate chapters and keep it rolling and when I church when I first gave my editor my first ten chapters I wasn't sure at all that it worked my first question was does this work do you mind going from like 1742 with the Spanish doing something and God knows what were the Comanches to you know out of the plains with Rachel Parker Plummer or or you know somewhere with Cynthia Ann and then back again I really didn't know and he was not only happy extremely enthusiastic he says boy does that work so that was the the key and then and then once I had that idea then the actual chapter ring of the book because I I know I've got to alternate in a way it solved itself it wasn't once I had figured that out and and it had that both alternate and move forward in linear time so in the one story you starting 1836 at the fort the other story you're starting whenever back in the Wind River mountains in the 1500s or something both these stories have to alternate and both have to move and both have to in effect merge in the person of quanta say this one happened so you have the alternating chapters when we get to quod on the plot merges and we march forward to the end so it was it had everything to do with everything I think it has everything to do with success of the book was that realization that that could be done yeah we're gonna start taking questions from the audience here in a minute Sam and I can't see very well from here but I think there are microphones in the aisles so if anybody would like to ask a question you might think about ambling on up there but I wanted to just ask another couple before we open it up one of the things that struck me the other day we were having lunch and I had a copy of Sam's book on the table and a guy came and was several people came up to congratulate him on the book that he didn't know but one of the guys who came up was the great-grandson of quanah's last wife is that right it was something like that yeah yeah it was hard to it's fun but yes I thought that was it so you know this this story has not ended and it's really interesting how how the Parker family in particular the descendants of Quanah both Anglo and Native American are still with us in a very real way today and as is the Comanche nation I mean if you encountered I mean you've obviously talked to a lot of oh yeah and I cited a number of books for people named quite a parker who aren't the actual coin of parker but i tell you if you those of you who are Texans who are here may not appreciate this but if you come from where I come from which is the Northeast you are it's absolutely stunning how close to history Texas is when the last of the Indians where I grew up was subdued 100 years before my forebears got off the boat in Boston it's not part of the conversation I haven't met people here whose grandfather not great-grandfather grandfather rode with quantum are now in the reservation period I've met people whose I think kita are you here somewhere where's kita great grandparents killed both killed by Comanches this was Texas I mean this is you know this is not where I came from people here have a particular sense I was you know the the I think the more you know there are places like Weatherford Mineral Wells Palo Pinto County Parker County out there those parts of Texas where it's just still very real and you know in a way that it really is not in the East and that's just absolutely striking about Texas and one of the things that persists is the the Parker family the Parker families you have Kawana had 19 surviving children and boy that family split they a lot of them married white people and then some married back to Indian people I mean it's all confused but you have half number of people who look like me and some people who look like quanta and that family and they're all still around the of course the Indians of the chalk sorry the the Comanches are still are still sitting out there on many of them in the in the Lawton cache area of Oklahoma there's you know there's even things you know about that are I've told people about this but Kiwanis in my book you'll see pictures of this star house which is this incredible house that Kawana got the cattlemen like Burkburnett to build for him and it was one of the most magnificent houses in Texas of its era as a magnificent place and you know Teddy Roosevelt ate there and Geronimo ate there Geronimo was like live was a neighbor of corners which I always thought was great it was a justice of history that Geronimo is the place where Geronimo's buried is on corner Road but the judgment of history but anyway oh so I'm talk about star house so star house which is what it was called you know somebody told me at some point said you know star house it's still there I said still where it said will it's in cash and so I will go up there it's one of the great revelations my favorite sort of moment in the book so I go up there and there's this that somebody tells me it's in an old amusement park in cash so I Drive up there and there's this indeed this defunct kind of broke an amusement park called star park and right next to it is this thing called the Trading Post which is the most broken-down antique place you've ever seen in your life we're like the best items in it are like glasses from Walmart ten years ago to being sold for like five cents that's those are the best items in it and so I ended up standing there for an hour where all these strange old ladies come out and try to sell me their memoirs about the old days and wherever and eventually this Norman Bates like character emerges who who is who is the owner of both the Trading Post I guess and star park and so I go I get into his truck and there's one of those trucks you know that's full of stuff so that you can't put your feet anywhere there was a cat in it I think and and so we drive back so we drive back into this into this other world we go back through there's an old-fashioned 1950s zero world of coaster this overgrown like Sleeping Beauty's castle this is just magical there cows everywhere we go back there all these defunct like teapot rides and wild Mouse's and things and you go back and then there's like the Frank James house supposedly that's said that they had moved there in the 50s and then some other house that I can't remember Jesse James once was in or something and you and then low and behold right in the depths of that park all overgrown well the house isn't overgrowth is cuantas house and those pictures in my book if you see the picture of quanta sitting at his dinner table with the wallpaper in the walls and the molded tin ceiling the room looks exactly the same the room where he's sitting there in my book again with the picture his precious picture of his mother and and sister that room looks just the same way so and that's just sitting out there you can't in fact I somebody told me that that guy died and so it may be in play in a certain way but it's just just sitting out there one of the great treasures of the American West but again stuff like that's been if that were in Connecticut there would be like a 75 acre park around it you'd be paying 15 bucks to get into it you know and I'm not in text not intent well in this case it's a no in cash Oklahoma but anyway does anybody have a question yes sir oh the microphone please right to your left well he's good going there it's Sam is it true that Kwame is in a movie yes can we can we see that movie yes you know I Netflix this is the most no not a Netflix this is this the most another amazing revelation was that I am somebody somebody that Quan is in a movie and the era of the Internet I mean I literally I taped in like quanta movie BAM it's like it's awesome Society in Oklahoma City has this and so I sent away for it for nine bucks I think it was and I get a video of the bank robbery the first two-reeler Western 1908 is shot in in cash I think and Quanah plays a role in it at some point you Kawana he's in a carriage another point he rides toward the camera and there he is I mean there is anyway yet another one of these there was just moments like this there was a moment when I was in the in the Briscoe library I remember when I was just reading some old you know it was just old letters you know and and of course the Briscoe Center has a lot of things in it they're just like the Ransom Center I you know that you've got to wear the white gloves and they bring you out the special cradle for the book and everything and at some point I remember a bunch of brand new Confederate currency just came fluttering out of whatever you know it was like fun moments of research so so sorry to keep you standing up there in the name Quanah where that name came from there is a town in Texas of course named quanta and I was there's any association to that he was it was named for him and the the name according to command the Comanches version of that is it means fragrance or odor there's theories that that was because he was born in a bed of flowers there's another theory that it was the kind of the negative side of odor that it came out of a childhood nickname as instinct that in Joella pal Exley and her book very good book frontier blood puts forward that that thesis which i think is an interesting one and no one really knows but i think either way it's an odor either it's a good odor it's a bad odor he was the reason that that Exley's theory could be true is that when quanta was growing up he when he had been orphaned he was he was a half-white orphan which really wasn't a good thing to be and so he had truck he had to struggle and clearly at some point he was bigger and stronger and meaner than everybody and those problems went away but that that that nickname if that's indeed what it was came from that area but the Comanche version is that it means fragrance I think we have a question over here yeah two-part question do we know how Mackenzie got his intelligence about where the Comanches were and the second part is what in the world possessed Quanah Parker to attack Dobie walls with a bunch of it in a buffalo hunters who were well-armed how close did they get well let's see the so the first question was who was first Mackenzie get his information oh well allegedly he just strung some command chair out on a wheel that was nobody that's that was that's there are a few sources on that anyway then he got it let's say the command chair was a chair was made to feel unpleasant I'm not sure what they did to him after they they strung them out on the wheel the the other how close did did they oh yeah this morning is well remember remember attack adobe walls went right remember though if the guy who owned adobe walls had not had advanced intelligence of that attack attack it would have there there the white men would have lost it absolutely and they would have lost it very quickly he got advanced intelligence now that's a good question how how they how the buffalo hunters well he in this case did know you know what was what was coming militarily speaking you know you always have to I guess you know I'm reading a book about Stonewall Jackson and Lee now where were the famous whatever it is order number 198 falls into the hands of the Union Army and say what would have happened if that hadn't happened but I don't know I mean militarily speaking the raid should have worked except for the fact that somebody found out about it once it was there once they were inside those houses I don't know did quanta know or did the could they possibly have understood what kind of Arsenal those guys had because they had an arsenal that was almost unequalled in Western history just by chance the number of big 50s that they had those big big powerful you know the Billy Dixon of you know the famous shot the mile long shot I don't know I can't really fault I mean II Setai was sort of crazy but he said I was that was theja at the moment of the attack II Setai was naked and painted yellow and sitting on a horse and I had told them that they would be invulnerable to bullets I think so that the everybody starting with the Cheyennes and then ending with the Comanches decided that his magic wasn't any good but a nation Ty's name translates to let's see can i okay it so you could say it politely well we could say coyote vagina I think it was one of those Comanches all had these names like that that they were why won't I won't do Buffalo Hump but yeah read my book to find out what Buffalo hunts name was it wasn't that Buffalo up trust me okay changing gears sir this would segue into how did you learn the Comanche language that you picked up by I was much interested in in your translations yeah I didn't you know I didn't learn the Comanche language and I didn't know and I didn't you know what I did was I I relied on a couple of books that went into it when in some detail and whose people you know I I respected but that no I learning the language was beyond my my capabilities yes sir you go into the relationship between Charlie goodnight and and Quanah Parker and there's a story that I've heard where quanta and a few of his Braves go out to Charlie goodnights ranch beg him to give them a buffalo right and then there's a buffalo hunt it's not in your book though that little vignette how come you did it in there and what's the true story I know it is it is in my book the quanta quanta begs basically and other people begged if the no it isn't my book the the beg the authorities at Fort Sill for the right to go on a buffalo hunt they want to be able to go out again and takes them awhile but eventually they they trust and I said okay you you can go out and so they go out and they end up in Palo Duro Canyon and and and as I described it in my book to the great and astonishing shock that a white man owns it which you know was news to them then there's all that unpleasantness where they confront him and he confronts them and quanta and there's that there's that moment of of great conflict anyway it's the origin it's the foundation of the of the good night quanta tale and the relationship grows from that first meeting I guess that's 1876 but anyway check it out I get is in there well there's different versions of it oh yeah I know there's different versions of the leopard coat man's story and there's there's there is there are different versions of it but the version that that that I'm talking about it was it was actually a confrontation where it was it was not clear what was going to happen when they realized that this guy had claimed to be and I was what I described in my book is a conversation where they're trying to get good night to admit that he's a Texan because Comanches hate Texans a good night understands that if he admits it he's a Texan they may shoot something at him so he he says he's from Colorado and keeps answering the question since the way and then they quiz him on Colorado it's okay if you're from Colorado where's the headwaters the Arkansas River or whatever they did and kind of went on that way okay thanks all right there's Perce there's a famous fictional version of this incident John graves the last running which in which a quantity fanned the Charlie goodnight character he gives them a buffalo to run down and they and they run it down right and I think isn't there a film of this somewhere bad I don't know if I think there is but I'll double check before right that's the right that's another version of that sorry that's it that's one of the yeah it's it's a it's a that kind of the relationship between good night and Quan is just one of those pieces of American lore any other questions I think he headed toward the mic I wondered if you could talk a little bit more about the relationship between McKinsey and Quanah Parker seems like McKinsey has to learn how to successfully fight the Comanches right he learns and then later Quanah Parker has to learn successfully to live with the white man and be successful in that society and Mackenzie's one of the people who helps him succeed in that way and it's just an amazing relationship I wonder if you could talk more about the mutual respect that they had for each other it gave for each other and how they learn from each other it is an amazing relationship and unfortunately it's one of the one of the lot of it is just completely invisible you here we have Quanah on the record as saying you know his manners or whatever he understood of manners were taught by McKenzie but this happened behind closed doors again nobody wrote it down McKenzie didn't write a memoir nobody recorded that we have statements by quanta to the effect that what we do we do know that McKenzie was more helpful to it than anyone else initially when Kawana came back in trying to find his family and we know certain things but a lot of that is it's one of the reasons I hope somebody makes a movie out of this because in a movie you can see behind that door and see what they were doing and if if you if you fictionalized it to some extent but quanta was McKenzie became this astonishingly effective fighter and the high plains but his initial one of my favorite discoveries of this book for for me anyway I mean I'm not the first person who discovered it but that the Battle of Blanco Canyon in 1871 was this wonderful thing where quanta in effects schooled McKenzie in in this case the Indian art of escape there was a one of the people who was there wrote who actually hated Kuan I didn't like him at all Robert Carter wrote a magnificent memoir of this battle in which he describes and other people describe this to McKenzie is now riding with six hundred mounted blue coats on twenty Tonkawa Scouts and they're going after quanah's village they finally you know the grim warriors of the South you know of of the north rather grant Sherman and Sheridan under they decidedly going to put the end to this Comanche nonsense so they send McKenzie who's the you know who's Grant's favorite officer in the Civil War they say okay we're gonna send this guy we're gonna take care of this is gonna this is going to stop this frontier is not going to be rolling backward anymore so McKenzie rides out there was six hundred mounted blue coats and the Tonkawa Scouts in basically they're going after quanah's quo haughty village which has two hundred lodges in it it also has its it has everything in it that the village has it has old men and children and women and animals and stuff you know lodges so the the blue coats kind of ride up to the where the village was where the Scout said it was village is now gone they track it for a while and these are not just the Bluecoats who didn't know what they were doing but the Tonka was who did more anyway at some point they decided they figure out that the village has doubled back on them and is now behind them now you have to understand quanta has taken the field in an unusual position for a military commander he has a village he doesn't have 200 warriors now he well he has a village with it he's taken the field of combat if you will okay the whites and the I mean the blue coats and the tacos are now furious they bivouac for the night they get up the next day and they track they they go and they tracked the they tracked the village again this time they realized that the village has disappeared up over the top of the cap rock now I'm not sure exactly how high the cap rock is but it's anywhere between a two hundred and thousand feet so the village is now in order to get away disappeared up from the rolling plains below the cap rock this is about 20 miles east of Lubbock and now they're okay so the the the the soldiers now mount the bluff they get up on top of the bluff they track the the village for a while they come to this wildly Criss crossing patterns again at the horse Travoy smake and then they figured out that the that the tribe has gone down the mountain again they go down again they find these what this is taking place over two days again wildly Criss crossing the Travoy tracks which of our parallel lines in the desert and they lose them again eventually they figured out that the thing has now gone back up I'm not making this up this is this is an account of someone who does not admire Qantas so he's not giving him any points here the village then goes back up for a second time up over the cap Rock well and now okay but now the the Bluecoats know where they are so they climb the cap rock again they get up on top and if you've ever been on again in that road between like Lubbock and Emeril you know what it looks like out there so now up in the cap rock now they can see the village fleeing on the horizon they got him except that on cue as if from Cecil B DeMille comes a howling blue norther from the north the men are all and they're October in late October uniforms out there the temperature drops 60 degrees the wind goes to 40 miles an hour you know for those of us have been through in norther and then of course the the blue part of the norther comes in the snow and the McKenzie decides he can't really face this I mean that the trip troops are too tired so they bivouac for the night meanwhile quano leads his entire village away into the teeth of a blue norther and they disappear and they get away and so what that is is both Qantas Mackenzie Mackenzie would eventually figure out exactly where all those trails were and how they all worked up there but to me I don't know maybe Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce to this at some point but very few times in history I think the millet did a military commander take the field in effect with a village and win and when in this case escape was as important in plains warfare as fighting and winning and anyway that I'm sorry for that long-winded story but it was if ever there was a story about Quanah it was that one and again it was told by someone who did not admire him so he the guy was saying well ok these guys are geniuses on some level we've got time for one last question and by the way they are making a movie about this Larry McMurtry and Diana song and screenplay Ridley Scott's production comes yeah we're the Scots production company and yeah yeah and the director is Scott Cooper who did crazy heart and the studios Warner Brothers so Larry is supposed to have a script by June they're not that I have any do it one last question I want first of all to thank you mr. Gwyn for a wonderful book which I've read and was fascinated by I appreciate it and thank you for the talk which was also quite good very exciting and Steve was exciting too I do have a question the Comanche weren't the only horse Indians on the plains and the impression one is left with this there's this empire with roughly well-defined boundaries could you say a little bit about the horse Indians to the north the other were there other empires absum you could certainly argue that the northern Sioux who were very powerful and were also mounted the you had the horse the Indians who came the foot bound Plains Indians who came in the possession of the horse it became really good at it our household names as a result I mean we're talking about Sioux Cheyenne Arapaho Kiowa Blackfoot Comanche we all know those names right the reason we know them as they were the dominant horse tribes and they sort of stack up that way kind of with the Sioux dominant in the north from Minnesota on the east to the Dakotas in the West they were the the reason that I mean my my well what I'm writing about the Comanches and not the Sioux but one of the big differences between the Comanches in the Sioux and one of the reasons I argue that the Comanches were the most powerful and powerful in the sense that ability to influence history I guess the the the human civilization was all in the southern frontier where the collision was between Comanches there wasn't even a collision of it really any kind with the Western Sioux for example like the Oglala till 1854 and that was strictly military there weren't there weren't people there wasn't a frontier pushing forward there and so you had in a sense you had all the action on the human frontier if you will considering Oklahoma was full of relocated Indians what's happening in Texas and on the Oklahoman on these Plains here but absolutely there were horse Indians they were powerful they were dominant again we're talking Arapaho Cheyenne's you had southern Arapahos and southern Cheyenne's there was a kind of a line of demarcation that was fought over intensely in 1840 a line roughly I guess north and well north of the Arkansas River fought over by Arapahos and and and Comanches so it was it was the boundary of come and cherry was not necessarily static but one of the reasons that its northernmost component pretty much you know that it pretty much stopped at the Oklahoma northern boundary what is now the local home of boundary it was because of those other horse tribes who were powerful and had carved out their own empire but I also point out that the when the Comanches acquired the mastery of the horse and and they challenged everybody else for the part of the plains that you would have wanted the richest of all the Buffalo plains with the southern plains and my thesis is that the most powerful military tribe not only contested for it but got it okay we'll have to leave the discussion there

Channel: TheLBJLibrary

Views: 37,089

Rating: 4.8684211 out of 5

Keywords: Sam Gwynne, New York Times, LBJ Library & Museum, Empire of the Summer Moon, Stephen Harrigan, Comanche Indian Nation, Cynthia Anne Parker, Comanches

Id: dB2hiEUEVew

Length: 75min 24sec (4524 seconds)

Published: Wed May 09 2012