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S.C. GwynneEmpire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Anti-Custer”
Ranald Slidell Mackenzie came from a well-to-do family from New York. He attended and graduated from West Point. One of his contemporaries at West Point was George Custer, and they were competitors, each wanting to outdo the other. During the war, Mackenzie was wounded several times, and the artillery shell that removed two of his fingers led to his nickname among the Comanches, Bad Hand. After stellar service during the Civil War, in 1871 Mackenzie was given command of the Fourth Cavalry, which was stationed on the Texas frontier. His appointment “was a direct consequence of President Grant’s increasing impatience with the ‘peace policy’” (238). Mackenzie was a man President Grant knew would be able to defeat the Comanche, though it wasn’t going to be an easy job.
As pointed out in earlier chapters, the frontier was often chaotic and bloody, and the “peace policy” that President Grant disliked was failing due to incompetence and outright corruption at the highest levels of the Office of Indian Affairs. The policy’s “most basic problem was that [it] rewarded aggression and punished good conduct” (241). The Indigenous people recognized that the treaties were worthless and that if they wanted to get goods the best way of doing so was to raid and kill because inevitably the government would come to them with “gifts” to get them to stop raiding.
Mackenzie’s first plan of action was aggressive, whereas previously the strategy was one of defense and reaction. However, it was a steep learning curve for Mackenzie and his troops in the initial phases of their campaign. The first Comanches Mackenzie encountered were Quanah and his band of Quahadi Comanches.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Mackenzie Unbound”
Though the beginning of Mackenzie’s campaign into Comancheria in 1872 nearly resulted in disaster for him and his troops, it nevertheless signaled the beginning of the end for the Comanches: For the first time, a sizable American force displayed its willingness to invade and destroy the Comanches in their homelands, rather than merely protecting the frontier. However, it would still take some time before the Comanches were fully defeated, and in 1872 the raids were frequent and violent: “Many residents of the frontier […] thought that 1872 was the worst year ever for Indian raids” (251). The war raged on, and Mackenzie was learning how best to fight the Indians.
Chapter 18 Summary: “The Hide Men and the Messiah”
As much trouble as the Comanches had with Mackenzie, there was another aspect of American westward expansion into their lands that caused even more destruction to the Comanche way of life, and that was the buffalo hunters. In 1870, a new tanning method allowed buffalo hides to be turned into high-grade leather. Thus began the true mass slaughter of the buffalo herds: “A hunter named Tom Nixon once shot 120 animals in 40 minutes. In 1873, he killed 3,200 in 35 days” (260).
As the buffalo herds progressively disappeared and the Indigenous people grew desperate, a Comanche named Isa-tai had a powerful vision. Isa-tai was a young medicine man and claimed to possess superhuman powers like raising people from the dead. In his vision, Isa-tai claimed that he was taken up into the clouds and spoke with the Great Spirit, who gave him great powers, wherewith to destroy the white men and restore Comanche prowess. Quanah believed in Isa-tai’s vision. Isa-tai called all Comanches together for a Sun Dance to prepare for war, something that had never been done before.
The first attack, against a buffalo hunting camp, did not go well. The hunters had been informed of a pending attack and were thus not taken by surprise. The Comanches could not burn down the building housing the hunters, because it was covered in damp sod. The hunters also possessed powerful, long-range rifles. They were all crack shots and had plenty of ammunition and stores of other supplies. The Comanches were quickly repulsed and discovered that they had to retreat far away because the hunters could snipe them from a great distance. One Indigenous person was shot from almost a mile away. That was the Second Battle of Adobe Walls, a complete failure for the Comanche.
Despite this failure, the Comanches conducted successful raids elsewhere. However, that year of 1874 was a turning point. The increase in violence destroyed the final vestiges of peace advocacy. All reservations were placed under military control. President Grant made the government’s goal clear: The army was to hunt down all remaining Indigenous groups and bring them under control on reservations. There would be no more peace until this was accomplished.
Chapters 16-18 Analysis
In Chapter 16, with the focus on Mackenzie and his role in “turning the tide” in the struggle against the Comanche and other Plains tribes, Gwynne once again emphasizes The Failure to Pass Down Knowledge as a key reason for the tactical mistakes made by the US in combating the Indigenous people of the Great Plains. It seems to all stem from a lack of study, meaning that no one learned from previous experiences. Juan Bautista de Anza, one of the earliest Europeans who successfully battled the Comanche, wrote down much of his experience, but it was all in Spanish, and it is unlikely that men like Mackenzie had access to the original Spanish or a translation. However, Jack Hays left behind enough material at the time for someone to have been able to construct a moderate idea of the type of enemy they were facing, what sort of tactics worked best, and, most importantly, what to avoid. No one appeared to learn from anyone else about how to fight the Plains tribes—a recurring theme throughout the history of the conflict.
Even when the US government sought peace with Indigenous people, their efforts were often stymied by corruption. The abject corruption of the Office of Indian Affairs is best illustrated by the appointment of Quakers in the newly created Indian Bureau. The US government had to turn to a highly religious group of Protestants, whose strong beliefs in peace and honesty made it less likely that attempts at reconciliation would be sabotaged by agents who stole and sold goods destined for Indigenous people to fill their personal pocketbooks.
In Chapter 17, the slow disintegration of the old Comanche way of life is illustrated by the fact that the Comanche bands, which had previously been autonomous, were increasingly forced to intermingle. This chipped away at the Penatekas by increasing their dependence on American goods and cross-cultural interchange, something that was happening to other Comanche tribes as well, even the fiercely independent and aloof Quahadi band. Part of this was inevitable—no culture remains unchanged when it interacts with another, as the book’s depiction of the Europeans and white Americans illustrates. However, the antagonism between these two cultures, coupled with Anti-Indigenous Racism and Cultural Misunderstanding, caused not only a physical war but a cultural one as well. The soon-to-be-victorious US did not, for the most part, view Indigenous culture as anything positive, and thus it sought to eradicate either the peoples themselves or their way of life through “reeducation programs.” The prospect of drastic and rapid cultural change only fueled the animosity between the two sides.
It is stated that Mackenzie represented the new, aggressive policy of the US government toward the tribes, and one of the best supporting examples is not only the fact that Mackenzie and his troops took the battle into the heartland of the Comanches but also that any horses captured by US troops were ordered to be killed. Horses were prized animals not only by the Comanche but by white Americans as well, and the Comanches possessed many valuable animals that could have brought a lot of money at market or supplied the military. However, this was not a priority for Mackenzie, who quickly learned how adept the Comanches were at stealing horses and how important they were to the Comanches’ ability to conduct war. Therefore, the destruction of all Comanche horses also destroyed the Comanche economy and means of fighting, much like destroying production facilities and railroads in modern warfare does. The tactic is reminiscent of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea—his scorched-earth campaign during the Civil War.
The buffalo hunt was not only lucrative for those involved but also served a political purpose. With the destruction of the great herds, the Comanche lost a pillar that supported their culture. They found that they were unable to support themselves and their families. While Mackenzie’s killing of captured Comanche horses was a deliberate military act, the buffalo hunt was primarily an economic activity that served a military purpose almost by accident. General Phil Sheridan stated: “These men have done in the last two years…more to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last thirty years” (262). Thus, the Comanches’ homeland was being militarily invaded, their military industry of horse husbandry was being targeted and destroyed, and they were being starved into submission. The fight against the Comanches, on a micro-scale, displayed characteristics of total war, which Europeans and Americans were skilled at conducting but which was alien to the Comanche. For all the Comanches’ martial prowess and bravery, they lacked the experience, coordination, and strategy of fighting a protracted war.
