Empire of the Summer Moon

I picked up S.C. Gwynne's story of "Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History" at the suggestion of my esteemed colleague from Texas.  Since the subtitle leaves little to the imagination, about the only thing I need to add is that it is also, as a sort of byproduct, an interesting history of Texas from the Mexican period up through the Reconstruction era.  Learning more about this wild and wooly history of early Texas actually makes it pretty obvious why Texans are so weird (aforementioned esteemed colleague excepted).  If I had lived the bloody history of this contested frontier -- constantly forced to defend itself from the Mexicans on one side and the Comanches on the other, as well as equally constant witness to the clueless incompetence of the US Federal government's interventions -- I'd probably also want to solve every problem by picking up a gun and doing it myself.  

That was some traumatic shit out there!  The book is filled with horrifically detailed stories of just how nasty, brutish, and short life could be on the edge of the empire -- regardless of which side of the edge one was on.  Obviously we're not surprised to discover that in the end the whale wins and the Comanches are almost completely wiped out.  But the way their culture of extreme violence towards the settlers and other Native American tribes allowed them to survive many decades against overwhelming odds is pretty impressive from a military perspective.  Beyond this perhaps over elaborately described military history, the book also tells the story of some of the human beings who lived all this trauma.  The most compelling character is of course right there in the subtitle.  Quanah Parker was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, a settler captured as a girl and raised as a Comanche, and who, as a grown woman, famously showed no interest in returning to white society.  Quanah begins his career as a rabidly anti-white Comanche war chief and ends it, after his people have been confined to the reservation, as an optimistic voice of modernization and adaptation.  It's hard to imagine a more surprising second act in life.