Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize

This stunning historic account of the forty-year fight between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American Western world was a significant New York Times bestseller.

In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account from the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all.

S. C. Gwynne’s Empire of the about Empire of the summertime Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American Background Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most effective Indian tribe in American history. The next entails one of the most extraordinary narratives ever to emerge from the Old Western: the epic saga of the pioneer girl Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the final and greatest key from the Comanches.

Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it had been actually the renowned fighting ability from the Comanches that determined just how and when the American Western opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age group six; complete Comanche braves had been considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at battle and so skillful using their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern get of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French extension westward from Louisiana. Light settlers arriving in Tx in the eastern USA were surprised to find the frontier becoming rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. Therefore effective were the Comanches that they pressured the creation of the Tx Rangers and take into account the development of the new tool specifically made to fight them: the six-gun.

The war with the Comanches lasted four decades, in effect holding up the development of the brand new American nation. Gwynne’s exhilarating accounts delivers a sweeping narrative that includes Spanish colonialism, the Civil War, the destruction of the buffalo herds, as well as the arrival of the railroads-a historic feast for anybody interested in the way the USA happened.

From this backdrop Gwynne presents the powerful play of Cynthia Ann Parker, a lovely nine-year-old young lady with cornflower-blue eye who was simply kidnapped by Comanches from the far Tx frontier in 1836. She grew to like her captors and became infamous as the “White colored Squaw” who refused to come back until her tragic catch by Tx Rangers in 1860. More well-known still was her boy Quanah, a warrior who was simply hardly ever defeated and whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a tale.

S. C. Gwynne’s account of these events is meticulously investigated, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told. Empire of the Summer Moon announces him as a significant new author of American history.