I picked up this book in the bookstore. The cover featured a plains Indian with feathers and beads and everything else. It was interesting, so I opened the thing. This was the blurb on the inside flaps of the jacket:

That was interesting, so I opened the thing at random and read about a peace treaty in the old west that actually worked. That was enough. I had to read this book. It really is extremely interesting. Despite what the blurb says, the book starts with the Comanche being a relatively small tribe of small people relegated to the rough parts (poor hunting grounds) of Colorado by stronger tribes, maybe 400 years ago or so. Then when the Spanish introduced horses, they did a better job of learning how to use the beasts than anybody else, and became the new dominant tribe of the area between what is now Mexico and Oklahoma, all the way from where the forests end to the deserts of New Mexico. The above story is told in some detail, and covers maybe 100 pages or so.

Gwynne explains such things as why Mexico gave Texas away. It seems that Comanche raids were making it uninhabitable, so they didn't argue too much when somebody else wanted it. A generation later Washington took over, but on the plains all that didn't matter. That was Comancheria to anybody that was there. The Manifest Destiny thing was a driving force in Washington at the time, so they (we?) opened the frontier to settlement. The Parkers were part of that. The Comanche were the kind of people that kept themselves busy all summer long doing things like hunting and raiding, so it was probably inevitable that the Parker fort would get raided next at some point. That's where Cynthia Ann came into the story, old enough to be useful to the Comanche after the raid, and young enough that the Indians didn't just kill her, which they usually did to adults that didn't escape during raids.

The bulk of the book really is the story of Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker, with plenty of asides that explain the factors surrounding their lives. The author fleshes out what is known from Cynthia Ann by adding a couple of other parallel stories that seem to have been better written. This is particularly interesting because there isn't much written information about what it was like to be a plains Indian of those days. Most of what we have are the few written accounts from people like Cynthia Ann that were brought back into the white world after spending time as Indians. There might be three or four of those, and I think at least two of them are built into this book. The story is told with original source material quoted and footnoted extensively. This quote affected me more than most:

It turns out that her two sons were the only two Indians that escaped that raid where she was recaptured. One of them died only a few years later, but the other went on to be a remarkable man. He led one of the last bands of Indians on the southern plains to move onto a reservation, and the story is gripping reading. Even though we already know how it turned out, still the game of cat and mouse that is played out on the pages kept me reading. Since they couldn't beat him in battle, the buffalo hunt was dreamed up to tip the scales in the U. S. Army's favor. They surrendered only after there was no meat left to hunt. When Quanah was finally put on a reservation they found out he was Cynthia Ann Parker's son when he asked "what happened to my mother?"

The last 25 pages or so tells Quanah Parker's reservation life. It's a better story than you'd expect. The guy became a famous cattle rancher and notable speaker, with the title Principal Chief of the Comanches, which he took seriously. His home was big and comfortable and he entertained many people there, including such notables as President Teddy Roosevelt and Geronimo. I love the way he explained to a visitor how the white man took over Texas:

Quanah Parker died in 1911, doing about as well as anybody can at leaving no material trace behind. Not much money, not much debt, but more than a few stories like this one for those who want to know more about how our world used to be. The government retired the title Principal Chief of the Comanches after that, so nobody has held it since. So much has changed it seems unlikely there will be another like him again soon.