Book Review: Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

European-Americans in the southern Great Plains feared them, other Native Americans quickly learned to get out of their way, and eventually the United States army would have to learn to be like them to defeat them. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne gives a general history of the Comanche nation from their rise as a power on the Plains thanks to the introduction of the horse and their fall with the near extinction of the bison mainly through the lives of Quanah Parker and his mother.

Gwynne’s dual history of the Comanche nation and the Parker family so closely linked with them for most of the 19th Century, are two different books combined in one that separately would have been good but together is just okay. While the subtitle implies that Quanah Parker plays a larger role in the history of the Comanche, his prominence is in the closing days of the Comanche’s pre-reservation years and attempt to help his people once on the reservation by essentially calling duplicitous government efforts to take away reservation land. One of the biggest issues throughout is Gwynne’s use of civilization and barbarism in relation to the Comanche and Euro-Americans they encountered, along with related words like savage when not in the context of a quote, is haphazard at best and problematic at worst that should have been taken care of in the editing process.

Empire of the Summer Moon is a very good general history of the Comanche as well as very good family drama in a clash of cultures only if the two were separated as together they are an okay combination. While S.C. Gwynne shows the complicated interactions between Native tribes and the ever-expanding tide of Anglo-American settlement well, his terminology is questionable and distracting.

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