Empire of the Summer Moon by S. C. Gwynne

Sometimes a story of real life can be stranger, more dramatic, more glorious, and more tragic than fiction. That is the case with this fully researched history of Quanah Parker and the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history.

Gwynne recounts the history of the Comanches, who became the most proficient, ever,in fighting from horseback. Their tactics and capabilities allowed them to repulse the Spanish, the French, the Mexicans, the Texans, and the U.S. cavalry, until superior weapons and the almost total obliteration of their chief source of food, the buffalo, finally conquered them.

Many historians would have been content to document the grand sweep of events, but Gwynne does more. This is also the dramatic saga of Cynthia Ann Parker, the white child who was kidnapped by Comanches, and of her half-blood son Quanah Parker, the last and greatest Comanche chief. It is also a narrative of the extraordinary life of Ranald S. Mackenzie, the cavalry leader who destroyed the Comanches but later befriended Quanah on the reservation. Although he was America's greatest Indian fighter, he never attracted the fame of Custer, and his life ended in madness.

Empire of the Summer Moon is, most of all, a history with emotion. And that emotion is sadness. Sadness for the life of Cynthia Ann, who was forcibly ripped from her known world twice, once by the Comanches and once by her "rescuers," who returned her to be an unwilling prisoner of her white relatives. Gwynne says, "But it was painfully apparent from the earliest days that the real tragedy in her life was not her first captivity but her second." Sadness for the inevitable tragedies that occur when a primitive, free-roaming people clash with hardy, determined families attempting to make new lives for themselves. (I cried while reading a history, for goodness sake!)

What makes this book riveting is that Gwynne is not a historian who writes books, but rather a writer who is also a first-class historian. The history is thorough, impartial, and extensively documented through primary sources. The writing is both lyrical and brutal and reads like a Hollywood-worthy epic. Highly recommended for both history buffs and fiction readers.