Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

As the US pushed its borders westward over the course of the 19th century, in pursuit of what the newspaper columnist John O’Sullivan in 1845 termed “our manifest destiny,” the fledgling nation came into conflict not only with Mexico—itself newly broken free from the Spanish Empire—but also with the many Indigenous groups that had lived on the land since long before the first Europeans arrived.

Relations between white settlers and the Indigenous peoples of the West were largely peaceful in the early decades of the 19th century. Fur trappers established trade relations with Indigenous groups, and those traveling westward on the Oregon and Santa Fe trails were protected by treaties that recognized tribal sovereignty while granting safe passage to settlers moving through tribal lands. The 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie forms a capstone to this peaceful era, and the fact that the US government broke the treaty almost as soon as it had been ratified signals the era’s end. The treaty allowed the US to build roads through tribal lands in the Black Hills of present-day South Dakota, but it also stipulated that these lands belonged to the tribes and that the US did not claim any part of them. This situation changed in 1858, when gold was discovered in the area of Pike’s Peak, Colorado (then on the border of the Kansas and Nebraska territories). The Pike’s Peak Gold Rush brought a massive influx of white migrants from the East, and these migrants—in violation of the treaty—competed with Indigenous people for space and resources, swiftly pushing the tribes out of their ancestral lands. Hunters began killing off the bison that the tribes depended on, and soon the scarcity of resources led to fighting both among the tribes and between Indigenous people and white Americans.

In the second half of the 19th century, conflicts like the one described above played out all over the American West as patterns of white settlement disrupted Indigenous ways of life. The Comanche raid on Fort Parker in 1836—recounted in Empire of the Summer Moon—represents the beginnings of what came to be called the “Indian Wars.” Quanah Parker—the son of Comanche chief Peta Nocona and Cynthia Ann Parker, who was abducted from Fort Parker in the raid—lived to see the end of those wars. When his band surrendered to US forces at Fort Sill in 1875, the bison had already been hunted to the verge of extinction, and the traditional Comanche way of life was at an end.