Comanches: The History of a People by T R Fehrenbach

by T.R. Fehrenbach

Authoritative and immediate, this is a brilliant account of the most powerful of the American Indian tribes. T. R. Fehrenbach traces the Comanches' rise to power, from their prehistoric origins to their domination of the high plains for more than a century until their demise in the face of Anglo-American expansion.Master horseback riders who lived in teepees and hunted bison, the Comanches were stunning orators, disciplined warriors, and the finest makers of arrows. They lived by a strict legal code and worshipped within a cosmology of magic. As he portrays the Comanche lifestyle, Fehrenbach re-creates their doomed battle against European encroachment. While they destroyed the Spanish dream of colonizing North America and blocked the French advance into the Southwest, the Comanches ultimately fell before the Texas Rangers and the U. S. Army in the great raids and battles of the mid-nineteenth century.This is a classic American story, vividly and poignantly told.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Native American, Native Americans, Westerns, American

Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Theodore Reed Fehrenbach, Jr. was an American historian, columnist, and the former head of the Texas Historical Commission (1987-1991). He graduated from Princeton University in 1947, and had published more than twenty books, including the best seller Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans and This Kind of War, about the Korean War.

Although he served as a U.S. Army officer during the Korean War, his own service is not mentioned in the book. Fehrenbach also wrote for Esquire, The Atlantic, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New Republic. He was known as an authority on Texas, Mexico, and the Comanche people. For almost 30 years, he wrote a weekly column on Sundays for the San Antonio Express-News. T.R. Fehrenbach was 88 years old at the time of his death.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

After enjoying Fehrenbach's Lone Star, a massive history of Texas, Comanches comes as a great disappointment.

It begins, like Lone Star, with the beginning of time. It starts by describing the formation of the all-important geography that shapes this story of the Comanche people, and those who took their lands. The first half of the book - the better half - is devoted to a general sociological and anthropological survey of the Amerindians who became known as Comanche. It's a fascinating portrait of people living short, unimaginably difficult lives, where the slightest scratch could kill them, and the simplest tasks necessary for daily existence required enormous effort. Fehrenbach does well with this section, all the more so because he is an exceptionally talented writer, as in this description of the land:

It was an enormous, varied, but almost formless land with few dividing boundaries...rare river bottoms, with shallow, muddy flows but carved deeply into the land and lined with trees; distant scarps and buttes thrusting their crumbling limestone up from the dusty mesa; mesquite-studded landscapes vanishing suddenly into the high, thin air of blue-mountained desert; and perhaps most dramatic to the human eye, the border region where the trees and rain ran out and the landscapes turned to unmeasurable miles of bending soughing grass.

The second half of the book, as it focuses on the history of the Comanche, rather than their general culture, falters terribly. The book is set up neatly: successive chapters devoted to the Comanche and the Spanish, the Comanche and the French, the Comanche and the Mexicans, the Comanche and the Texans, and finally, the Comanche and the Americans. Unfortunately, the content of the book does not mesh with the table of contents. The book is unfocused and wildly diverging. There are countless distracting digressions, as well as countless comparisons to other tribes, such as the Algonquins, the Lakota, the Cherokee and the Cheyenne. These comparisons are helpful, as far as they go (especially interesting was the comparison in horsemanship between the short, squat Comanche with the taller, more athletic Siouan tribes), but they serve more to point out differences between the tribes, rather than highlighting the specific attributes of the Comanche.

Fehrenbach's soft paternalism and old-man-ethnocentrism is on display again. He bends over backwards to tell us how noble, brave, and hearty the Comanche were, but does not neglect to remind us they were barbarians of a lower order, who never managed to progress like their civilized European brothers. He does a good job, though, of pointing out how the Comanches' failure to adapt ultimately proved their doom. When they discovered the horse, for example, they did not use it to drastically change their lives; instead, they used it to better follow the lives they already lived. Adapting verses progressing, however subtle the difference, is a big theme in the book.

The Comanches are nearly lost in the chapters dealing with the Texans and the Americans. What I appreciated most about Lone Star was Fehrenbach's ability to sketch a meaningful portrait of a person in just a paragraph. Here, literally two or three people are given any attention at all, and none of them are Comanche. He lavishes slavish attention on Texas Ranger Jack Ford and American cavalryman Ranald Mackenzie. And he tells all the old stories - the massacre at Parker's Fort, Council House Fight, the Linville Raid, and the Plum Creek battle - from the Texan perspective. We never go into the camps; we never learn what it was like to be a Comanche during this period; we are given no biographical sketches of the great Comanche leaders such as Peta Nocona and Quanah Parker. Instead, we are told to empathize, time and again, with the Texas settlers who had to face the marauding Comanche. At one surprising juncture, I was even told that the Texas settlers were blameless innocents. I will now pitch a house in Fehrenbach's front yard, and then tell him to suck it.

Fehrenbach also reminds me a bit of Francis Parkman in his almost psycho-sexual obession with torture. Sure, he tries to be fair, mentioning, off hand, that the Texans and Americans practiced their own brand of brutality (namely genocide, as defined by the UN General Assembly). But Fehrenbach is fixated by torture and mutilation, nearly reveling in stories of knives being shoved in into the "sexual organs" or women.

The dead were mutilated horribly. Arms and legs were severed, genitals invariably smashed or amputated. Female breasts were sliced off, and corpses of both sexes were eviscerated and decapitated. Bloody entrails were burned if there was time. All this crippled the enemy dead for eternity. Above all, the scalp of every age and sex was taken, by drawing a deep cut around the hair line, then popping off the top of the head. Sometimes the whole scalp, sometimes only a centerpiece was retained, to be tanned carefully and stretched and preserved as a permanent trophy.

Has T.R. Fehrenbach read The Kindly Ones yet? Because I think he'd like it.

In his telling, the Comanche women were fiendish demons who knew how to torture much better than their lily-livered husbands. At one point, he states this is justification for their deaths at the hands of Texas Rangers.

Fehrenbach is also obsessed with rape - "ravishment" to use the lingo of the day. He is so obsessed he continually digresses to the Sioux (Santee Dakota) Uprising in Minnesota in 1862. He notes the countless rapes that took place there, for no real reason, since this is a book on the Comanche. Moreover, even a cursory bit of research of the court records made in the wake of the uprising (helpfully put online by the University of Missouri-KC) show that there were very few - maybe 3 - corroborated instances of rape.

This is a huge, HUGE, problem with Fehrenbach. He is utterly, preposterously credulous. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that he has NO notes at all. I don't have a single clue about his scholarship. Judging from what I read, he looked at the primary sources with the eyes of a gun-obsessed ten-year-old. He throws out figures - 70 dead, 100 dead, 500 dead - that are just astronomical (and frankly, not possible). Without criticism or analysis, he passes on Lt. Pettit's report of 3,000 warriors at the battle of Adobe Walls. 3,000! So, using the conservative rule of 3 - three noncombatants to every warrior - there was a village of 12,000 Amerindians in the neighborhood. To quote Vizzini from The Princess Bride: "Inconceivable!" What we are actually dealing with is an excited witness who obviously overstated the numbers of combatants, but Fehrenbach blithely continues with his story.

As the book went on, I just got more and more annoyed. For some reason, Fehrenbach has a tendency to name drop in the smuggest way possible, referring, for example, to "the frontiersman Carson" or "the general Harney." Why don't you just call them by name and tell us who they are (Kit Carson and William Selby Harney). The book is nearly 600 pages, did you really not have the room?

I also grew weary of his incessant Custer bashing. He keeps referring, offhand, to Custer as a fool and nitwit. I guess maybe he was letting a little white guilt shine through, but it's just puerile and amounts to a historical cheap shot. It's such an easy thing to say, and could not be farther from the truth (the truth being nuanced). Every time he wrote it, I kept thinking to myself, if all this guy's research is this sloppy, I wonder if I can take anything here seriously. I expect this from Dee Brown and Mari Sandoz, but not Fehrenbach.

The book is at times embarrassingly ethnocentric. In a book that is about Comanches, subtitled "a history of a people," there is remarkably little space devoted to those people. This is more a history of the Texans, whose travails are told in great detail, and a history of the US government's dealings with the Amerindians.

At the end of the book, with the Comanche on a reservation, Fehrenbach relates the story of an Indian agent who allowed the Comanche a controlled hunt. The hunt was a failure:

The Indian agent did not understand Comanches, nor could he really feel what was happening to their souls. But hungry children troubled him. He sent emissaries, with wagons of food, out to the prairie. When these arrived, the Comanches were sitting in their tipis in a snow storm. They were starving. They accepted the food sullenly and listened to the agent's request that they come back to the reservation, where they would be cared for by the government. The last hunt camp was broken. The tipis were struck, the bows and lances put away. Then, in a long, silent column, the Comanches left the graveyard plains, returning to the agency for the completion of their destruction.

It is a tragic end, but like the agent, I also couldn't understand what was happening to the Comanches' souls. Because this book hadn't bothered to shed the least bit of light onto them.

[Edward Gwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

In-depth and enjoyable. A sprawling history of the Amerindians, specifically the Comanche tribe. There are times when the author seems to write with judgement and distaste, which shouldn't be the case in a history, but it is detailed and fascinating.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is superb history - dispassionate though not without judgment, informative with a clear narrative and capable both of changing prejudices and assumptions and suggesting analogies with today.

Fehrenbach wrote this book forty years ago as a sympathetic historian of Texas and Mexico who was filling in the natural sovereign gap in the history of the South West - the 'savage' Comancheria.

Because it was written so long ago, it was also written before 'political correctness' obliged us to accept an entirely false view of the benignity of savagery because of our fear of what Hobbes claimed.

In fact, Fehrenbach (who does have a bias towards 'civilisation' that might be unwarranted) treats the southern plains Amerindians with more respect and less sentimentality than East Coast liberals.

He takes them for what they were and not what deeply idiotic Quaker Indian agents would like them to have been - the book presents a standing argument for keeping religion and ideology out of empire.

There are two overwhelming truths about the dreadful experience of the Comanche: the official state machines of Texas and the USA were never in control of the situation; and the Indians were vicious.

The first point is one of demography and not actually of superiority. Indeed, the white settlers were held back, even pushed back by Comanche determination, for many decades.

Driving the white population forward was the simple fact that they were breeding like rabbits and surviving, sending waves of dour Baptists and then desperate migrants eastwards.

Ironically, the West is now besieged by the opposite - excitable pentecostalists and islamists and desperate migrants moving northwards with the same sort of sentimentalist evading the consequences.

The native Amerindians were numbered in tens of thousands, not millions, and were defeated ultimately first by disease and second by a market-driven, not calculated, destruction of the bison herds.

The United States in particular, but also the Republic of Texas, were not sophisticated hierarchical empires with the ability to enforce assimilation or treaties but polities trying to keep a lid on things.

The British in Canada preserved Indian culture by enforcing deals against settlers but the sheer scale of European migration and the weakness of the state meant that this was not possible in the US.

Hence the much written about tragedy of long and violent border wars and brutal and intermittent guerrilla actions leading to the utterly self-destructive tactics of the tribes and their final destruction.

Fehrenbach plausibly argues, using the Navajo example and alluding to Canada, that the best strategy for the Indians would have been a decisive military defeat and enforceable treaty-making.

It is at this point that he may be too kind to the populist federal republics that emerged in Texas and which made up the rather nasty Jacksonian democracy that drove agrarian indians ever westward.

The plains indians were not fools but simply ignorant and Jacksonian democracy as a political model had lies and faithlessness built into it - Texas was a mere extension of Christian Southern arrogance.

The point was that the Indians could never possibly resist the surge from the East because it was many and they were few but their culture and experience failed them in organising adequately to deal with this.

A diferent sort of Indian culture might have followed the classic barbarian model of creating a single Comanche proto-state that could create its own settler patterns but this was not to be.

Had it had the intellectual and organisational resources to do this, it would have followed the Slav pattern, created a sovereign war chief ('king'), adopted Protestant Christianity and become the Comanche Republic as a state within the Union or independent.

This could either have happened naturally (which no plains indian seemed able to achieve) or as a result of a defeat in effective collaboration with a sympathetic federal enemy (as in Canada).

This latter is not as absurd as it sounds since the military were professional not racist and there was a strong body of Eastern opinion sympathetic, overly so, to the Amerindians.

Unfortunately, the classic problem of American democracy - populist hysteria and inter-agency conflict constantly evaded a decisive handling of the problem.

When the military were finally permitted a free hand, the war of attrition between millions of whites and thousands of Comanche was a brutal walk over that destroyed a culture that had no room to adapt.

The Comanche, by their blunders and brutality, also sped up the end for their northern plains counterparts but that is another story.

So far, my account of the book sounds rather one-sided but that is because I have missed out the essential truth of the conflict - that the Comanches and other southern plains tribes really were savage.

The small-minded Baptists and racists were no less unappealing to modern tastes and many whites were thugs of the first order but the plains indian culture was inherently violent.

What we are dealing with here are not the romantic noble figures with waving feather headdresses who speak of great spirits and environmental responsibility but torturing half-beasts.

These were stone age people engaged in permanent internecine warfare of consummate brutality, engaging in the vilest form of torture and destruction for a form of 'honour'.

Horses and then iron simply upgraded the methodology of terror to include the plains and competition with other tribes. This moved on to brutal raids against vulnerable Mexican villagers for loot.

Given the culture, its misogynistic kin-orientated brutalities would naturally be applied to the very different tejanos even if they were initially restrained with the americanos.

Be in no doubt, the horrors perpetrated by the Amerindians on their own kind and the settlers - systematic rape, mutilation, kidnapping, enslavement, murder and wanton destruction - were 'normal'.

Any excuse that they were responding to the invasion of their territory does not hold water. They were raiding because it was profitable and that is what their young men did to get 'honour'.

Fehrenbach's book is good not only in clarifying this but in giving important context for each stage of the Comanche's evolution so that we learn a lot about the history of the whole American South West.

As he points out, what was 'normal' to Amerindians became normalised as barbarities amongst the besieged 'tejanos' although the Texans and Americans certainly did not rape, mutilate and torture as a 'norm'.

These were two incommensurate borderlands cultures and, as we know from European history, borderlands are the liminal areas where any cultural restraints will collapse under pressure.

Fehrenbach points out the differential in 'organisation' (not intelligence or technology) and the effects of demography and market capitalism as decisive in the final American victory.

But, as we note above, this victory took an inordinately long time a-coming and only emerged when the American Civil War had permitted the federal state the ability to organise itself for modernity.

The story is a tragedy. There are many capable people in it and some heroes - the disastrous rule of the Quaker Indian agents must not be included here. Most people here are muddling through on tram-lines.

Perhaps that is the lesson for today - populist democracies can never seem to get a grip on what needs to be done and there is, as a result, far more suffering than is necessary.

For all their brutalities and short lives, the plains indians deserve the respect that Fehrenbach and the best of the soldiery gave to them.

They deserved an early defeat in battle with honour and a treaty imposed by a superior force that enforced its provisions with the same sense of honour and professionalism as was found in Canada.

(Although we should be careful of claiming too much British Imperial decency. Once those missionaries got their teeth into the tribes, the decency started to disappear pretty quickly)

Instead, the Comanche faced a weak state whose lies and incompetencies derived from sentimentalism and religion. These did far more harm to them than any number of honest military defeats could have done.

The soft sentimental liberal and faith-based mind simply cannot understand this - that progress comes from direct brutal struggle between strong forces succeeded by magnanimity and the rule of law.

The final form of the American Federal State, before it degenerated again into ideology and religiosity, got this perfectly right in 1945 after another existential struggle.

It is probable that the USA will never be great again until it learns the lessons of the Indian wars - use power effectively, decisively and sparingly and be generous to the defeated.

The treatment of the Amerindians after their defeat, despite their brutal 'norms', is a lasting stain on American democracy, indeed on the normative claims of the West in general.

I recommend this highly readable book to anyone who wants to understand our own species better, what differential power really means and why sentiment and faith are appalling guides to policy.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the penultimate history of the Comanche so far written. So little was known of the Nermernuh and so much of what was known was confused or misapplied from and to other Plains Amerindian bands or tribes even as late as the 1930s as to make a clear understanding of the role that the Comanche played within their own history and in the context of their place within the broader history of the North American continent. Fehrehbach has done a masterful job of carefully sorting and sifting through hundreds of years of historical information, beginning with the Nermernuh's hard-scrabble starvation-level root-digging in the Rockies to their discovery and adoption of the Spanish mustang, their transformation into true Horse Indians, their rise to power and long-standing position as the greatest light cavalry of the 19th Century and the outright owners of the most game-rich and temperate sections of the southern tier of the American Great Plains through their final destruction in 1873-1875. Amazing, heartbreaking, and fascinating reading. I would especially recommend this book to anyone interested in early Texas history.

[Steve Statham · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book, the best I've read on American Indian history. Fehrenbach takes a clear-eyed look at all perspectives in the conflicts between Comanches and other Indian tribes, and between Comanches and the European and American powers. He sugar-coats nothing, but makes a point of relating each side's point of view. And like all good histories, it occasionally steps beyond the specific subject matter to shed light on other aspects of North America's history.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fehrenbach is a truly gifted historian. His tale of the Comanche people has got to be one of the best histories ever written. It's a thorough and academic insight into the lives and culture of a once-fearsome tribe of Indians who stood their ground in middle America for years against the relentless westward pressure of the Anglos.

What makes this book great is not just Fehrenbach's lyric writing, but his sober and unsentimental look at what went on as Americans encroached on this country's original inhabitants. Fehrenbach isn't trying to romaticize or worship the Comanches, and he doen't subscribe to any New Age obsequience by viewing Native Americans as all-knowing shamanic wizards living in gentle harmony with nature. Instead, he only tries to see them for who they are, and that's what makes this book incredibly, endlessly powerful.

As with all good histories, tales of the past inform the present, and Fehrenbach writes well, both explicitly and implicitly, about what it means for all living Americans that our cultural inheritance includes wholesale extermination of entire peoples.

If you read this book, please send me a message and let me know what you thought. I have yet to meet anyone else who has ever read it.

[Andrew Edwards · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book if you're interested in the history of the southwest. It was part of a frenzied bunch of reading I did after inhaling Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. A substantial amount of McCarthy's basic philosophy came from this book.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

As becomes apparent even in the first chapter, this book is old school. I don't just mean that it was published in the early 70s. No, this book was old school by the standards of its time of publication. With that comes a lot of baggage about states of civilization on a mythic teleological kind of linear history that is older than Mitch McConnell's jowls.

So why 4 stars? This is big picture single issue history done right, even with its dated flaws. It starts with anthropology and prehistory of the Comanche people and then builds up their world view and experiences before their breaking out as America's greatest horse nomads. The author's biases do not get in the way of both a good story and a rigorous and multi-sided history as we learn the minutia of Comancheria and new things about Plains Wars in general.

While I still prefer Hemalainen's 'The Comanche Empire' as the preeminent work on this subject and would steer anyone there first, this is still a vital and enjoyable history on the native experience in the southern plains.

[Nicole · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's rare that I don't finish a book, no matter how badly I might hate it...and I only made it through sixty pages of this one.

The writing style was too flowery, and even worst, the tone was condescending. Every other paragraph he called the people he was talking about 'barbaric', 'inferior' or 'savage', and that is not a way to constantly describe the people you're writing about! It certainly doesn't make it sound like he actually respects these people and their history. Actually, it comes across as though he's talking about children, and how it's cute how hard Amerindians tried, but they were never going to be as good as Europeans. It was absolutely maddening.

[D.A. Vega · Rating 5 out of 5]

T.R. Fehrenbach's Comanches: The History of a People is the most comprehensive text that I've read about the Comanche to date. Fehrenbach presents a wealth of knowledge, following the Comanche as they split from the Northern Shoshone tribes, wandering south on the open plains where they met an ally that would raise them to be one of the most feared and venerable nations in the Americas; the horse. This work explores the history and the culture of the Comanche Empire. It is a thrilling and enlightening read.

[Zoe Aarden · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm finding this book difficult to read... It's racist and ethnocentric. And I'm only on page 20. Sigh. I'm finding it difficult to believe I'll glean anything of value from it, since Fehrenbach's perspective cannot possibly embrace or empathize with the reactions and experiences of the people he's writing about. Will try to finish the book, nonetheless.

[Roger S Pinkston · Rating 2 out of 5]

Initially, I thought that the book was well sourced and written. However, the author mistakenly identifies the 4th U.S. Cavalry under Colonel Mackenzie as consisting of Black soldiers. The 4th U.S. Cavalry was not a Buffalo Soldier unit. The 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments were the Buffalo Soldiers. I wonder what other details in the book were incorrect?

[Antonio De Cunzo · Rating 2 out of 5]

Terribly dated, repetitive, slightly offensive, and written in an overbearingly grandiose style.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

One downside of audiobooks is that the original publication date isn't always easily viewed. The language occasionally used by Fehrenbach is cringeworthy but slightly understandable for a book published in the 1970s (when it was written) but completely unacceptable for one released in 2024 (when the audiobook was first released). I think Fehrenbach is a pretty decent historian -- and there were many good takeaways from this book -- but I had to work to see past the Peter-Pan-esque way he often described the peoples about whom he was writing.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

First 3 chapter were very good. Admittedly I didn’t realize this was an older book—a bit of outdated assumptions and a grind to get through most of it.

[Steven Hull · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was introduced to Fehrenbach through his book, This Kind of War, a seminal book about the Korean War. I developed an interest in the Comanches by reading the excellent Empire of the Summer Moon, and The Searchers.
This book is a must read for anyone who wants to try and understand the life and death of the North American indigenous peoples and specifically the Comanches. Fehrenbach begins by going back thousands of years to the immigration of the original North Americans. He then moves into the age of the European incursion into North America and how this impacted the Natives. Here we learn why the destruction of the Comanches and other northern and southern Great Plains (and the surrounding environs to the west, east, north, and south) natives was inevitable.
Conventional wisdom and Hollywood’s movies would have one believe that the Europeans and later the Americans overwhelmed the Natives, which is partly true. However, the cultural incompatibility between the whites and the Natives ordained a long, bloody rivalry that could only end with the complete subjugation of the loser. Much of this inevitability resulted from the demands for fighting and war inbred into the Comanche culture.
Without going into detail, the author’s tale describes the greatest mounted warriors of all time, their culture, that culture’s demand for raiding, war and by white standards, extreme brutality. After centuries, the end for the Comanche came quickly as the Americans overwhelming superiority crushed the Comanches.
Every military officer should read this book. After doing so, it is clear why we never fully understand culturally the enemies we fight. Absent wars like World Wars I and II, where we totally defeated the enemies, our cultural ignorance easily invites into wars, where disengagement becomes impossible, as we grind our resources, blood and treasure into dust ignorant that we can never ‘win’ on our terms. Sadly we have seen this happen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Vietnam.

[Sam Stevenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fehrenbach is an absolute master in the genre. He is truly the only historian I have read who can say, truthfully, that he starts from the beginning. His pros truly let you into the mindset of the peoples he writes about, capturing the intricacies of his subjects, in simply, but in painstaking specificity. He sets cultures next to each other, not for the purposes of comparison or showing the brilliance and likewise the deficiency of the other, but to simply better describe the culture he wishes to shed a light on by putting it next to something we know better and letting the reader draw from their own experience.
There is no bad guy on his histories which is in keeping (for the most part at least) with the actual truth of history. He shows the desperate struggle of a people against a equally desperate struggle against them and truly shows the diametrically opposed natures of the two peoples and presents that as the real culprit of the Natives demise rather than wanton blood-thirst and rage.
I will never not enjoy a book by Fehrenbach but must admit that it will require some time on my part before I start another one as they are truly undertakings but ones I cannot recommend enough to people truly wishing to hear the unfiltered and un-politicized side of history.

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fehrenbach's history of the Comanches was a difficult book to rate. The book was not as much a history of the Comanches as it was a history of the years the Comanches ruled their lands and their battle to keep their lands. That wasn't my problem with the book. The history of the time period was actually interesting.

The problem was the author's blatant racism. Several times I wanted to give up and stop reading, not because the story wasn't interesting but because it was difficult to take anything Fehrenbach said seriously. Calling the people you are writing about barbarians does not give me any hope that there will be any kind of honest appraisal of the subject matter.

I did keep reading and once in awhile Fehrenbach would actually be complimentary of the Comanches but it was rare. Most often he focused on the violence of the culture of the southwestern Indians. In Fehrenbach's defense he was not all that complimentary of the Tejanos either.

I'm afraid I can't recommend this book to anyone. The history itself was interesting but getting past the racism was difficult.

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gripping description of the Comanche people as they rose to dominate the Great Plains and then were destroyed by a coalition of all the neighbors they'd raided for loot, slaves, and prestige. The great tragedy was that the Comanche had no way to constrain their young men from raiding . . . making it impossible to coexist peacefully with any other culture.

[Alec Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Focusing on the Comanches, this book is the best overall examination of the Indian cultures in North America and their destruction by European settlement that I have read since Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. This is essential history for all Americans.

[James Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a good book on the Comanche Peaple. Well Researched. You learn What brought thier down-and eventual surrender. The Destruction of thier way of life

[Pat Mizell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not for everyone, obviously, but for me and all closet cowboys and Western History buffs, a great explanation of these unique people. You'll still hate them, but at least you'll know them.

[Matt Baggett · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sad, sad tale that almost couldn't have happened any other way. Two cultures that could never have co-existed, The Comanches and the Americans.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book. Even though it is non-fiction, the writing is very unique and beautiful. I am convinced that Cormac McCarthy leaned heavily on this book while writing "Blood Meridian."

[Michael Vest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Factual!

Excellent history of the Comanche people. Required reading for those wanting more insight into this great tribe. It is highly recommended

[Justin Krudop · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was initially hesitant as to whether or not I would like this book. The author is possibly the most cited and one of the more preeminent historians in Texas. I mean, he's up there with Walter Prescott Webb and J. Frank Dobie. What is different about this book is how he cites his sources. I had read a number of reviews that offered a lot of criticism on this subject, which, I will admit, does offer some confusion as he doesn't include a notes section. The beginning of the book details the Comanche really well and is written in the form of an ethnography, but the author is not an anthropologist. This had me a little perplexed as to the trustworthiness of his analysis. I haven't ready any true ethnography of 19th century Comanche, so I can't speak definitively that this is 100% on point, but I believe it is very close. The author covers their origin, ethic and cultural backgrounds, culture and customs, and family breakdown. This part can be very cumbersome if you are just looking for a historical analysis, but it serves to provide you with some effective detail in developing a holistic understanding of the future conflicts with the Comanche.

In terms of cultural conflict, the author covers Indian conflicts, Spanish conflicts, Mexican conflicts, Texan conflicts and finally American conflicts. His historical analysis is very thorough. I can't say that one particular conflict is more interesting than the other as the Comanche were largely unchecked until the Texans came along.

As a native myself, I want to be sympathetic to the Comanche, but I find it very hard. In terms of business, the Comanche brand was fear and terrorism. Warriors were brought up on the notion of achieving glory through warfare and violence. Anything else flew in the face of their worldview. The Comanche were extremely successful in their wartime exploits until they were caught up in the national expansion of the United States. This isn't to say that they weren't still successful at an individual level, but they weren't culturally prepared to move beyond the Industrial Revolution. American technology just moved too quick and the American frontier was never going to stop at the 98th parallel after investing time in their own wartime expansion.

I do not find that I am overly sympathetic to the Comanche in their ultimate demise. As this book demonstrates (as well as many others), the Comanche mode of warfare was terrible. It was terrible and violent right up until the very end. In fact, it's arguable that they contributed more to the racism heaped on other tribes because of the way they pushed violent conflict with Americans than any other cultural group of natives.

What this book also offers in a true frontier perspective where others fall short. This book demonstrates the true American frontier, specifically in Texas, but also throughout the Great Plains. Settlers never intended to back down. They never did. Not at the Appalachians in the 1760's, not in the mid-east in the early 19th century and most certainly not in Texas or the Great Plains. Settlers had very little to lose and exploited all of the risk involved for the notion of being a land owner. It is arguable whether or not this was truly encouraged by American politicians, or if they just followed the settlers west, or both. Either way, the American frontier, technological innovation, and economic development proved to be the true demise of the amerindians, especially the Comanche.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the history of Texas, the Southwest, Native American, Cavalry, and frontier expansion.

[Evan · Rating 1 out of 5]

While I’m not personally offended by the way the author characterizes people’s and cultures I do think they reflect a type of history which is as much conjecture as anything. You’d probably learn just as much, if not more, about the Comanche from reading Lonesome Dove.

Careful readers will notice that the author frequently uses the words “always”, “never”, “certainly”, etc. to describe minute behaviors within a culture. Most history readers will find that suspect, and when there is little to no source material provided for most of the assertions made here you might begin to wonder… Am I just wasting my time? I suspect the author has read much about the west, researched, and then put together his personal idea of how things were. This could be right or wrong to any extent, in any particular, but it probably isn’t going to give you a reliable history of a people.

Calling the Spanish missionary to the middle and south Americas a “humanitarian mission” and satiating that it was simply trading one ruling religion for another “more cultured” religion (whatever that means), then stating baldly that had the Amerindians been more hardy (mentally and physically) that they would have benefitted from the Conquistadors remodeling of them, and that their treatment was never genocide because the Spanish always needed them as slaves (it was only because they lacked will to live that they died out under the conditions) and the did not intend for them to die en mass like they did. Well, that was a final straw. Not interested in wasting my time on that kind of nonsense and I don’t believe even the Spanish missionary would have been able to express that with a straight face.

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

While this book is fascinating, it is also very, very depressing and, at times, shocking. The book portrays Comanches as something much different from the popular impression. While their society had many wonderful features, it was also as brutal as people can be. And this included most Amerindian (his word) tribes. This brutality was also inflicted by the white invaders against the Indians, so no one is without guilt in that.

The way the book presents the events as inevitable is disturbing and convincing. When you think about it, this kind of tragedy and overrunning of less technological societies is going on all over the world even now. Could we stop it? We would have to change basic human nature to do so.
The end is, of course, the worst part. The virtual extinction of the bison and the people who depended on them was so heartless and depraved that it is hard to imagine anyone taking part in it. But, on the other hand, according to the book, the Comanches never stopped raiding or torturing white people until they were forced onto reservations.
Perhaps the worst thing, which is not really covered in the book but which we all know, is that this degrading treatment of Native Americans is still going on, long, long past when there is any justification for it at all.
If you want to face up to a naked description of the extermination of a people and a culture, this is the book for you.

[Jonathan Jerden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabulous!

So much history and unfolding philosophy of North America post Columbus, especially Spanish Mexico up thru Texas and the northern Plains. The Comanches are the last of the 300 major tribes of North America to be subjugated to the reservation. And the Comanches of 1878 little resemble the Comanches of 1700 while likely non-existent much before that. Native Americans, including First Nations of Canada, can't trace their traditions, culture, chief/warrior lineage, history of hunts & wars, migrations, etc. typically for more than 300 years. Perhaps 1,000 North American distinct tribes have emerged and disappeared in the last 1,000 years alone. So, the designation of 'first nation', 'original peoples', and 'native' - as archeological digs and scholarly study are making more and more clear - remain relative monikers, whose only real interpretation means 'before the Europeans.'

So many lessons, not the least of which includes teachings and a roadmap for the current Israeli/Palestinian 'problem.' Guidelines for the solution become crystal clear in reading this book.

Also, I now see where Larry McMurtry derived much of his background from this 1974 book for his wonderful 1985 best-selling book Lonesome Dove and the subsequent popular prequel/sequels Commanche Moon, Dead Man's Walk, and Streets of Laredo.

[Steve Eubanks · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dense and compelling read, this one took a while, but every page was remarkable. I learned more from this one book than everything I’ve read before on the American Indian.

It’s methodical, going back 11,000 years to what anthropologists assume was an ice-bridge migration from Asia to the Americas (I’m not buying all of that; I think tribes like the Mayans sailed here), and it continues through the introduction of the horse to the Americas by the Spanish, and the warrior raids that led many of them to be abandoned in the plains, thus our wild mustangs. It ends with the Comanche surrender by Quanah Parker in the late 19th century. In between, the brutality, the cultural mysteries, the evolution, survival, and ultimate destruction of a people are laid bare.

Did you know, for example, that the reason Spain, the French, and then Mexico allowed and even encouraged Anglo settlements in Texas and Oklahoma was to create a white buffer between themselves and the Comanche? Did you know that the 2nd Cavalry of the US Army was created by Jefferson Davis in order to pursue and engage the Comanche? This book is full of that kind of stuff.

I can’t recommend it enough, but take your time. It’s not breezy.