Comanche Sundown

by Jan Reid

Comanche Sundown is the story of the great war chief Quanah Parker, a freed slave and cowboy named Bose Ikard, and the women they love. In 1869 Quanah and Bose do their best to kill each other in a brutal fight on horseback in West Texas. But over several years, through the flash and chaos of war and killing they discover that they are friends, not enemies. They change from violent unformed youths into men of courage and decency.
The son of the ferocious warrior Nocona and the tragic captive Texan Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah suffers the wound of being slurred and rejected by many Comanches as someone of impure blood and certain bad luck. When told he cannot marry his youthful love Weckeah, he rides off and joins another band of his people in the canyonlands and plains of the Texas Panhandle. Later, when Quanah has just emerged as a war chief in a daring rout of army cavalry, in defiance of elders and tradition he elopes with Weckeah and leads a following of the wildest Comanche bunch of all.
The enslaved son of a white physician, Bose is freed by the Civil War and rides on trail drives of longhorns into New Mexico Territory that are led by the pioneering Charles Goodnight. Bose winds up captured, utilized, and eventually valued by Quanah and his people. That period in young Bose’s life brings him into intoxicating friendship with Quanah’s other wife, To-ha-yea, a Mescalero Apache and born heart-breaker.
Comanche Sundown lays out a sprawling and plausible recast of Southwestern history that brings Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid, Bat Masterson, Colonel Ranald “Bad Hand” Mackenzie, and General William T. Sherman into one fray. In the tradition of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man , William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner , Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove , and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses , Jan Reid’s novel offers a rich blend of historical detail, exquisite eye for the terrain and the animals, and insight into the culture, customs, poetry, and dignity of Native Americans caught up in a desperate fight to survive.

Genres: Historical Fiction

320 pages, Hardcover

First published October 6, 2010

About the author

Jan Reid has written for Texas Monthly, Esquire, GQ, Slate, Men’s Journal, Garden & Gun, and the New York Times. Reid received the Lon Tinkle career achievement award from the Texas Institute of Letters in 2014. His twelve books include The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock, The Bullet Meant for Me, Rio Grande, Comanche Sundown, and Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards. The biography of the late Texas governor won praise from Bill Clinton to the Washington Post to the Economist, and the Houston Chronicle cited it as one of the ten best nonfiction books of 2012. Let the People In won two awards from the Texas State Historical Association, for 2012 book of the year and co-winner of the award for best book on women in Texas history. It also received a nonfiction book of the year award from the Philosophical Society of Texas. His prior book, the novel Comanche Sundown, was awarded best fiction 2011 by the Texas Institute of Letters, an award that has previously gone to Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Reid's Texas Tornado: The Times and Music of Doug Sahm, was an Oxford Magazine Music Book of the Year in 2010. Reid’s fiction and non-fiction have also won awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN Southwest, and the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship; his short fiction has appeared in Northern Liberties Review and the anthologies On the Brink and Texas Short Stories, his nonfiction in The Best of Texas Monthly, The Slate Diaries, twice in Best American Sportswriting, and most recently in Curiosity's Cats: Writers and Research. He is at work on a new novel titled Sins of the Younger Sons and a novella, The Song Leader, that is related in one of its settings to his first novel, Deerinwater. Reid grew up in Wichita Falls, Texas, and has lived in or near Austin since 1970.