Empire of the Sun and Moon Book Review
Men on Horseback
Why does Custer persist? Most 134 years after his last stand up, a military debacle that cost the lives of all 210 men under his immediate control, George Armstrong Custer remains such an iconic figure in the American pageant that mere mention of his name evokes an entirely overromanticized era in the American West. By all rights he should be a footnote. That he enjoys the glory of unmarried-name recognition is a testament to the ability of personality, show business organization and savvy public relations. Custer wasn't simply an Indian fighter. He was one of the first self-made American celebrities.
In "The Last Stand," Nathaniel Philbrick, the author of the pop histories "Mayflower" and "In the Heart of the Ocean," offers an account of the Battle of the Piddling Bighorn that gives appropriate space to Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, Maj. Marcus Reno and others who fought that day. Simply really, Custer steals the testify.
How could he not? The human being was a spectacular piece of piece of work. Ambitious and charismatic, he graduated last in his West Point class but first in socializing. During the Civil War, he emerged as i of the best cavalry officers in the Union Army. His gallant Gettysburg charge ("Come on, you Wolverines!" he shouted to his Michigan volunteers) helped change the course of the battle that turned the tide of the state of war.
Even equally a young officer Custer cultivated a flamboyant public persona. He fought at Gettysburg in a blackness velvet uniform (of his own design) embroidered with gaudy gilded lace coils. After the war, when he turned his energies to fighting Indians on the Groovy Plains, he outfitted himself in fringed white buckskin and wore his pilus long.
He was a gambler, a probable adulterer, a braggart, a petulant boss and an impulsive blabbermouth. His eccentricity tilted toward stupidity. He in one case divided up his regiment co-ordinate to colour. Horse color. As you might expect, he wasn't especially honey past the troops. "I had known General Custer . . . for a long time," 1 of his officers one time testified, "and I had no confidence in his ability as a soldier."
What he did have was boldness and fortune on his side, upwardly to a point. A force of fate that he himself called "Custer luck" propelled him up the ranks, and his gamble-taking strategies secured an of import victory over the Cheyenne in 1868. Custer imagined the 1876 entrada against Sitting Bull'south Lakota Sioux equally the capstone to his brilliant military career. If all went well he hoped to ride back East every bit the hero Indian fighter in time for the nation's July 4, 1876, centennial celebration and a scheduled lecture tour. Custer, then 36, entertained serious notions of running for president one day. Given his personal charisma and genius for publicity, he might well have won.
All did non go well, of course. The Lakota disharmonize began with an onetime-fashioned land grab inflamed by Custer himself. The Black Hills in present-day Due south Dakota were declared Indian land in the late 1860s, but white settlers began encroaching by the early on 1870s. Custer, sent to investigate, instead escalated things by discovering gold in the Black Hills. News of his notice flooded the region with 15,000 white prospectors. At this bespeak, "Custer luck" starts to look more like "Clouseau luck," and it's hard not to imagine the commander in chief, President Ulysses S. Grant, going all eye-twitchy like Herbert Lom in the old Pink Panther movies.
Grant tried to defuse the situation by offering to buy the Black Hills from the Lakota, simply Sitting Balderdash wouldn't sell. Faced with a choice between the Indians or the miners, Grant chose to bulldoze off the Indians. And — cue the heart twitch — he sent Custer to help carry out the job.
Many books have been written about battlefield strategy at Little Big Horn, a grassland of shallow folding ravines in southeastern Montana, but information technology boils down to this: Custer was overwhelmingly outnumbered and chose recklessness over prudence. The paradox is that moments earlier the first shot was fired, Sitting Bull was prepare to make peace. He and his followers escaped into Canada a few months after the battle, and ultimately returned to live on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota.
Custer's defeat shocked the nation, and at that place was lilliputian doubt even in 1876 that Little Big Horn represented an ignoble moment in American military machine history. So how did a monumental disaster plough into a courageous "terminal stand"?
Philbrick'southward answer: A widow's spin and show business. After her married man's expiry, Elizabeth Custer, known every bit Libbie, embarked on a one-woman crusade to rehabilitate her honey's reputation through books and speaking engagements. Buffalo Beak Cody took the myth nationwide past ending his wildly popular Wild West Evidence with a Fiddling Big Horn re-enactment and a call to avenge Custer's glorious death. Just really there was nothing to avenge but the poor judgment of a dangerously ambitious officer. The Battle of the Little Bighorn — the military appointment — was a foolish and entirely avoidable defeat. Custer's last stand — the myth — was simply good prove concern.
Epitome
If Custer illustrates how the spotlight of history sometimes shines on the wrong actor, Quanah Parker exemplifies the more deserving who get left in the shadows. One hopes a better fate awaits "Empire of the Summer Moon," S. C. Gwynne'due south transcendent history of Parker and the Comanche nation he led in the mid- to tardily 1800s.
Born the son of an Indian warrior and his white wife (who had been captured at the age of 9 during a raid on a Texas ranch), Parker grew up to go the terminal and greatest main of the Comanche, the tribe that ruled the Great Plains for most of the 19th century. That's his one-sentence biography. The deeper, richer story that unfolds in "Empire of the Summer Moon" is nix curt of a revelation. Gwynne, a former editor at Time and Texas Monthly, doesn't merely retell the story of Parker's life. He pulls his readers through an American frontier roiling with extreme violence, political intrigue, bravery, ache, corruption, dear, knives, rifles and arrows. Lots and lots of arrows. This book will go out dust and blood on your jeans.
Gwynne opens with the May 1836 Comanche raid on the Parker homestead. The Parkers were a clan of Illinois pioneers working sixteen,100 acres near nowadays-day Dallas. In 1836 they represented the leading border of white westward expansion into Comanche territory, which the tribe didn't similar one fleck. They expressed their displeasure by killing the Parker men (though a few escaped) and taking two women and three children captive.
The term "Indian raid" glosses over the atrocities. Men and babies were killed as a matter of course. Mutilation, rape and torture were common. The lucky died rapidly. "This was the actual, and oftentimes quite grim, reality of the borderland," Gwynne writes. "This treatment was not reserved for whites or Mexicans; it was adept just equally energetically on rival Indian tribes."
The Comanche weren't merely ane of many tribes steamrolled by Manifest Destiny. They were a Native American superpower, a thesis put forth in Pekka Hamalainen's Bancroft Prize-winning study, "The Comanche Empire," oddly not cited here. Gwynne presents the Great Plains wars of the mid-19th century as the disharmonism of iii empires: the United States, Mexico and the Comanche nation, which controlled almost of modern-twenty-four hours Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma.
"They held sway over some twenty different tribes who had been either conquered, driven off or reduced to vassal condition," Gwynne writes. "Such imperial authorisation was no blow of geography. Information technology was the production of over 150 years of deliberate, sustained combat against a series of enemies over a singular piece of country that contained the land's largest buffalo herds." At the meridian of their power in the late 1830s, the Comanche contemplated a total-scale invasion of Texas and United mexican states.
Native American tribes weren't — and still aren't — static entities. They waxed, they waned. Some gained power and territory, others lost it. The rise of the Comanche was the kind of instance study of timing and technology that Jared Diamond described in "Guns, Germs, and Steel." They came from Wyoming; short, squat-legged, with little of the social or cultural development of neighboring tribes. Then everything inverse. "What happened to the tribe betwixt roughly 1625 and 1750 was 1 of the great social and military transformations in history," Gwynne writes.
What happened was the horse. Castilian conquistadors introduced the animals to Mexico in the 16th century, and they rapidly dispersed n. The Comanche adapted to this transformative technology more than apace and completely than any other Plains tribe. "No one could outride them or outshoot them from the dorsum of a equus caballus," Gwynne relates. The key was a Comanche warrior'southward ability to attack and shoot arrows while at total gallop, a skill few others could master. On the Great Plains this was the equivalent of attacking from tanks, and the Comanche used their military reward to become wealthy traders in horses and buffalo hides.
Which brings u.s.a. back to the raid on the Parker ranch. The Comanche didn't raid for sport. They had specific political and economical ends in mind. The political goal was to drive the white settlers (squatters and land thieves, from the tribe's point of view) out of Comanche territory. To that end, expiry, terror and torture proved to be effective. Past the 1860s the Comanche were actually rolling the frontier astern in Texas. The economics of raiding were equally straightforward. Young Cynthia Ann Parker was captured and not killed partly because the Comanche needed women to continue their buffalo economy humming. The men killed the bison, but the women, Gwynne writes, "did all the value-added work: preparing the hides and decorating the robes." The more than captives and wives — every bit with Cynthia Parker, the former sometimes became the latter — the more product a human being could produce.
Parker had a son named Quanah. Quanah grew upward chop-chop. When he was 12, his begetter was killed in battle and his mother was captured by white troops. (They saw it as a rescue, but Parker was forever trying to escape dorsum to the Comanche.) A vengeful Quanah began raiding white settlements. He was good at it, too. Only skill in battle wasn't his trouble. Timing was. He happened to rise as a leader just as the whites acquired their own transformative technology: the railroad and the repeating firearm. The railroad could cheaply transport valuable buffalo hides to Eastern markets, which made it profitable for men similar Buffalo Bill to massacre the great herds. Between 1868 and 1881, 31 million buffalo were slaughtered, destroying the source of Comanche wealth and food. Meanwhile, the nimble Colt revolver and the powerful Sharps .50-caliber burglarize countered the Comanche'due south one time-superior weaponry. The empire crumbled.
Quanah Parker's second human action was, if annihilation, more remarkable than his first. Resigned to reservation life, he transformed himself from a expiry-dealing warrior to a prosperous cattleman and a hard-bargaining politico who earned the respect and friendship of Teddy Roosevelt. He played a leading function in establishing the Native American Church and its practice of peyotism, the use of hallucinogenic peyote cactus in religious ritual. "The white man goes into his church and talks about Jesus," Parker once said, "just the Indian goes into his tipi and talks to Jesus." In a 370-page biography, Gwynne devotes but a unmarried paragraph to Parker and peyote. There are merely too many other proficient stories to tell.
Nosotros may never shake Custer'due south identify in the American story. He's just too colorful a grapheme, and "The Last Stand" will introduce him to a generation too immature to have encountered him in Evan S. Connell's archetype biography, "Son of the Morning Star," or the movie "Little Big Man." But thanks to Gwynne, the story of Quanah Parker may assume a more fittingly prominent role in the history of the American West. "Empire of the Summer Moon" isn't just a biography. It's a forceful argument about the place of Native American tribes in geopolitical history. The discussion "nation" is sometimes used today to refer to a specific tribe, and information technology tin be confusing to non-Indians. Does information technology mean a belonging, like Red Sox nation? Or state ability, like Germany? The Comanche of the 1800s were truly a nation more like Deutschland. And you crossed them at your peril.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/books/review/Barcott-t.html
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