To write about the comanches in the great plains which is as far from connecticut as the frozen moons of jupiter. I will not bore you with the details of my past but to put it as briefly as possible i had my little epiphany in the spring of 1970. I had just been admitted to Princeton University and i was traveling there for a weekend where you see if you want to go there. It was a glorious day. Kind of like this morning actually. The spring was in full bloom per full bloom. I had taken a train and the last leg was on a smaller train which was the princeton to Princeton Junction that took the right to the campus. On the trip, i happened to be reading a book by f. Scott fitzgerald called this side of paradise. It was about life in princeton. At the time, it was absolutely magical. I happened to finish it as the train was pulling into the station. It is cute as a button. I was finishing it just as the train old in and i walked out and up onto the campus and i walked by 12 University Place which is where fitzgerald had lived where i just read about. I remember thinking at that moment there was nothing in the world i would rather do than to be able to write like scott fitzgerald. It was all downhill from there. [laughter] for the next 15 years i wrote a bunch of fiction and publish some of it. Got a graduate fellowship but none of what i did was much good unfortunately. It was not great stuff. I worked, i had jobs. I was a french teacher and a banker. All the while, i persisted in seeing myself as a writer and i would go home at night and read gertrude stein. Whatever writers were supposed to do, i would do. I was aware on some level as time went by that i was not exactly like scott and zelda living in paris, sipping champagne at the ritz. I was aware of that it was not happening for me. At some point it occurred i could make a living by writing so i became a reporter in my early 30s. If i got better and better at nonfiction, the fiction dream slowly went away everything now , in my age everything is black and white. It is hard for me to understand myself were things were not so absolute where you could be an International Banker or a writer. The fiction dream went away then in one great glorious a desk glorious, spectacular cataclysm, which was a 700 word novel. The main effect was to cause my agent in new york not to return my phone calls. [laughter] then it was gone and it was a cathartic experience. It did not happen that long ago but it had to be done and we all realize what we cannot do. I dont look back and i dont regret it. I dont think of myself as a failed novelist. I dont care, i dont even read fiction that much anymore. It comes down to a legendary blank page that the writer sees. That blank page for a fiction writer is an absolutely astonishing thing. On that blank page theres no rules at all. It could be about iran or mars or new jersey horrible will be or life or what am i supposed to birth. Do . I dont know. Applying journalism as well as my history it is palpable or rio something very real that you hang onto minstar with the premise of the real. So i ended up in austin, texas as executive editor of a magazine called Texas Monthly , essentially learning what i know how to do now. It was in texas were all of his comanche nonsense started. When i told my journalist friends i was writing the history of the comanches. I got a lot of blank stares you can see the of wheels turning in their tiny little news driven brains what the angle was. Is there an Indian NationHealth Care Obama no, no, no just a dusty history something that happened 300 years ago. They would say we cannot wait to , read it. [laughter] meaning, good luck, jackson. Frankly, i did not care. We should all do things that we want to do. The fact is a lot of us write books but very few are interested in jumping back into history partly because, not to run them down to badly, but reporters have the Attention Span of a gnat. You can check your thesis out in the Princeton Library so my plan is to go check it out and take it somewhere and burn it. [laughter] but i have not done that yet. I am just not this guy. Im not a historian, i was not sitting at Oklahoma University mulling over native American History. So why does a reporter become interested in something that happened in the faraway past . It is something called generational memory. I grew up in connecticut in massachusetts. A part of the country were native american tribes were subdued a long time ago. I was aware of the indians on cape cod, even playing summer baseball. They cease to exist as the free tribe 100 years before my ancestors got off the boat and nobody really knew about the mohicans or at all a consequence because too much time had intervened. Nobody had a conceivable memory of them. The frontier was not part of my upbringing. In texas, where i moved in 1994, the whole sense of the frontier and native americans was radically different. In fact, i never would have written this book or have gone near this book if i had not moved to texas. One of those circumstances that happens to you when you move around. In texas it was part of my job , to travel the state and write the stories for Time Magazine then Texas Monthly. I met a lot of people who told me about the comanches. One lady who sat next to me at Texas Monthly had both of her great grandparents were killed and a comanche raid. I knew my great grandparents. Somebodys grandfather had done business with Quanah Parker. Theres a sense of the immediacy of the frontier. Often in my travels, it was this weird mixing of legend and history. I am up in a little town near Wichita Falls in north texas. I am up there and doing a story about these great baseball gloves. The factory burned down and the town was struggling. I was sitting at a bar with some old guy and he was telling me about this battle that took place. I had no idea what he was talking about. What he was talking about was the end of the Spanish Power in the new world. It was the battle in a 7058 where the comanches rode the spanish back. Im talking about the end of the spanish world. In the new world. It was the stories and things like that. Here i am, traveling around the state. One of the reasons of course is for the immediacy of the frontier, the last of the indians surrendered in 1875 and after that, there was a good deal of jostling on and off the reservation. Things are happening validity 20thcentury. Well into the 20th century. The frontier was the immediate thing. The tribe that was featured in most of the stories there were a lot of wichita in a bunch of other tribes. The crowd you always tried to always heard about were comanches. For me when i was growing up comanches were a word in a john wayne movie and it was always a code word for danger. That is the comanche arrow. We are in trouble now. Always like that. You did not know why the comanches were bad. But they were bad and they were very bad folks. I did not know anything else about them. There was a remembering of the past going on in texas that got me interested in this story. But what got me interested enough was not just this remembering of the past, but also forgetting. A simultaneous and contradictory revelation. Although the old folks of the plane often remembered, as most people forgot. Texas is the fastestgrowing state 500,000 people per year , coming and coming from illinois and mexico they dont know these things. My daughter did not know these things. She grew up in texas and she is 19. In 1940 i would venture to say every single schoolchild in the state of texas new the story of symbian parker, the whole thing the kidnapping. Her son was the last of the greatest chiefs talk to a texan above a certain age they could tell you those things. This is a good story if you have read my book one of my great discoveries was a guy named jack hayes. The original and greatest ranger. He was the man. One of the the greatest indian fighter of the planes and one of the greatest commanders america ever produced. He developed in the comanche war techniques that were for that had never existed before later use with brutal effectiveness with the war in mexico. He adapted a failed invention by sam colt. It was said before jack came into the American West everybody came on foot lugging the rifle but after him, they came on horseback carrying six guns. I am leading up to something because i am trying to describe the process of remembering and forgetting. Jack hayes seem to be completely forgotten. Just south of austin, there is a county named hayes county, named after john. Inside, there is a high School Called hayes high school, named after him. In a state that absolutely treasures rangers i mean Texas Rangers are mythical. Would you suppose in the state that the mascot of the High School Team would be the rangers . No. They are the rebels. [laughter] now, i have no problem with rebels except jack hayes left texas in 1849 to become the first sheriff of San Francisco during the gold rush. He is not a rebel, he is a ranger. Nobody in hayes county knows who he is, nobody and the high school. Nobody in san antonio, where he invented the six shooter knows who he is. This was going on. Here was a great opportunity i saw as a writer with this book. Im a relatively smart guy and i was even living in texas and i did not know who these guys were. Have you ever heard of geronimo . Everybody heard of him. Ever heard of Quanah Parker . No. Ever heard of custer . Yes. Here of mackenzie the actual greatest fighter . Never heard of that. John coffee hayes who should be a household word like Davy Crockett but he is not . No. You can just keep going. The fact is for me as a writer i could go sell a book in new york to people who didnt have a clue. Not only to an editor who gives me many which they do but i could sell to a country that had never heard of these guys. What it a cool thing. There were books done about these things. They tended to be prisoners of their region. Texas a m press, 700 copies. There is no distribution. I saw my opportunity. I took it. The comanche story is just one of the Great Stories and what i love about it is it is like the best kind of a School Lesson you could get from the most beloved history professor. It uses a vehicle, in this case, the comanche tribe, to teach you how the west was won. It was not one until it was lost. Won until it was lost. They constituted an incredible physical barrier to everything that happened in the west the mexicans and texans and americans and spanish and everybody else. And determined what happened around them. They occupied the southern plains, 250,000 square miles. They basically in a sense held up themselves to be progress of the american empire. Before that they blocked the , northward expansion of america partly the reason is the spanish provided them with an astonishing piece of technology. It was the attempt to move west. Turns out they made the mistake of farming that comanche and amaze. Texas exist because of comanches. What does it exist . Here is what happened. The mexicans needed to stabilize the northern border. They own the texas in one way to do that the israelis have discovered is you settle it and put people there. The more you settle, the more you stabilize it. These rednecks from alabama and tennessee, these scott irish people, were guys like Davy Crockett they had no problem coming in to settle in this land. This grand plan of mexico backfired because these texans wanted independence after a little bump at the alamo. I got it. This is in part, a misguided scheme to stop the comanches. A pretty good way to tell list three to someone who does not know the history of texas. The six shooters, the rangers are a product of the comanches and finally with the comanches and a 40 year war on a single line frontier draw a line through santillan san antonio to dallas and that is where the frontier sat for 40 years. Nothing even remotely similar happened with any other tribe. I call them the most powerful tribe in American History and people ask me if i meant that if i meant who would win. I dont mean that even though they were fabulous war years what i mean is the power to influence the course of history. No tribe has such a determinant effect on what happened in north america. The plains tribes were mounted. No tribes in the east remounted. You could find them. Course bound tribes were far harder to eradicate. That is a big military picture of my story. On one side, you have the rise and all of comanches, which is interesting. But the other side is the more intimate and small story of the Parker Family. This little, nineyearold girl gets taken in this raid in 1836. The big picture is the comanches by then, the Parker Family. The organizing event of this book is this raid near 1836. It was one of those small moments in history. It was a small moment that come in retrospect, has astonishingly large historical prevalence. This was the year the Parker Family had built a stockade 90 miles south of dallas. What they were out so far on the comanche front tier it was almost ridiculous. You really wonder how you could bring children out there. They were way beyond anybody else on the frontier. In fact, one thing i think to keep in mind if youre thinking about the way the American West was settled, people sometimes think there was a sweep across that went north or south. It was not. It was all south. The human frontier was in texas. Nothing going on up north. The great clash was down in the south. In this raid, five people were killed, a bunch of people were wounded. Five cap does captives were taken, one was cynthia anne parker. This is a routine raid. They had been doing this for many, many years. But in historical terms it was a defining moment of the front ier. It marked the start of the longest and most brutal war between americans and a single native tribe. Also because it involved the woman who was to be the most famous captive. It took place precisely at the point where the westward booming american empire the parker did not realize this you have this enormous, american empire moving west. Meeting eight 250,000 square mile comanche empire. Nobody could see this at the time. It really was right there. That is where the parkers build the house. How they had any idea that is what they were doing i am sure they never would have done it. Why was that empire there . It is very interesting. The reason it was there is a result of 150 years of sustained combat with one goal of the south plains. Why . That is where the buffalo were. Over 150 years the comanches essentially use their unbelievable mastery of the horse to challenge as they went south, eventually gaining what they wanted which was the south plains, which is where the buffalo were. That is where the parkers put their house, right on the edge of that. Pretty good idea. This is where they built the frontier paradise and the chain of events one more thing that is really interesting about where they put the house. If you look at america before columbus, the entire east coast was one dense grimm brothers forest. It was dense. Dense. It went from the east coast to the 98th meridian. Right through the middle of texas. Right from san antonio, through dallas, and essentially, it was a bizarre thing. You have the culture and the east of the woods, based on timber, land, water. When you got past the treelined , this is a terrifying moment. No trees to build houses. No water. All of that happened right there so that house was at the edge of that moment, that physical, geological moment where the land changed and that was there. It is an amazing little place they picked to build their house. We have that captivity of cynthia parker. She bore three children, refused to come back. Famous as the white squall who would not return. That story played out. Her oldest son was one of parker, the greatest comanche warrior of his age. I will tell you one really great story about him. I consider Quanah Parker one of the most extraordinary of the 19th century. Probably the most formidable comanche warrior of his era. He led the last of the comanches into the terrible dying days of 1875 and the buffalo had all been killed after all the other tribes have surrendered. He moved to the comanche reservation and transformed himself in oklahoma the way that his mother had. She had adapted brilliantly to the comanche culture. Now he adapted to the white culture. He went from the fiercest plains warrior to the most successful , influential indian of the period and controlled a small cattle empire, outfoxed the white man to the leasing games. He accumulated a large fortune of almost all of which he gave away to help his fellow comanches. The year is 1871. Keep in mind a 35 years after the first battle of the comanche. The frontier was still shockingly where it had been. It was not moving. Keep in mind, this is after the civil war. The men who are running america are these grim warriors who have destroyed the south. The president is ulysses s. Grant. And these are the men who were running things. 1871, they unleashed the greatest war machine in American History. World history. We are looking at this tribe that was sitting there holding up everything. In 1871, one of the reasons the comanches were still there as i point out is the civil war took the attention away from the plains. In 1871, that attention was no longer focused on the war or reconstructions but now look to see what we will do about the comanche problem. Quanah parker was 23 years old at the time, the leader of the most remote, hostile of all of the comanche band in the panhandle, amarillo. They were an amazing bunch. They kept away from the white man contracted very few of the , diseases. They had 15,000 horses. One of the ways they kept away from the white man is they traded with men who operated out of new mexico. You see them in movies as a rough bunch. So grant and sherman decide they have had enough so they sent colonel mackenzie down. They send mackenzie 600 blue coats and right out and they are going to get the comanches. Their target is a village. Quanah has this village. We dont know how big the village was but we think 200 , tepees. It was a village with women, children, dobbs, probably cattle, horses. Quanah mackenzie the most extra ordinary lesson in plains warfare. The indians were vastly outnumbered. The comanches, if they had anything at all, it was muskets, but mostly bows and arrows. Let me see if i can briefly describe what the that all was. The battle of blenko canyon. The bluecoats, theyre pretty tough people. After playing cat and mouse , the bluecoats calgary move forward and locate the village and they will move on the village. They march to where the villages village is but it is gone. So they send the scouts out to figure out where it was. What has happened is they get to a point where they realize all of the crisscrossing lines. If you use a horse, that is the way the indians carry thanks. It is too long holes poles on the back of a horse. You had parallel lines in the sand. At some point, all of the parallel lines go crazy. Then, they realize the village has doubled back and it is now behind them. There were 200 lodges. They are furious now. They get at the next, go back. Now, the village disappears again and now they realize, the cap rock is this steep cliff that rises from one plane to another. The whole village disappeared up the cap brock. So the soldiers go up to the top of the cap rock, realize the village has gone down, track it again, and they lose it. It sounds like im making this up. This is an account by a medal of honor winner who won the medal fighting Quanah Parker at his battle. The village disappears again goes back at the cap brock. Cap rock. The soldiers, 600 of them up to the back back to the top of the cliff. Now, they can see the indians out there. On cue suddenly, this howling norther comes down. A norther is a wind that can blow in the fall in texas where the temperature drops 5060 degrees in an hour. A blue norther that cowboys fear. It comes in, and the kenzies troops forgot to put on their winter close because it was beautiful, west texas weather that day. Quanah leads his tribe off and away and mackenzie and his men are forced to hunger down and they are lucky they do not freeze to death. Essentially, quanah got away. He schooled mackenzie in this plains were for. One of the key things is escape. But very few instances in history where a commander takes a village into the field against his adversary and wins. That is the kind of commander Quanah Parker was. He was quite brilliant. He obviously escaped to fight another day. He would not surrender until 1875 after almost every single one of their food source had been killed. That is all i want to say tonight. I would be happy, do we have time for questions . I am happy to answer questions. [inaudible] mr. Gwynne that was her cousin Rachel Parker plumber. [inaudible] do you have access to it . Mr. Gwynne yes. This is one of the great things that you have at your disposal. Rachel plumbers diary which is an unbelievable account for the very few captives she was taken for many months on to the planes so it is rather extraordinary. It is published. I also held the original. Yes. I dont know how many libraries are around here but in texas the rare book collections will have it. I dont know if i could get it in most mains lay berries but in the rare book collections, you easily could. Your description of the comanches ability to fight on their horses was absolutely fascinating. There are a few statistics on how fast they could fire in an arrow as compared to loading a rifle. Maybe once you have not read the book would be interested in that. Mr. Gwynne you are talking about their amazing abilities with the horse. The first time americans saw that was the expedition of 1834 that ran into them. They simply could not believe what they were looking at. There are people today who can sort of do what they did. They would did down on the side of the horse so if they were riding by, you could not see them. They were behind the horse. They could also fire under the neck of the horse with extreme speed. Trick riders can do this now but they could hit things with it at full gallop. Nobody had ever seen anything like it before. Nobody had seen their ability to break a horse. They did this thing nobody had ever seen before where they often would do things like chase the horses wild horses they would chase them over a large piece of ground. They would let the horses come right up to the water and before i got to drink actually will do this to caribou the horses were constantly on the road and not ring allowed to drink. Eventually, they stopped. One of the things you see these comanches do is they try to get a rope on the horse and they somehow get up to the horse, and finally, this thing was in a complete lather and it they would put their mouths over the nostrils and blow into the nostrils of the horse. It would gentle the horse. There is a whole list of things like this people had never seen before. They were really good. They were good at breeding time also. They understood about all of that stuff. As much as anything, the comanches were, as far as we know in history, a very small tried that lived in the wind River Mountains of wyoming. Not a particularly significant drive. Suddenly something happened in the 17th century that nobody saw. It emerged as a powerful force by virtue of the horse. [inaudible] mr. Gwynne interesting you should ask that. There are about 14,000 of them registered now. 9000 lived close to the old homeland of the reservation which is in oklahoma southwestern part. There are a few comanches that are more widely dispersed. They have a couple of casinos there now. I think they do ok with them. They are wrestling with the same things that most other native american tribes are wrestling with, but they still exist and you can go onto the internet and see their nation website and it is interesting. I had the opportunity some lady stood up on time and asked what do they think about your book . [laughter] did answer that question a lot , of them like it. Some of them dont. There are some things i tell about Quanah Parkers death that fathers death that goes against the history. I think on the whole, the reception is pretty good. [inaudible] mr. Gwynne very good question. How many people that i interviewed . The answer is none. There were no living people that could inform what happened back then. What i had was in the 1930s, very thankfully, there were two or three different projects where people recorded comanches from the old days from the prereservation period. They did studies and there is a lot of that. I relied on that. Those guys did my interviewing for me. There was not much point in interviewing it would be like interviewing me about my grandfathers experiences of world war i. I wrote about the chickasaws last year. I do intend to do a lot of interviews of current day comanches. [inaudible] could you elaborate how much society has organized on retribution and how much was a strictly on the goal of getting land . Mr. Gwynne the question is to what extent were the raids the comanches performed revenge raids or retribution part of the planes were fair . Warfare . The plains indians were a warlike group and they fought. That is what they did. When somebody would conduct the arapahoes conducted a raid against the comanches, they would conduct a counter raid and this is the way it went. It went both ways. There were raids to get horses and there were raids and someone killed your two sons, that would call for a revenge rate. It was the way it worked out there. It was part of the deal. The same revenge was exacted on the white later. The whole adobe wall the last rate of comanche power that Quanah Parker led was in effect a giant revenge raid. It was in part because of the death of his bother. His father. They were very brutal. So were all plains indians. So were the native americans in the terms of treatment of captives and torture and revenge raids. If you are a historian in the field, you have to come to terms with that. It happened. I think there was perhaps i was a little my youth when i started writing, but i remember someone was interviewing me on the radio and a set set, did you not to stop and take a deep breath before you sat down and wrote a complete revision of history to native americans . I am thinking him a complete revision of history . What he meant was, there was a notion popular particularly in the 1960s and the best example would be a book called barry meyer heart at wounded knee barry bury my heart at wounded knee. They were nice, fundamentally decent people who were steamrolled by this culture that broke its treaties and destroyed them and massacred them. It was a onesided deal. If you look at the command just come that simply is not true. The comanches were enormously powerful. Yes, where they victimized steamrolled come run out of existence. They were. That, that is not fundamentally who they were. I was not thinking of political points, i was just describing what i found. What you found is yes, they were quite brutal and warlike and held their own against everybody. That particular view is overly simplistic. Even the five civilized tribes from the southeast, if you go back to their origins, they were enormously powerful and warlike and noble in their own ways. I have no doubt was i will i was not smart enough to have a political agenda. Anybody else . Thank you for coming. [applause] on history bookshop come here from the countrys bestknown American History writers of the past decade every saturday. He watched these programs anytime, visit our website. You are watching American History tv all weekend, every weekend on cspan3. Here are some of our future programs for this Holiday Weekend on the cspan networks. On cspan tonight at 8 00, former texas state senator wendy davis on the challenges facing women in politics. Easter sunday at 6 30 p. M. Golfing legend Jack Nicholas received the congressional gold medal for his contributions to the game and community service. On cspan two, tonight at 10 00 activist and author cornell west on the radical, political thinking of Martin Luther king jr. And sunday at noon, a live, threehour conversation with the times bestselling author ronald kessler. He has written 20 books. And on American History tv on cspan3 tonight at 8 00, East Carolina University professor Charles Calhoun on the obstacles they tend to call bushs made by and a coupled of publishers