Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne was written in 2010, and a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Mainly it tracks the rise of the Comanche raiders, and how technology finally allowed Manifest Destiny to reach the Great Southern Plains of Texas. It's an incredible story, and I wanted to share the character traits, behaviors, and ask how this could possibly be applied today.
Comanche Males
"Virtually alone among all bands of all tribes in North America, they never signed a treaty. Comanches were the hardest, fiercest, least yielding tribe that had long had the reputation as the most violent and warlike on the continent; if they ran low on water, they were known to drink the contents of a dead horse’s stomach, something even the toughest Texas Ranger would not do."
They were brutal and savage to their enemies.
"To their enemies, the Comanche’s were implacable buffalo-horned killers, grim apostles of darkness and devastation. Inside their camps, however, they were something entirely different. Here, wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, one of the first Americans to observe them closely, the Comanche, “is a noisy, rollicking, mischief-loving braggadocio, brimful of practical jokes and rough fun or any kind…rousing the midnight echoes with song and dance, whoops and yells.” He would dance for hours, or days. He loved to gamble and would bet on anything. He loved to sing. He especially loved to sing his personal song, often written expressly for him by a medicine man. He often woke up singing and sang before bed. He was an incurable gossip and had, “a positive craving to know what is going on around him.”
It's an interesting mix of a killer and joyful comedian.
As for the Texas Rangers,
"The Rangers were a tough bunch. They drank hard and liked killing and fistfighting and knife-fighting and executing people they deemed criminals or enemies.
As time went by, and so many of them were killed, creating a sort of natural selection in their ranks, they got even rougher, more brutal, and more aggressive. They looked the part, too. Though the idealized Ranger wore a leather hat with its brim up, a kerchief, cotton shirt, and plain britches, the reality was something else. They wore whatever pleased them. Sometimes that meant colorful Mexican serapes and wide-brimmed sombreros. Sometimes fur hats, bobtailed coats, or dirty panamas. Often it meant head to toe buckskins or bits and pieces of buffalo robes. Some went naked about the waist, wearing the equivalent of Indian breechclouts over leggings. Many were large, physically imposing men with thick, brawny arms, long hair, and full beards. Seen from the more civilized parts of nineteenth-century America, they occupied a place in the social order just this side of brigands and desperados. They were not whom you wanted to pick a fight with in a frontier saloon."
"Rangers hunted for themselves, often going into the field with only water and a mixture of sugar and parched corn they called “cold flour”…The only thing the government reliably provided, in its wisdom, was ammunition. Oddly considering the fact that almost nothing was given them, there seems to have been no real problem with recruitment: The western part of Texas in those years was awash in young, reckless, single men with a taste for wide open spaces, danger, and raw adventure"
After reading the book I felt a melancholy knowing that those experiences for males don't exist anymore, no matter that those were terrifying brutal times of existence.
Comanche Males
"Virtually alone among all bands of all tribes in North America, they never signed a treaty. Comanches were the hardest, fiercest, least yielding tribe that had long had the reputation as the most violent and warlike on the continent; if they ran low on water, they were known to drink the contents of a dead horse’s stomach, something even the toughest Texas Ranger would not do."
They were brutal and savage to their enemies.
"To their enemies, the Comanche’s were implacable buffalo-horned killers, grim apostles of darkness and devastation. Inside their camps, however, they were something entirely different. Here, wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, one of the first Americans to observe them closely, the Comanche, “is a noisy, rollicking, mischief-loving braggadocio, brimful of practical jokes and rough fun or any kind…rousing the midnight echoes with song and dance, whoops and yells.” He would dance for hours, or days. He loved to gamble and would bet on anything. He loved to sing. He especially loved to sing his personal song, often written expressly for him by a medicine man. He often woke up singing and sang before bed. He was an incurable gossip and had, “a positive craving to know what is going on around him.”
It's an interesting mix of a killer and joyful comedian.
As for the Texas Rangers,
"The Rangers were a tough bunch. They drank hard and liked killing and fistfighting and knife-fighting and executing people they deemed criminals or enemies.
As time went by, and so many of them were killed, creating a sort of natural selection in their ranks, they got even rougher, more brutal, and more aggressive. They looked the part, too. Though the idealized Ranger wore a leather hat with its brim up, a kerchief, cotton shirt, and plain britches, the reality was something else. They wore whatever pleased them. Sometimes that meant colorful Mexican serapes and wide-brimmed sombreros. Sometimes fur hats, bobtailed coats, or dirty panamas. Often it meant head to toe buckskins or bits and pieces of buffalo robes. Some went naked about the waist, wearing the equivalent of Indian breechclouts over leggings. Many were large, physically imposing men with thick, brawny arms, long hair, and full beards. Seen from the more civilized parts of nineteenth-century America, they occupied a place in the social order just this side of brigands and desperados. They were not whom you wanted to pick a fight with in a frontier saloon."
"Rangers hunted for themselves, often going into the field with only water and a mixture of sugar and parched corn they called “cold flour”…The only thing the government reliably provided, in its wisdom, was ammunition. Oddly considering the fact that almost nothing was given them, there seems to have been no real problem with recruitment: The western part of Texas in those years was awash in young, reckless, single men with a taste for wide open spaces, danger, and raw adventure"
After reading the book I felt a melancholy knowing that those experiences for males don't exist anymore, no matter that those were terrifying brutal times of existence.