by S. C. Gwynne
The best descriptions of Texas in the early to mid-nineteenth century come from several contemporaneous sources: Captain Randolph Marcy was a superb and reliable reporter, as were Colonel Richard Irving Dodge and the artist George Catlin. All delivered raw, unvarnished firsthand looks at the unspoiled Indian frontier. Life inside Comanche bands before the reservation period comes alive in the memoirs of a number of captives, including Dot Baab, Herman Lehmann, Clinton Smith, and Nelson Lee. (Though the latter clearly fictionalized some of his story, other parts remain useful.) Other contemporary chronicles, like reservation teacher Thomas Battey’s 1875 book Life and Adventures of a Quaker Among the Indians, were also quite useful. Mary Maverick’s memoir of old San Antonio, including the Council House Fight and the rise of Jack Hays and the Rangers, is indispensable.
For secondary sources, nothing can quite match Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel’s magisterial ethnography based in large part on ethnological studies from the 1930s: Comanches: Lords of the South Plains. Wilbur Nye’s Carbine and Lance: The Story of Old Fort Sill, and Rupert Richardson’s Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement were the books that broke the first major ground on Comanche history. The two extant full-length biographies of Mackenzie, Wallace’s Ranald S. Mackenzie on the Texas Frontier, and Charles M. Robinson III’s Bad Hand, are well researched and useful. The section on the Comanches in Walter Prescott Webb’s 1931 masterpiece The Great Plains is what got me interested in the subject in the first place, and his work on the Texas Rangers remains definitive. T. R. Fehrenbach’s The Comanches: Destruction of a People is well written and remains the modern classic in the field. To these I would add two more current works: William T. Hagan’s superb biography of Quanah, which focuses on the reservation years, and Jo Ella Powell Exley’s Frontier Blood, a solid piece of research centered on the extended Parker clan.
The rest of my research was done by automobile: crossing and recrossing the plains of Comancheria, visiting the marvelous reconstruction of Parker’s Fort in Groesbeck, Texas, touring forts such as Richardson, Concho, and Phantom Hill, nearly getting stuck in the ice at Adobe Walls, climbing in the Wichita Mountains, hunting down various battle sites on the Pease River and elsewhere. One of the highlights was finding Quanah’s old Star House in an abandoned amusement park in Cache, Oklahoma. It is in moderate stages of decay but everything is still there, including the dining room where Roosevelt and Geronimo once came to dinner (on separate occasions). I have lived in Texas for fifteen years now, and my understanding of the state’s peculiar geography, and particularly the geography of the west Texas plains, was an enormous aid in writing this book.
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