Empire of the Summer Moon

It was the fall of 1871, and the United States Army drew closer to finally defeating the once-mighty Comanche nation. On the 3rd of October of that year, the 4th Cavalry, under the command of Ranald Slidell Mackenzie, was on the precipice of enacting the “final solution” (2) to the Western European and American struggle against the Comanches, then under the leadership of the enigmatic Quanah Parker.

The storied history of violence was at its peak in 1871. Colonel Randolph Marcy, accompanied by General Tecumseh Sherman, remarked at how desolate the Texan frontier was of settlers compared to even a decade earlier. Settlers left in droves, escaping brutal Comanche raiding parties.

Comanche success occurred amid the Industrial Revolution and at a time of great social change in post-Civil War United States. Much of this affected, in some way, the events on the western Texan frontier, specifically the region known as Comancheria (the lands of the Comanches) where buffalo hunters affected “the greatest mass destruction of warm-blooded animals in human history” (5).

Mackenzie and his troops sought out a specific group of Comanches on the aforementioned date: Quahadis, the group from which their war chief, Quanah Parker, came.