Just got done with "Empire...".
Gwynne does a fine job, like he wrote Fehrenbach's "Comanche" book better. But I'm gonna nit-pick.
Starts out with the phrase "the Tonkawas were always losing"...
Near as I can tell the original of that sentiment is a 1930's Texan account of Ford's 1858 battle against Comanches in Oklahoma wherein the author says Ford's Tonkawa scouts fought the Comanches in individual duels but that Ford got disgusted because the Tonks were losing every one.
Interestingly, Fehrenbach (alos from Texas) also has Ford at that fight with 113 mostly Tonkawa Scouts but then discounts almost entirely their role, resorting to the stereotype of a 'few grim Texans checking their priming'. Ford hisself in "RIP Fords Texas" mentions mostly 100+ Caddos with him on that expedition, and gives them full credit for their very active role, including the shooting of Iron Jacket (Fehrenbach says Texans did it). Why the Texan authors felt it necessary to rewrite history that way is open to speculation.
Anyhoo... the Tonkawas were infamously cannibalistic. Yet for a people that were "always losing" (as per Gwynne's "Empire") they sure were a persistent bunch.
Their remnant survivors of massive epidemics (the usual cause of such things) lived entirely within raiding range of the Comanches throught the late 18th/19th Centuries, and we know the numerous and collectively powerful Comanches despised them more than most anyone until the very end (having their kinfolk get eaten does that to folks).... yet there they were.... still around in numbers as late as 1871, enough to lead Mackenzie out to whup Comanches as Gwynne begins.
Interestingly, accounts have it that what REALLY PO'd the Comanches in the afermath of the 1840 Council House Fight in San Antonio (where more'n 50 Comanches men, women and children who had come in peaceably were killed by the Texans, although in truth, they were fighting back) was the thought that those same Texans were butchering and eating the dead.
The collective fighting power of the Comanches is way overblown. 700 on the great Linnville Raid in the aftermath of the Council House Fight, and yet only a relative handful of White casualties, most caught by surprise. And then a defeat of that same party at Plum Creek by a lesser number of Texans, fighting WITHOUT revolvers (more on that myth later).
Also hundreds of Comanches on the infamous Elm Creek raid of 1864, yet only a relative handful of White casualties.
Where the Comanches excelled was at catching the helpless and/or hugely outnumbered by surprise, and where conditions were such that there was a steady supply of victims the body count mounted up, as it did on the Texan Frontier and in Mexico for decades.
In the same vein, Gwynne calls Quanah Parker "brilliant", perpetrating the myth. While QP was a remarkable guy, especially in the reservation period, I can't see where he ever did anything during the fighting times that weren't standard, run-of-the-mill Plains Indian tactics.
More later.
Birdwatcher
