

A lot of the children in say, the 3-10 range were often taken as captives. The white men were astonished by it but they were assumed that they would be killed. That was one of the reasons that Indians fought to the death. But the automatic thing in battle is that all the adult males would be killed. "This is what Indians did to Indians and this just happened to be Indians meeting whites. On what the raid on the Parker fort was like When I started to read a little bit about them, I realized that they were just this enormous force - this enormous force of nature sitting in the middle of the North American continent who determined how the West opened."
WARLIKE BOOK MOVIE
I think I had heard about Comanches in a John Wayne movie or something but I really didn't know who they were. "I grew up in the Northeast and I moved to Texas about 16 years ago and I started hearing stories about Comanches and I really didn't know what a Comanche was. On telling the story of Quanah Parker and his mother Gwynne has written for Time, Texas Monthly and The New York Times. Here was why there was basically a 40-year wait before you could develop the state of Texas or before other Plain states could be developed." Here was why the West Coast and the East Coast settled before the middle of the country. "Why did the French stop coming west from Louisiana? Comanches. "If you go back through Comanche history, you see that they were the ones who stopped the Spanish from coming North," he explains. Gwynne tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he became interested in telling the Comanche story because of their integral role in preventing - and then opening up - the American West to white settlers.

Gwynne traces the rise and fall of the Comanche Nation against the backdrop of the fight for control of the American Midwest. Gwynne's book, Empire of the Summer Moon. The story of Cynthia Ann and her son, Chief Quanah Parker, is told in S.C. She eventually married a highly respected Comanche chief and gave birth to three children, including Quanah - who would grow up to become the last and greatest Comanche leader.
WARLIKE BOOK FULL
Parker became a ward of the chief and later, a full member of the Comanches. She was strapped onto the back of a horse and taken north, back into the Plains where the powerful American Indian tribe lived.

In 1836, a 9-year-old pioneer girl named Cynthia Ann Parker was kidnapped during a Comanche raid in North Texas. Empire of the Summer Moon is now available in paperback. This story was originally broadcast on June 23, 2010.
