Category Archives: Library

Comanches: The History of A People is one of Texas historian T.R. Ferenbach’s greatest hits and I enjoyed it thoroughly, as much for its Texas and U.S. Army history as for the tale of the destruction of the murderous, wholly unlovable Comanches.

The book was written in 1974, so it’s free of Hollyweird indian mumbo jumbo, as well as the hand-wringing, multicultural, everything’s-relative claptrap. By the late 1860s, with their ultimate demise plain to see, Comanche chiefs began lying about their nomadic guerrilla-warfare culture which had, for hundreds of years, been raiding, stealing, kidnapping and enslaving women and children, torturing some for pleasure, raping most, and mutilating all.

"The story of the People is a brutal story," Ferenbach writes, "and its judgements must be brutal." No one but their victims ever understood them, especially not the patronizing Quakers whom Washington put in charge of trying to pacify them. The 4th U.S. Cavalry did it best, by using their own tactics to massacre the men and take the women and children captive to the reservations. Ferenbach is sensitive to the pathos of their end. But, by then, the Comanches had slain so many thousands of noncombants, most of them white and black Texans and peasant Mexicans, that few who knew their handiwork would mourn.