I grew up outside Frederick, Oklahoma, about 30 miles from Cache, the final home of Quanah Parker. I remember as a kid seeing Star House close to a little amusement park where my sister and I learned to roller skate. I wondered who might have lived in that house and why someone had painted such a big white star on its roof.
When I visited the Wichita Wildlife Refuge near Cache and Lawton and watched small herds of buffalo as they ambled across the road in front of our car, I thought about the Plains Indians. I wondered how that grassland country would have looked when huge herds roamed there during Quanah Parker’s early years.
As an adult, when I read Empire of the Summer Moon, I pictured Quanah Parker and a few of his friends, riding out next to the Wichita Mountains there, after they had convinced agency officials to let them go on one final buffalo hunt. In that year, 1878, they never doubted that there were buffalo still roaming the Plains. They rode out, fully expecting to kill and eat the buffalo just as they had done in the past. Instead of huge herds, they found only stinking, decaying corpses and huge piles of bones bleached by the sun. As I read, I could feel their sorrow, despite the fact that I was born 100 years later than the events that Gwynne writes about, I knew
I was there in those places as I read the story of Quanah Parker and Comanche life on the High Plains.
Truthfully, today, as a high school teacher with a variety of learning levels in each of my English classes, I probably would not assign a book like Empire of the Summer Moon. However, I would certainly recommend the book to more advanced readers. I would also probably select passages for classroom reading – passages to allow us to research, or discuss or write about the differences between the High Plains the way the area is now and the way it was during the height of Comanche powers; passages which would allow us to examine the United States government’s policy of “manifest destiny”; passages which would allow us to discuss reasons people take risks in the face of insurmountable odds.
For me, reading Empire of the Summer Moon brought back memories of the place where I grew up. I read about atrocities committed by Native Americans and by white people, I read about hardships endured, land fought over, buffalo systematically slaughtered -- all those issues that I didn’t think very much about when I was a student myself. Reading this book helped me understand how much my students could learn about history and about human behavior by examining parts of Empire of the Summer Moon.
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