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On Inhabiting the Flatlands

Jonathan Baker

I’m a writer in Canyon, Texas, and I’ve been asked to talk a little about this month’s Book Club Read, Empire of the Summer Moon, by S.C. Gwynne. I love this book, because it paints such an unflinching picture of the staggering beauty and brutal reality of my homeland.

The High Plains is perhaps the greatest grassland in the world. It’s hopelessly wide and unnervingly flat. And until somewhat recently, it was uninhabitable. But with the introduction of the horse to the plains, something remarkable happened. The confluence of the Comanche, the horse, and these limitless grasslands led to the rise of one of the most powerful mounted forces the world has ever known. If you were to invent the ideal denizen of the High Plains, you couldn’t do much better than the Comanche. Their very natures echoed this place in countless ways.

I live on a high flat part of the plains known as the Llano Estacado. These palisaded plains served as the center of the Comancheria for two and a half centuries. This land feels somehow low and high at the same time. In all this flatness, I sometimes feels like the tallest thing for miles around. Yet, on a clear summer night, I feel like my hair might tickle the stars if I stand tall enough. It’s a place that can seem mundane or majestic, depending on the angle. The Comanche were like this, too. Most anyone who came across a Comanche brave without his mount—a rarity—would remark on the Indian’s squattiness. They were unassuming, unremarkable. But once these warriors were mounted, they suddenly became imposing, imperial, and terrifying.

Like Caprock prairie dogs, the Comanche could also be playful. They were known for their practical jokes and impish humor. By the opposite token, like a West Texas cloudburst, they could thunder down on you from above like the devil’s unholy vengeance.

In fact, the Comanche call to mind the weather of the plains in many ways. The wind blows harder on the Great Plains than anywhere in the continental U.S. You could be enjoying the breeze on a delicate spring day, when suddenly a norther might blow in, faster than any man could hope to run, bringing with it lightning and terror. In his book, Gwynne writes of the Comanche, “Their striking range . . . was four hundred miles. That meant that a Spanish settler … in San Antonio was in grave and immediate danger from a Comanche brave sitting before a fire in the equivalent of modern-day Oklahoma City.” They were that fast. And just like a panhandle rainstorm, they could vanish into the flatlands like phantoms.

That’s why the Comanche remained unbeatable for so long. Because they so perfectly inhabited this place. In fact, it was only after the Texas Rangers adapted Comanche methods, attacking from horseback, that they were able to rebuff the native’s advances.

The Comanche, of course, were eventually defeated. But what Gwynne’s book makes me wonder is, have we, as westerners of the 21st century, ever been able to inhabit this place in the way that the Comanche did? I think the answer is a fairly obvious no. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. As people of the plains, are we meeting this place on its own terms? Do we take more than we give? Do our businesses, our architecture, our attitudes promote the sense of openness and possibility that the Great Plains inspire? Or are we living apart from this place? Have we succumbed to our own complacency? What I mean to ask is, are we adapting ourselves to meet the needs of this great open land? Or are we forcing our will onto the plains, as we did the Comanche?

Just something to think about as you read S.C. Gwynne’s riveting chronicle of these true High Plains people.