Women wrote the four books I read last month: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundati Roy, No One Knows Us Here: Poems by Jessica Bebenek, and Escape from Capitalism by Clara Mattei. So far in February, I have read only male authors. It feels like a different world. Two of my nonfiction selections focus the years surrounding statehood for Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. These are not happy stories. In all three states, territorial settlement and entry into the union meant the oppression, violence, and genocide that accompany ideologies of white supremacy and Manifest Destiny.
Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State by Caleb Gayle (New York: Riverhead 2025) chronicles the nationalist effort by attorney and land agent Edward McCabe around the turn of the 20th century to establish a Black state, first in Kansas, then in Oklahoma. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S. C. Gwynne (New York: Scribner 2010) tells the story of Texas settlement as it pertains to the Comanche people, the Texas Rangers’ prime target during the Indian Wars. Both books narrate tragedies that did not end with statehood.
Black Moses is the inaugural book club selection of the Tulsa Flyer, a new nonprofit press. Gayle’s research of local property records, newspapers, public records, and other sources chronicles McCabe’s rise to prominence in the late nineteenth century. Gayle describes McCabe’s thoughtful personality, balanced tactics, and passionate commitment to the betterment of Black people. Notably, Gayle also alerts readers to the plight of Freedmen, Black persons formerly enslaved by Native peoples who were resettled in Indian Territory in the 1830’s. Gayle’s account shows that the establishment of black towns in Oklahoma during Reconstruction was not spontaneous but purposeful, led by McCabe and others. The book also explains that the city of Guthrie, the first capital city of Oklahoma, originally included a prominent Black community, The Elbow, which is why the state capital was moved to (white) Oklahoma City in 1910. Gayle argues convincingly that the white repression of Black people in Kansas and Oklahoma was relentless, public, and practiced with impunity.
Empire of the Summer Moon presents as a biography by naming Quanah Parker in the title but the reader waits until chapter 13 for the start of his story, which Gwynne appropriately situates in the context of the white settlement of Texas and its entry into the union in 1845. Gwynne narrates the anthropological history of the nine Comanche bands, which touches another story of conquest, the Spanish settlement of New Mexico. Gwynne argues that the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, which temporarily drove Spanish colonizers from New Mexico, released abandoned Spanish equine stock onto open land. This made horses available to nomadic peoples of the Great Plains, transforming their lifeways and substantially expanding their geographic range. The development of a horse culture turned the tide for the Comanches, who became expert riders and breeders of horses. It also dramatically increased the Comanches’ success at bison hunting and initially provided a significant military advantage over white settlers and soldiers.
Gwynne’s account of white contact with the Comanches in Texas gives a reader no one to root for. He frequently describes actions on both sides of the bloody conflict as “savage.” Gwynne finds his through-line in the Parker family story, beginning in 1833 with the establishment of Fort Parker in what is now Limestone County in east Texas. Comanches raided the fort in 1836 and abducted the nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker. Subsequently, she was raised as a Comanche, married a Comanche chief and bore three children. Quanah Parker was her eldest son and the last Comanche chief on the plains before the establishment of the Comanche-Kiowa-Apache reserve in Oklahoma.
Both books present problems for me. In Black Moses, Gayle pays scant attention to the tragic history of Native settlement in Indian Territory, including the displacement of indigenous peoples there by the forced resettlement of removed Native nations. Similarly, Gayle merely nods to the gross injustice of opening the so-called Unassigned Lands to non-Native settlement in 1889, the occasion for McCabe’s Black nationalist campaign in Oklahoma. And while Gayle alludes several times to the Freedmen problem, he fails to explore in depth this complex dilemma that persists today. Still, Gayle vividly exhibits the failures of Reconstruction and argues persuasively that McCabe’s nationalist ambitions resulted from the unremitting perpetration of racist atrocities against Black people.
As for Empire of the Summer Moon, I wonder about the reliability of Gwynne’s account. He rarely discloses his sources or research methodology and he presents as fact events that would have been difficult to document. Gayle consistently and inaccurately refers to the indigenous American bison as “buffalo,” a term that names two distinct species native to Asia and Africa. Admittedly, this mistaken terminology has entered common usage. But in an historical account such as Gwynne’s, it seems important to use correct terminology, since the bison constituted the Comanche’s primary food source and the foundation of their lifeways on the plains.
More disturbing is Gwynne’s tone in describing the Comanches. He compares them with white settlers and other native peoples in terms of “higher” and “lower” forms of civilization, referring to them as “Stone Age barbarians” and “Stone Age pagans.” He refers to Comanches on the open plain as “hostiles” and to Comanches on the reservation as “broken” or “tamed.” He describes the Commanche’s attacks as “furious” and asserts that they enjoyed killing and inflicting injury, a curious claim against the backdrop of the deliberate and systematic slaughter of Comanches and other plains peoples by the Texas Rangers and the U.S. military.
Oddly, Gwynne romanticizes Cynthia Ann Parker’s life with the Comanches, despite classifying its conditions as harsh and uncivilized. He lionizes Quanah Parker while depicting him as a liar, cheat, and brutal warrior, reserving his highest praise of Parker to the period after Parker agreed to abandon the open plains for the Comanche-Kiowa-Apache reserve at Fort Sill in the Oklahoma Territory in 1875. Despite the book’s many awards, the Comanche Nation denounced Empire of the Summer Moon in 2024 because “Mr. Gwynne purposefully eschewed use of Comanche sources in writing his book and as a result of his over-reliance on electronic sources, the book repeats many inaccuracies and stereotypes about the Comanche people” (Comanche Nation, Resolution No. 142-2024).
My February reading suggests why the struggles attending white settlement in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas persist today. I feel acutely the disturbing upshot of these readings, since I live on the Muskogee reservation in Tulsa, a city in which a white mob burned down Black Wall Street in 1921. It is difficult to comprehend how the gross injustice inflicted on Black and Native peoples here and throughout the U.S can be redressed.
These are complicated stories that need to be told in all their complexity. I appreciate both books and both authors’ efforts to bring these troubled histories to light. I intend to watch for additional studies that might fill out the bigger picture.
