4/28/2012 Empire of the Summer Moon

For Christmas 2011 my brother-in-law gave me a copy of Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne. It tells the story of the Comanches in the 1800’s. Centered in the southern Great Plains, from Kansas to northern Mexico, they were the most violent of the American Indian tribes. All of the stories and vignettes in this book relate to thoughts, actions, and words of actual individuals – out of these various threads, the fabric of our nation today is woven. There is only one map in the book - a very nice one in the beginning, by Jeffrey L. Ward.

The best way to read this book is in front of a computer, with Google Maps, Google Earth, and a search engine up and running. Empire … is the story about a particular place and time in our Nation’s history, and the geography is an integral part of the story – visualization of that geography helps to complete the story.

Chapter Nineteen – The Red River War

Page 275 … But the best reason to camp in the panhandle was that, in all the southern plains, there was no better place to hide. In the general vicinity of present-day Amarillo, the dead-flat Llano Estacado gave way to the rocky buttes and muscular upheavals of the caprock, where the elevation fell as much as a thousand feet. Into this giant escarpment the four major forks of the Red River had cut deep, tortuous canyons, creating some of the most dramatic landscapes in the American West. The spectacular Palo Duro Canyon, carved out over the geological aeons by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, was a thousand feet deep, one hundred twenty miles long, between a half-mile and twenty miles wide, and crossed by innumerable breaks, washes, arroyos, and side canyons. This was long the Quahadis’ sanctuary. …

… The final campaign took the form of five mounted columns designed to converge on the rivers and streams east of the caprock. Mackenzie commanded three of them: his own crack Fourth Cavalry was to march from Fort Concho (present-day San Angelo), and probe northward from his old supply camp on the Fresh Water Fork of the Brazos; Black Jack Davidson’s Tenth Cavalry would move due west from Fort Sill; and George Buell’s Eleventh Infantry would operate in a northwesterly direction between the two. From Fort Bascom in New Mexico, Major William Price would march east with the Eighth Cavalry, while Colonel Nelson A. Miles, a Mackenzie rival and a man destined to become one of the country’s most famous Indian fighters, came south with the Sixth Cavalry and Fifth Infantry from Fort Dodge, Kansas.

I have two monitors, and I like working with the additional real estate (as opposed to an iPad or Kindle). I don’t think that I want to see a movie – but these additional interactive visualization tools make “reading” a richer experience.