Comanches: The Destruction of a People by T.R Fehrenbach - 1974

Comanches: The Destruction of a People

by T.R Fehrenbach

Hardcover Cloth 553 pages. Condition Very Good Dust Jacket Good. Stated first edition 1974. Handsome brown boards and gilt embossing shows off this Clean, tight, square copy with no marks, highlights or bookplates. Faded topstain. Previous owner's gift inscription on front endsheet. Book Well kept and carefully stored in unread condition. Slight shelf wear. Some spotting to edges. An unclipped dust jacket is discolored with age showing considerable shelf wear - tears, scrapes, wrinkles and chips. Not an ex-library, book club or remainder copy.

The story of the most powerful of American Indian tribes, the Comanches (they called themselves the "true human beings"), who rode into modern history in a headlong collision with western civilization. T. R. Fehrenbach here recreates their rise to power, from their first harsh struggles for survival in the Eastern Rockies through uncounted generations who desperately resisted privation and suffering until they encountered and mastered the horse (first introduced by Spanish settlers).

This is how, on horseback, the Comanches conquered and controlled the plains for more than a hundred destroying the ancient dreams of Spanish empire in North America, blocking the French advance into the Southwest, and becoming for more than sixty years the single greatest obstacle to Anglo-American expansion. Fehrenbachâ€s history also tells how, at last, the Comanches themselves were conquered, falling before the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army in the great raids and battles of the mid-nineteenth centuryuntil, after the Civil War, only random clumps of tipis stood where once encampments had stretched for miles.

Theodore Reed Fehrenbach, Jr. was an American historian, columnist, and the former head of the Texas Historical Commission (1987-1991). He graduated from Princeton University in 1947, and had published more than twenty books, including the best seller Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans and This Kind of War, about the Korean War.