The Gruesome History of the Comanche Tribe w/S.C. Gwynne | Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan's experience it's kind of funny how this conversation came up you said you got a call from your publicist because your audiobook went off he's fighting like crazy it was like cosmic dust and the BAM outer bands of Jupiter just did that because we didn't I didn't find out What was it, it just went off like crazy, it went crazy. I think it went to number one briefly, but okay, so what did that do anyway? It was on an Instagram post and you'll see my friend Steve Rinella wrote a book called American. Buffalo and I had put on Instagram how fantastic the book was and he made the audio version and a friend of mine on Instagram named Jackalope, he's a fellow hunter and Thompson enthusiast, he said you had to read this book.

And then he tells me to read his book and Empire of the Summer Moon, yeah, yeah, and it was amazing. I mean, I was so right and it was so good, and I made an Instagram post about it, and there it is, it's a fantastic book. There was so much good stuff there and it was just so sad and so gripping and so fascinating, and we all know that a lot of horrible things happened the moment the settlers started crossing the plains and heading west, but God, you just did fantastic job bringing it to life, it's all those things, it's brutal, it's sad, it's incredibly dramatic, I mean, I think people forget what the border was, that was a good idea you had. on TV or something, but anyway it was a wild place that was trying to convey it with us and with as few people as possible stationed in anthills with their eyelids cut off and things like that, so there's a lot of that.

Yeah, I mean the horrors of it all are like poof, you know, and I would never see it. I didn't know that kind of thing had happened, but I'd never really read it graphically before this book. What motivated it? You write about all this, so what is this book about me? I'm a Connecticut Yankee, a Massachusetts Connecticut boy. I moved to Texas 25 years ago and I've been there ever since and I didn't know anything about Texas

history

. nothing beyond what you might know about the Alamo or something like that or Sam Houston or someone like that and I got there and I started to know, I started to hear about the Great Plains and what they were, which was a foreign concept to me.

I wasn't sure what the plains were or why they were different than other parts of the country, the high plains, and I came up with this idea. The idea occurred to me that the final frontier was there, that this is where everything collapsed. This is where, like the end of freedom and unlimitedness, it didn't happen. The border did not advance until it reached California and then reached the ocean. California settled in the east and then there was one last place that didn't. and it went on forever anywhere, reasons why one of the most hostile Indian

tribe

s in the country, another was that there was no water, water, you know, basically there was just land, there was no water or wood, but then I got into this and then Hell, lo and behold, there is this that I discovered because I live in Texas, that there is a principle that lives in this that lived on this land, the Comanches that determined everything that happened in the American West around them and that is not an exaggeration, they would because until you know the West wasn't until they lost it and that was for sure, so there were two things, one in this arc of the rise and fall of the most powerful

tribe

, the most influential tribe in the American

history

, the Comanches, which was very cool from the Spanish and the horse and all kinds of important things that happen and then in the middle of that history, there was this little story of this little nine-year-old girl, you know, blonde hair and cornflower blue eyes who gets caught in a Comanche raid in 1836 that ends up becoming the mother of the last and greatest chief of the Comanches and, in fact, her kidnapping and her surrender at the end of the Comanches, you know, in in a way they close the book on a 40-year war in which we never fought for 40 years. war of guesses against any of them, so I came across this story and I'm just the kid from Connecticut and it seemed like the most obvious book in the world, it was just the coolest story, it's a crazy story and I had never heard of it.

Cynthia Ann Parker before her, we have her in her well, we have a giant metal image of her on the walls because the representation of her was very powerful. I wanted to know what he looks like and what his name is again Quan Quan so Quan Quan Quan Oh, what was his name, the book lover, right, because his mother was Cynthia Ann Parker, who wasn't that, didn't become that. , he didn't come out and no one found out until he was much older, so he was born Quanah as a Comanche later in the reservation period, when people found out who he was, they identified him as part of the Parker family too, oh wow, yeah, so he was a famous Comanche war chief and was one of the The most famous and feared was Kona.

It's such a crazy story that they killed so many people, but occasionally they would hold people and bring them to the tribe, so there were rules on the border at that time and we're talking about how wild it was. It was and the rules of at least the Plains Indians, of which the Comanches were, that if you were captured as an adult male, they would kill you and torture you to death, either quickly or slowly, depending on how much time they had. If you were a baby, they were killed they couldn't deal with the baby baby it was that they were nomads and they were on their horse and they were probably escaping from whatever attack they had just done they couldn't deal with babies a teenage girl or a young woman would possibly be killed, but probably turned into some kind of slaves, the ones who had the possibility of being adopted into the tribe where, you know, eight nine ten eleven twelve year old children because the Comanches had trouble maintaining their numbers and therefore would instinctively take these captives and not just of the whites, but of the Apaches, the Utes and the Navajos and whoever they could take them from, and the interesting thing about the frontier is that those rules were applied for so long, but forget about it, forget about the arrival of the whites. in the early 18th century, by the time, those rules had been applied to Indian tribes forever, you know, that was the assumption of a raid that everyone had, it was almost like the golden rule in reverse or the golden rule applied to others that everyone expected.

That kind of treatment none of them were surprised when they killed a baby or a pregnant woman. It took the kind of Anglo-European civilization of Newton and Leibniz and the biblical tradition to get to the Texas frontier in 1830. and you will be surprised at what they saw very interesting very wild very brutal it was a raiding culture essentially this is the Comanche culture in particular or the American Comanches in general yes, well, the Native Americans in general the Plains Indians in general and you know, the Plains Indians we You could start, you know, you would know the names of the laws of many Arapaho, Cheyenne and Sioux, and these were people who operated outdoors, they were all masters of the horse.

What made the Comanches special was that they became the preeminent horse tribe. Now people forget that there were no horses on this continent until the Spanish brought them over in the 16th century, so the tribes that got the horse and mastered it basically upset the whole balance. of power on the plains and the tribe that got the horse better than anyone else in terms of breaking, breeding, saddling, riding, stealing and hunting on and fighting with them were the Comanches and there was no one there, Pierre, so this It was this. It wasn't just a Plains tribe, it was the preeminent power on the southern plains.