Making $ Through Atrocious History: A Review of Empire of the Summer Moon

I have been teaching Native American history for almost twenty-five years now. So, on a regular basis, people ask me for my thoughts on Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne, since it’s one of the most successful books published in the field in the past couple of decades. It has 4.7 stars out of over 20,000 ratings on Amazon, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and also for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In a resolution passed recently, the Comanche Nation (the main subject of the book) made it clear they consider the book to be junk.

So, who’s right? I’ll discuss in details Empire of the Summer Moon and several other books on Native American history in an upcoming audio episode for my Patreon and/or Substack subscribers to the paid feed. But in the meantime, I’d like to present this written review (more limited in scope, but possibly useful nonetheless) to all my readers.

Let’s go to work.

Just to lay my cards on the table right away, let me start with the conclusion: as a writer S.C. Gwynne is skilled. If he wrote fantasy or historical fiction, he could be great, thanks to his very readable writing style. As a historian, he’s abysmally bad. No… actually, that’s putting delicately. He’s so abysmally bad that I can’t even find the words for it. Since I don’t expect you to believe me just because I am so pretty, I’ll present the evidence, so you can decide for yourself. The number of sweeping generalizations and straight up lies littering the book is so high that I won’t even try being comprehensive, but here are a few:

1 Speaking of the Comanche, he writes, “Like all Plains Indians, they were nomadic” (p. 5-6). Plenty of tribes on the Plains lived in permanent, sedentary villages. The Arikara, Mandan, and Hidatsa are an example of this. Many others spent most of the year in permanent villages, and only left them for an annual buffalo hunt before returning home. This is not exactly hidden knowledge. Anyone who studies Plains Native cultures for about 35 seconds can find that info. Including such a glaring error in the first few pages of the book tells you a lot about the author’s questionable skills as a researcher.

2 On p. 46, he writes, “…in the Americas, farming was not discovered until 2,500 BC, fully four thousand years later and well after advanced cultures had already sprung up in Egypt and Mesopotamia.” Here, S.C. Gwynne misses the boat regarding the beginning of farming in the Americas by a few thousand years. If you type “when did farming begin in the Americas” in any internet engine, you’ll get more accurate answers in a second. So, I wonder, how do you write a book that’s supposed to be about history and not bother to fact check something this basic?

3 “Among other horse tribes, only the Kiowas fought entirely mounted, as the Comanches did. Pawnees, Crows, even the Dakotas used the horse primarily for transport. They would ride to the battle, then dismount and fight.” (p. 32) I may have to sit down for this. What?!?!? Read literally any book about the Crows and Lakota and it’ll become immediately apparent how ridiculous this statement is. One doesn’t even need reading skills to realize this. If you look at these tribes’ ledger art, you’ll see plenty of images of their warriors fighting on horseback. Again, not a hidden or a controversial fact, so how can a researcher miss the mark by this much?

4 “Indians habitually avoided soldiers; almost all their battles with army regulars were defensive, including those against Fetterman in Wyoming and Custer on the Washita.” (p. 242) In reading sentences like this I’m reminded of this scene from the movie Airplane!

This quote is so ludicrously wrong that it’s almost funny. While it’s correct about Custer’s attack at the Washita (1868), it’s clearly wrong about the 1866 battle against Fetterman. In that occasion, Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho harassed the soldiers at Fort Phil Kearny for days, until they were able to lure them into an ambush on Dec 21, 1866. There was literally nothing defensive about it.

5 "No tribe other than the Comanches ever learned to breed horses--an intensely demanding, knowledge-based skill that helped create enormous wealth for the tribe." (p. 32) This, like much of the rest of the book, is factually incorrect. The Nez Perce' were some of the most successful horse breeders in North America, famous for breeding the Appaloosa. Anyone claiming to be a historian who can't be bothered checking something like that is not a historian.

6. The author speaks of the 1758 Comanche attack on the San Saba mission as ushering Spain’s “greatest military defeat in the New World.” (p. 62). By most accounts, the attack led to less than a dozen casualties, which is far less than the losses Spain suffered in plenty of battles in the Americas (from the Noche Triste forward). Even if we take a generous interpretation of Gwynne’s statement and we assume the ‘greatest military defeat in the New World’ to refer not to the attack itself, but to Spain abandoning the mission, it still doesn’t check out. From the Spanish point of view, that area was a barely populated outpost at the outskirts of a large empire. It didn’t matter much either way. The 1680 Pueblo Revolt, on the other hand, led to over 400 casualties and resulted in the Spaniards being kicked out from an important base for 12 years.

7. "Torture of survivors was the norm, as it was all across the plains." (p. 57) No, it wasn't. it was practiced by some tribes, and not by others. It was actually much more common among eastern Woodland tribes than it was on the Plains. Tom LeForge, for example, who spent much of his life among the Crow tells of being aware of only a single instance of torture among the tribes he interacted with. But, of course, Gwynne doesn’t take into account LeForge’s testimony, and many others like his, because it’d interfere with the goal of writing a sensationalistic version of history that is more likely to appease the average reader’s taste for over-the-top violence.

8. “American Indians were warlike by nature, and they were warlike for centuries before Columbus stumbled upon them. They fought over hunting grounds, to be sure, but they also made a good deal of brutal and bloody war that was completely unnecessary. The Comanches’ relentless and never-ending pursuit of the hapless Tonkawas was a good example of this, as was their harassment of Apaches long after they had been driven from the buffalo grounds” (p. 44). In this passage, the author begins to make a case for the warlike nature of all Native peoples (all of them? Really? No difference among them?) in pre-Columbian times. And in the very next sentences he uses two examples that are much more recent and have nothing to do with pre-Columbian times. He also repeats many times generalizations such as “Such behavior was common to all Indians in the Americas” or “This, too, was seen as fair play by all Indians in the Americas." These kinds of statements, implying a shared culture among thousands of different groups over North, Central and South America are plainly off base. Native cultures ranged from militaristic urban empires with a highly stratified society to small-scale nomadic bands with no meaningful social classes, from farming societies of millions of people to tiny tribes of a few dozens of hunters and gatherers. Trying to paint them all with a single brushstroke is lazy and inaccurate. Generalizations like this are the type of stuff that get you laughed out of the room as a history undergraduate. Past that point, they are simply unforgivable.

9. In writing about the 1862 Dakota War, the author argues that it resulted in "...the highest civilian wartime toll in U.S. history prior to 9/11" (p. 211) Really? You don't think more civilians died during the Civil War? Considering that the estimates for civilian casualties during the Dakota War range from less than 400 to 800, compare it to the about 50,000 civilians estimated to have been killed in Civil War. So, let’s add this to the long list of monumental mistakes printed in this book.

10. Throughout the narrative, he adds a bunch of cases of rape by Natives against white women that are found nowhere in the original sources. Overall, it seems that whenever the historical record is not bloody and disturbing enough for his taste, he adds to it to make sure each chapter meets its quota of bloodshed and gore.

11. I kept this for last after presenting you with enough hard evidence that by now you hopefully see how clownish this whole thing is. “The first settlers ever to see true horse Indians were the Texans, because it was in Texas where human settlement first arrived at the edges of the Great Plains." (p. 41)

I’m sorry, but… what?!?!?! ‘Human settlement”? Gwynne writes this this in reference to the first white people showing up in Texas, because… you know... Natives who set up sedentary villages there were not 'human.' I am not a fan of casually throwing around the word ‘racist.’ Far too many people do it too often to the point that it stops meaning anything. And yet… I don’t know what other word to use when considering the following. How do you call a writer who speaks of a different culture, the Comanche in this case, and refers to them as a "premoral, pre-Christian, low-barbarian versions" of Europeans? Who describes them as ‘savage’ and ‘filthy’? How do you call a guy who describes Native religious worldviews as having "no tendency to view the world as anything but a set of isolated episodes, with no deeper meaning”? How do you describe someone who doesn’t consider ‘human’ the settlements built by Native Americans for thousands of years and reserve the word ‘human’ only to speak of white Euro-Americans? I mean… short of screaming “I’m racist and I love it” I don’t know how much more obvious does he need to make it. This is not someone trying to debunk stereotypes by showing a non-idealized view of a culture. This is someone missing the good old days when history was written through the lenses of 19th century racism. He somehow tries to justify what he writes by saying he’s calling things as they are, and doing otherwise would be bowing to political correctness. Call me crazy, but I think there are better ways to address the excesses of political correctness than rushing back into the arms of straight up racism.

I could go on. There are many more glaring mistakes throughout the text, but I think you get the idea. Keep in mind I’m not a specialist on Comanche history. If with my minimal knowledge, I can see all these errors, I can only imagine what I’d see if I had actually studied the topic to any degree of depth. When you add up all the evidence, the conclusion I draw is that as a writer, he’s talented and entertaining. As a historian… I don’t even know polite words I can find to describe just how out God-awful he is. If I made mistakes of this magnitude on the podcast, I would quit in shame. Of course, for a typical podcast I have anywhere between 1 to 3 months to prepare. For a book you have much longer, and have the benefit of editors. So, there’s simply no excuse for publishing this kind of trash. Worse yet, it makes me wonder how stuff like this can end up as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, which means that a ton of supposedly educated people have read it and missed the never-ending list of issues that characterize this work.

The answer is that most people are not educated enough to spot the difference between entertaining crap and real history. Most of us have opinions about stuff that we have no business having opinions on. If you don’t know enough for your opinion to be an educated one, perhaps it’d be best not to have one at all.