Historical sites will be history soon
I’ve been a recreational reader since kindergarten but I rarely read nonfiction without someone forcing it on me. But earlier this year I turned a new page and started reading nonfiction for personal enjoyment.
The books have been primarily about Oklahoma territory and Native-American history. It started with “Empire of the Summer Moon,” a brutal and thrilling examination of “Comancheria,” Quanah Parker and the Comanche tribe’s forgotten place in the history of 
the Great Plains. I am familiar with the stories. I grew up hearing and learning about them from every perspective but the book still blew my mind.
I’ve also read “The Way to Rainy Mountain,” a book of stories and poems about the Kiowa tribe and a sacred foothill southeast of Gotebo in Kiowa County. The place was important to the tribe for many reasons but it also served as geographical marker. Before U.S. development, the plains were an amorphous land comparable to an ocean or desert in vastness, danger and navigability.
I used to cut wheat and plow fields at the foot of that landmark when I was a kid. I would commute from Apache via back roads and also use Rainy Mountain as a guide.
Right now I’m reading “Chilocco: Memories of a Native American Boarding School.” The book is about the “Indian Agricultural School” north of Ponca City, just inside the state line. 
It was open from 1884 to 1980. More than 5,000 students graduated from there and approximately 18,000 students, representing 176 different tribes, walked the massive 8,640 acre campus.
I plan to read “Carbine and Lance: the Story of Old Fort Sill” next. I went to the museum at the military base every year as a child, but I hope to learn something new from the book.
These books and stories like the one on Collings Castle by Derrick Ho and Hannah Rieger, and others I found in the archives have inspired me.
While writing stories for the metro section, the know-it section of Newsok, the forthcoming Yukon Living Guide, and working on stories for the business section, I’ve also been developing a multimedia project that examines endangered historical sites in Oklahoma.
I’m just not sure if I will have time to do them all.
Many of these sites are rural and forgotten. It is sad to see locations rich in historical significance give way to the elements of weather and neglect. Oklahoma City residents had the tax base and common sense to restore Bricktown. However, there is no economic incentive to save many places on the list of the state’s most endangered historic places.
I have five sites selected. I hope to do at least three. Feel free to email me with any suggestions at koswald@opubco.com.
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Good for you! Excellent! Caution: You will be hooked on history before you know it.
Here’s my review of “Empire of the Summer Moon,” which is supposed to be in the next “Chronicles of 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. Pp. xxiv, 371. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography, Index. $27.50 cloth).
S.C. Gwynne has written a roiling account of the Comanches’ last decades of independence. Within it, he spins a romping tale of Quanah Parker, the last Comanche chief. There is a reason the book was a New York Times bestseller: Gwynne seems thoughtful and is a great writer. The book is not without faults, of course. Historians might quibble at the very characteristics that make Empire of the Summer Moon so accessible to the everyday reader, especially a provocative pose that borders on rash at times. Others complain of errors of fact and the perpetuation of myths. But this is the stuff of which great movies adapted from history are made: well-crafted story.
In twenty-two short chapters, Gwynne introduces readers to the Comanches at their height and descends with them to their nadir as first Texans, then Americans, then Oklahoman Americans circumscribe their territory time and again in their own social and legal — and usually violent — climbs toward other zeniths. Gwynne probably introduces a new generation of Western and American Indian history enthusiasts to Parker, cattleman Charles Goodnight, Captain Sul Ross, as well as the most romanticized and tragic woman in the frontier histories of Texas and the Southwest: Parker’s mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, kidnapped at age 9 during a Comanche raid in 1836, the year of Texas independence, and again kidnapped — there is no other word for it; rescued will not do — in 1860 by federal troops backed by Texas Rangers and held captive by Texas society and white culture for a decade until her death. Gwynne punches the twin stories right along to their bitter end for the Comanches and bittersweet finale for their last chief, who embraced white ways to his own benefit and his tribe’s — although the whys and what-fors of it were debatable among Comanches in Parker’s day and remain so now.
Gwynne, a journalist, makes two major faux pas, one to put him at odds with historians, one to get him crossways with historians and Parker descendants in Oklahoma and Texas. In a four-page sermon (43-46), Gwynne boldly, if not carelessly, goes where few historians have gone since the 1970s in his assessments of the Comanches’ alleged mindless, immoral savagery and worldview. The gruesome facts cannot be denied; Gwynne’s interpretation reflects his own Western biases and worldview. Besides, he contradicts himself later with his characterization of infamously brutal Comanche raids in 1860 as “neither random nor senseless” but “a colliding of political and social forces” (157) — meaning they were rational, not random, and moral in their own way.
Historians and Parker descendents, as well as Parker’s casually fictive kin by choice in Oklahoma and Texas, will recoil at Gwynne’s audacious declaration that the captivating and popular post-surrender Quanah Parker lied, again and again, in insisting that his father, Peta Nokona, did not die in the Battle of Pease River, a Comanche disaster, in which his then-34-year-old mother was re-kidnapped — when Quanah was 12 — just to protect his father’s reputation. Gwynne bases his conclusion on a weak chain of hearsay that he claims is Quanah’s own veiled and inadvertent testimony, couched in Charles Goodnight’s words by way of Texas historian J. Evetts Haley (195-196, 317). Gwynne calls Quanah Parker a liar based on a hunch — at a book-signing in Oklahoma City, Gwynne called it “common sense.” Many Parker historians and descendents consider the book itself a travesty for posterity — an opportunity for a grand retelling of the Quanah Parker story, ruined by what they consider unfounded character assassination. They would rather the story had been left untold for this generation.
In all, though, Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, is engaging history writing for the non-academic reader. Unfortunately comical typos — the year 1939 instead of 1839 (145), “clamored forward” instead of “clambered forward” (163), “rife” for “rifle” (233), and 1992 for 1892 (308) — can be attributed to careless copy editing. Less forgivable is the assertion, from the subtitle to the last page, that the Comanches disappeared into American culture. Ask them. They did not.
Richard Mize
The Oklahoman/NewsOK.com
–rm