Kevin Costner's the West (2025) s01e04 Episode Script

From the first days
that it became a nation,
the United States has
looked to expand its borders.
In the early 1800s,
American settlers move west
into territories gained from
the Louisiana purchase,
creating the states of Louisiana,
Missouri, and Arkansas,
while forcing native
nations off their homelands.
But when they push into
Texas in the early 1830s,
they must confront a native power
that's dominated the southern plains
for the last hundred years.
A nine-year-old girl, Cynthia Ann Parker
will find her herself
at the center of a battle
to control the heart of the continent,
fought between three bitter rivals,
the us, Mexico, and the comanche.
People live on myths,
and the myths that really
stick in the American experience
are the myths of the west.
The mountains were taller,
the deserts were harsher,
the snows were deeper.
American west conjures
wonder, possibility, opportunity.
The figure of the mountain man.
Notorious outlaws.
The cowboy.
The discovery of gold in California.
This train of wagons
trailing across the prairie.
Everybody has a reason
for wanting this land.
But most of that land
was already occupied.
We have had residents
for more than 10,000 years.
But this is a clash of two different ways
of seeing life itself,
fighting for the future of your
homeland on the one side,
and fighting for the
destiny of the new republic
on the other side.
The history of the
west is a creation story.
It's the creation of what we
think of as modern america.
The west is a place
where anything is possible.
It is the essence of the American dream.
The core of this, is what
are we to be as a nation?
The reckoning is coming.
The west is this canvas on which
American dreams
become larger than life.
Three decades after independence,
the United States has almost doubled
in both size and population.
The original 13 states now number 17
and are home to five million Americans
and 600,000 indigenous people.
Most of the land the United States
doesn't occupy in North America,
is claimed by great britain or Spain.
But on the southern great plains,
the 300-year-old Spanish
empire is struggling
against an unexpected
threat to its power.
Long before the Europeans
arrived in North America,
there have been Indians
living on the plains.
And among those peoples
were the comanches.
If you were to take a
snapshot of them in let's say,
the year 1600 or 1500,
they would've been a small tribe.
You would've described them
as nomadic hunter-gatherers.
Then sometime around 1625,
something happened to
turn this very sort of minor
and somewhat insignificant
player on the plains
into the single most
powerful force on the plains.
That was the arrival of the horse.
With the Spanish, the horse arrives
in the late 16th century,
and the tribe that
knows what to do with it
more than anybody
else is the comanches.
The horse is what enabled
for comanches to be able to go
and to build up this thing
that now historians are calling an empire.
With the help of the horse,
the comanche become
master buffalo hunters.
Buffalo became even more essential
to the comanche
culture and way of living
than it had been before
because they're not growing crops,
they're living off the buffalo.
Experts estimate that there was
as many as 30 million
buffalo, huge herds.
You could stand still
and it would take hours for them to pass.
The buffalo were everything,
for sustenance, for shelter, the teepees,
the hides, clothing.
The buffalo is a life source.
Chasing down buffalo from horseback,
the comanche learned to fire arrows
with deadly accuracy at a full gallop,
a skill they bring to warfare
as they shield themselves
behind the neck of the horse.
Their abilities to fight from horseback
were things that people
had never seen before.
They had been called
the most effective and
formidable light cavalry
in the history of human warfare.
And they became the
scourge of the plains.
They're blowing tribes
off of the southern plains
left and right.
They drove navajos and
apaches nearly to extinction.
The comanche fiercely protect
their hunting grounds
from all potential threats,
above all, the Spanish.
They would raid
settlements and steal horses,
and raiding became a way of life.
The comanches,
they're the most successful
expansionist power
on the great plains.
They're the ones
who are the most
successful empire builders.
By the mid 1750s,
the comanche have halted
Spanish expansion in its tracks.
With a population of 40,000,
their empire dominates
an area larger than France,
some 250,000 square
miles known as comancheria.
This comanche empire doesn't
look like European empires.
It doesn't have a central authority.
They were broken down into bands,
but it has its own policies,
its own economic strategies,
its own foreign policy,
as they work together
to dominate this area.
And if you were in comancheria,
you were liable to be raided upon
and perhaps killed by the
comanches almost at any moment.
As its north American empire
is under assault from comanche raids,
Spanish power in north
america is in decline.
In 1821, after an 11-year rebellion,
Mexico wins independence
along with all of Spain's
north American lands.
That includes the
province of tejas, or Texas,
about 3/4 of which is
now in comancheria.
To safeguard Texas
against comanche raiding,
the new Mexican rulers
look to create a human shield,
with American settlers.
In the 1820s, the Americans
have been invited in.
And so Americans are
moving to a foreign country
because they're gonna get
free land, thousands of acres.
It's this incredibly fertile land,
and they come in by droves,
and they create a buffer
against the comanches.
These Americans,
they've dealt with cherokees
and chick a saw Indians,
so they think they
know what Indians are.
No big deal.
And so there's a land rush,
as there will later be gold
rushes in the American west.
Over the next 15 years,
more than 30,000
settlers moved to Texas
looking for opportunity and fertile land.
Among them, the Parker family.
The Parkers came to Texas
because they weren't particularly well off
and so they couldn't buy land
where land had gotten expensive.
They start in Virginia
and they migrate to Illinois,
and they end up in Texas in 1833.
Land is wealth and
Mexico gave the Parker men
a 16,000-acre parcel
of nice rolling Savanna
that's just beyond your wildest dreams.
And they build fort Parker
like a military compound
on the very edge of comanche country.
Arriving with 38 members
of the extended Parker family
is nine-year-old Cynthia Ann.
Cynthia Ann's got three
brothers and sisters
and her parents are god-fearing baptists.
They believe god has already
willed what is going to happen
and they make their life.
To the Indians, as long as
Americans are passing through,
they are useful trading partners.
But once Americans
start to settle in places,
that's usually when conflict ensues.
The Parkers live out on the frontier,
so they're taking the risk.
Maybe you'll survive, maybe you won't.
While the comanche are a
threat to American settlers,
it's the Americans who
are now a threat to Mexico.
Mexico's outlawed slavery in 1829,
but many of the settlers who
were attracted to Mexico come
for the raising of cotton
and other slavery-dependent
commodities,
and they bring their slaves with them.
This is gonna create a
conflict between Mexico
and its invited guests
from the United States.
And by 1836, Americans in Texas revolt
in the name of
independence from Mexico.
After a bloody six-month war,
including the loss of some
200 Americans at the alamo,
texan forces led by Sam Houston
defeat Mexican troops at San jacinto.
Houston's rallying cry,
"remember the alamo,"
enflames his troops
earning victory in just 18 minutes.
Texas declares independence
from Mexico on march 2nd, 1836,
and looks to join the United States.
Texas wants to come into the union,
but the United States
says, no, you can't come in,
because northerners don't
wanna have any more slave states.
So Texas becomes this
independent republic.
And so they fly this lone star flag.
There's no American federal power
because Texas has
not come in as a state.
And so these settlers are out
on the absolute edge of the frontier
with no protection of
any kind around them.
So who is it that's going to be getting hit
by comanche attacks?
It's going to be settlers.
If you're a comanche back in the 1830s,
and if suddenly a huge family,
20 people or so showing
up in my backyard
and then they set up camp,
several months go by
and they're still there,
what choice do you have?
On a bright may morning in 1836,
a group of comanche, led by a
young chief named peta no con a,
rides up to the Parker fort.
Comanches have come
up with a white flag.
Cynthia Ann's uncle Benjamin
goes out to talk with them.
They say they want water.
But uncle Benjamin notes
that their horses are dripping wet
having just come out of the spring,
so they can't really want water.
Suddenly, all hell breaks loose.
It's obviously a killing raid.
The comanches stabbed
Cynthia Ann's uncle Benjamin
and scalp him while still alive.
What happens next is one
of the most significant events
in the history of the American west.
Now, the killing starts.
The fort itself was a very strong defense
in case any enemy came at you,
but the Parkers have left their gate open.
And that's a problem.
This quick scene of
violence, it's all about death.
Five members of the
Parker family are killed
and four are taken captive,
including Cynthia Ann and
her cousin, Rachel plummer.
This brutal raid marks the beginning
of one of the longest
and bloodiest conflicts
in American history,
the 40-year fight against the comanche.
Cynthia Ann Parker,
my great-great-great-grandmother
was, I believe, nine
when she was captured.
There's this perception that
the comanche take captives
because they're interested
in ransoming them off,
but in reality, the
comanche are also interested
in assimilating their captives.
This increases the
strength of the tribe itself.
The Parkers are just a few
of the hundreds of captives
taken by the comanche
in the early 1800s.
Many never see their families again.
Comanches would capture the children
to be incorporated into the tribe
to become comanche
men, comanche women.
Her captors take Cynthia Ann
deep into comanche-controlled land.
Her family tries to find her,
but she's beyond the
reach of American power.
Then after two years of searching,
they find her cousin Rachel
plummer and buy her back.
Rachel is 21 when she
was returned to her family
after two years of captivity.
The most telling detail about
what captivity must have been like
is that her striking red
hair had turned gray.
And she publishes a
memoir of her captivity.
They commenced
whipping and beating me
with clubs, so that my
flesh was never well
from bruises and wounds
during my captivity.
Often did the children cry,
but were soon hushed by such blows
that I had no idea they could survive.
Rachel plummer's narrative
of her time in captivity
becomes a big, big bestseller.
It has elements of true crime,
elements of a world that
one can't possibly imagine.
Rachel's memoir makes it clear to people
that there are extraordinary
dangers in the west.
And we're seeing a world that is scary,
we're seeing a world
that is filled with violence.
And now, anybody who didn't know about
Cynthia Ann Parker and
the Parkers, knows it now.
By 1838,
Cynthia Ann has been
missing for over two years
and the story of her
cousin Rachel plummer
prompts fear and
outrage across america.
Yet armed settlers from the
us continue pouring into lands
claimed by the new Texas republic,
but controlled by the comanche.
You can't really overstate
the amount of land the
texans of this new republic
were giving out.
And once you surveyed it, it was yours.
The comanche recognized that
surveyors are the advanced
guard of settlement.
And so surveyors are killed left and right.
Then it became the most
hazardous profession in america.
As the comanche raids continue
and more captives are taken,
the first president of
the republic of Texas,
Sam Houston, promotes peace.
As a teenager,
he spent three years
living with the cherokee
and was sympathetic
toward native Americans.
But texans want war.
And in December of
1838, they vote him out,
in favor of his vice president
who commanded the cavalry
during the Texas revolution.
Mirabeau Lamar became
president of Texas in 1838
and it became very clear
that this was one of the meanest people
in the state of Texas,
and most of the meanness
was directed at Indians.
He has a famous phrase
that describes his policy towards Indians.
"Expulsion or extinction."
As thousands of
American settlers claim land
in the republic of Texas,
their aggressive policy
towards native peoples,
"expulsion or extinction,"
is shared by the president
of the United States,
Andrew Jackson.
Andrew Jackson wanted
to have white settlers
able to have free access to
land in the southern states.
By the Indian removal act of 1830,
tens of thousands of native Americans
are taken away from their
lands and forced to go west.
But in 1838, the comanches are still free
and attacking settlers
across the southern plains.
The new president of the
Texas republic, mirabeau Lamar,
not only vows to get rid of them,
he promises to recover all their captives.
And knows the perfect men for the job,
the Texas rangers.
The Texas rangers were
famous for giving no quarter.
The rangers began in
1823 as a force of 10 men
hired to protect American settlers
in what was then Mexican Texas.
They are volunteers repaid
for their bravery with land.
When Texas gains its independence,
the rangers grow to 300 men,
and even more are needed.
Jack hays, at 23 years
old, is just the type of recruit
that the Texas rangers are looking for.
He's a formidable Indian fighter.
He's very adept with a pistol.
The rangers are all
under 30 and fearless,
but their firepower is still
no match for the comanche.
They've only got three shots.
They've got the Kentucky long rifle.
One, and they've got
two single shot pistols.
Their second problem is they're afoot,
against Indians who can
discharge arrows at this rate,
mounted on fast horses.
Now who do you think wins those fights?
But in the late 1830s, the
comanche are facing a threat
that's deadlier than any weapon.
The arrival of European diseases
were catastrophic for native populations.
Smallpox kills 90 of the
Indians for one of the whites.
In 1839, the comanches
have been devastated
by a sweeping epidemic of smallpox.
It's reduced their
population almost by half.
And that's what compels
some of the comanche to attend
the council house in Texas
with the Texas rangers
which is gonna be an attempt
to exchange dozens of captives
and achieve some measure of peace.
The comanches bring
only one white captive
by the name of Matilda Lockhart.
The white soldiers are saying,
but we want all the captives.
And chief mukwooru he's saying,
it doesn't work that way.
The texans will not accept
that a comanche leader from one band
cannot speak for another.
As tensions rise,
the 12 comanche leaders
who came to make peace
are provoked into a fight and shot dead.
23 more comanche are
killed in a street battle.
The news travels quickly,
and the comanche payback is merciless.
Surviving comanche leaders get together
and build a force of about
1,500 seasoned warriors,
and they are gonna seek
vengeance on white settlers
all across southern Texas.
The raid of 1840 is
like no other in history.
Comanche bands unite
for a 200-mile rampage
that slices through the heart of Texas
to the Gulf of Mexico.
They plunder two cities,
slaughter cattle, and
make off with 3,000 horses,
two dozen scalps, and
a half a dozen captives.
They burn the coastal
town of linville to the ground.
But technology is about to
turn the tide against them.
Samuel Colt is one of the
great early entrepreneurs
in industrial technology
in American history.
He just so happens to focus on firearms.
Back in 1836,
22-year-old Colt
patented a new invention,
a repeating pistol that can fire five times
in under 30 seconds, a
major upgrade from rifles
that can take a minute
to load just one shot.
Jack hays, the first great ranger,
immediately understood
that this could transform
warfare in the American west.
So he gets the rangers
drilling on horseback.
They are doing exactly
what the comanches are doing
except they're doing it with
a different type of weapon.
The Colt six shooter fast
becomes part of the
brand of the Texas rangers.
The Americans know
without any question
that this is going to be
the key to taking the west.
By 1844, nearly a decade has passed
since Cynthia Ann Parker
disappeared without a trace.
But out of the blue,
an Indian agent claims to have seen her.
She's now living as a comanche.
She was covered in buffalo grease,
not unlike other Indian women.
She is now called naduah,
which means one who was found,
or one who keeps the family warm.
She has been married for a
number of years to peta no con a,
a chief who was among the
comanches who captured her.
They have two sons, quanah and pecos.
And a daughter by
the name of topsannah.
The Indian agent tries
to buy back Cynthia Ann,
but she refuses to leave.
This was an astounding revelation
to people in the frontier.
It was a shock that she wouldn't return.
They say that she had sort
of gone over to the dark side.
White civilization freaked out.
Let's imagine what it's like to be
an American settler woman in the 1830s.
It's just bone grinding work.
And you're also in a
very patriarchal culture.
By comparison,
being a member of a tribe
was a world of freedom
for some of these captives.
She didn't want to come back.
The tribe didn't want to give her up,
her husband didn't want to give her up.
Cynthia Ann is not going anywhere.
It's 1844, an election year,
and the hottest political topic
is whether or not to annex
Texas, a slave-holding republic.
The United States congress
is deeply divided on the issue.
Westward expansion
exacerbates the issue of slavery,
because there had always
been this delicate balance
in america at that time
between those who were
opposed to the extension of slavery
and those who were
interested in expanding slavery.
James polk runs for president
on the Democratic ticket
and says that the united
states is going to annex Texas,
and all of Oregon, and he wins.
Then at that point, it tips
the balance in congress.
On December 29th, 1845,
president polk formally welcomes
a new slave state into the union,
Texas,
deepening the nation's
growing divide over slavery.
But with this addition,
polk sees yet another
opportunity for us expansion.
When president James
k. Polk takes office,
he quickly sends a large
contingent of American soldiers
down to the us-Mexico border
with the intention of provoking
a clash with Mexican soldiers.
And lo and behold, that
is precisely what happens,
and that becomes the pretext
for us declaring war on Mexico.
The Mexican war can only be described
as a war of naked imperial
expansion and land grab.
It has no justification of any sort.
There's a lot of brutality in it.
Two years later, the
Mexican war ends in 1848
and the United States gains
an enormous new territory,
out of which a number
of states will be carved.
Principally California,
Arizona, new Mexico, Utah,
and part of Colorado.
Polk's victory over Mexico
gives the us 1.2 million
square miles of new land,
an instant 66% increase to its territory,
that extends its boundary
to the pacific coast.
And to ensure the land is
open for American settlement,
congress passes the Indian
appropriations act in 1851,
creating the reservation system.
The government claims
it will contain and protect
the indigenous people
from American settlers moving west.
But many native American tribes,
including the comanche, fight back.
Peta no con a began a series
of horrifically violent comanche raids.
The worst of the raids are
in the county named
after Cynthia Ann's uncle,
Parker county.
To the comanche,
peta no con a is revered
as a powerful protector.
But to texans,
he's a violent terrorist
that's scaring off settlers.
In December of 1860, us
cavalryman sul Ross teams up
with Texas ranger, Charles goodnight
to track down no con a and take him out.
They locate a comanche supply depot.
They think this is where
they're gonna find peta no con a.
The camp was mostly
just women and children.
The men are out hunting.
But they attack anyway.
It's not a fair fight.
But one of them,
actually turns out to
be Cynthia Ann Parker,
who turns at the moment
where she's about to be killed
and holds up her small child.
And at first, they just assumed
she's another comanche to be killed.
And when they got up close to her,
and they saw the blue
eyes, they're like, who is this?
They soon realize
this is the long-lost
famous comanche captive,
the white woman that
people across the country
were hearing about.
Cynthia Ann Parker, now 33 years old,
does not want to leave the comanche.
But once again, she's
taken captive by an enemy,
this time with her baby
daughter, topsannah.
The fate of her husband,
peta no con a, is lost to history.
The Texas rangers
assume that her only desire
is to be rescued and taken back
into the the world of her childhood.
Cynthia Ann and topsannah are reunited
with their white relatives, the Parkers,
who insist they give up
their comanche ways,
and learn the scriptures.
Soon after her capture,
the Parker family
parades her through town
in western style clothes.
Crowds flock to stare at her.
They're doing all of this to be able
to make a presentation
to the world, to the family,
that this can work.
She got held up in white society
as celebratory, as justice,
as finally coming home.
She was rescued by the rangers.
But this was no rescue.
Cynthia Ann is devastated
being returned to white society.
It is not where she wants to be.
These people are strangers to her now.
She is basically held there under duress.
She tries to escape
back to the comanches.
And they keep bringing
her back to Texas civilization.
She's just despondent.
She's lost almost everything,
and she doesn't know what to do.
It's 1860 when Cynthia
Ann Parker is "rescued"
and returned to her white kin.
That same year,
Abraham Lincoln of Illinois
is elected to the presidency.
His election immediately
touches off the civil war.
At the start of Lincoln's presidency,
only a quarter of families
in Texas owned slaves.
But a majority of texan voters support
breaking off from the union.
And on march 2nd, 1861,
Texas joins the southern confederacy
just six weeks before the
opening shots of the civil war.
When the war breaks out,
soldiers in Texas head
for the confederate army.
And so, what were heavily
guarded areas in Texas
now are largely unguarded.
Many Texas rangers also enlist.
In their absence,
the comanche unleash a series of raids,
not only halting the flow
of settlers into west Texas,
but staring off the ones already there.
But Cynthia Ann stays in east Texas
many miles from the
raids with her white family,
but has no idea what happened
to her husband or to her son.
Cynthia Ann never
reconciled herself to her fate.
She never got used
it, she never forgot it.
She never stopped mourning
for both her husband
and for her two boys.
This one surviving photo of
Cynthia Ann and her daughter,
it speaks volumes.
Her hair is cut short, in mourning,
and there's a sense of desperation,
of getting back to her family,
back to her comanche people.
Topsannah was not
supposed to be in the picture,
but she was fussy,
and so Cynthia Ann takes
her and begins feeding her.
When the civil war finally
comes to an end in 1865,
congress abolishes slavery
in every state, old and new,
and begins the process of
reconstruction in the south.
Cynthia Ann and topsannah
have survived the turmoil,
but perhaps in vain.
Topsannah comes down
sick with pneumonia.
She's very ill.
She doesn't survive.
Cynthia Ann is beside herself with grief.
She's lost her husband,
her two boys, and now her little girl.
She's lost everything.
Now completely severed
from her comanche family,
Cynthia Ann refuses to eat
and purposefully wastes away.
She dies 11 years
after her second capture,
never reconciled, never happy again,
and mourning 'til the day that she died.
By the early 1870s,
many of the plains Indians,
including the sioux in the north
and the apache in the south,
are being moved onto
reservations by the military.
But Cynthia Ann's son, quanah Parker,
now around 30 years old,
is leading a coalition of armed resistance
on the southern plains.
In 1874, president ulysses s. Grant
sends troops to the Texas panhandle,
determined to ensure the
security of white settlers
by forcing every last
comanche onto the reservation.
The conflict will come to be
known as the red river war.
The us government make
their final absolute attempt
to crush the comanches
and other south plains Indians
in this spectacular place called
palo duro canyon in west Texas.
Federal soldiers led by
colonel ranald s. MacKenzie
ambushed a comanche village
and burned more than
400 teepees to the ground.
MacKenzie took 1,400 horses
that belonged the comanches,
and shot them.
They wouldn't fall over dead
like Hollywood movie actors.
They would take off bleeding.
So there's wild screaming
horses in all directions.
By the end of the year,
the remaining southern plains Indians
fighting alongside
quanah Parker surrender
and move on to reservations as ordered.
Quanah Parker, he is the last holdout.
He is the last of the free
roaming comanche leaders,
and the last of the
resistance to the United States
in this area of the country.
Unable to defeat their enemy in battle,
the army instead cuts
off their food supply.
The us adopts an official
policy of exterminating
the buffalo herds that
the plains tribes live on.
The bison population
dropped to about 1,000.
It's a decline of 99.99996%
in basically two generations.
The bison are virtually gone.
The comanche are being told
they're going to become
sedentary farmers,
and they'll be so much happier if they do.
The native perspective
when it comes to farming,
to be plowing a field behind a mule,
it's the lowliest thing
they could think of.
They just didn't want to do it.
Being a warrior and a
hunter was the highest pursuit.
But quanah Parker and the comanche
have almost nowhere to
go and nowhere to turn.
For almost two centuries,
the comanche built an empire
upon the two most iconic
animals of the American west,
the horse and the buffalo.
Their nomadic way of
life depends on them both,
but now they're under attack.
And by 1875, the comanches,
the lords of the plain,
who once numbered
40,000, are down to 1,500.
They either have to go extinct
by fighting to the last person,
or they have to cut
whatever deal they can
with the people who are
taking their world from them.
By the summer of 1875,
the only comanche still
riding the southern plains
are quanah Parker's band, the quahadi.
Quanah must decide
whether to give up control
of his ancestral lands forever,
or fight on and risk the
extermination of his people.
It's said, when quanah
was faced at that crossroads
of what to do, he goes
out to a nearby mesa.
He hears a wolf howling in the distance
toward the direction of
southwestern Oklahoma,
of fort sill,
where the cavalry have long
wanted the comanches to go.
And quanah Parker makes this decision
to finally go to the reservation,
to finally be corralled,
imprisoned on a very small space of land
that is totally contrary
to how you and your people
have always moved about.
On June 2nd of 1875,
quanah and his band surrender
at the fort sill reservation,
marking the end of the red river war
and the last day of the free comanche.
It's the end of a war
that is in effect begun
by the taking captive
of this nine-year-old girl
with bright blue eyes,
and it ends with her son's
surrender 40 years later.
The 1,500 comanche left
with quanah are now forced
to live on just 4,600 square
miles of reservation land,
less than 2% of the size of comancheria.
The vast southern
plains they once controlled
are soon turned into a patchwork
of fenced-in ranches and
farms owned by texan settlers.
The tribes are no longer independent.
They're no longer able
to sustain themselves on the buffalo.
They're dependent on
government handouts.
They had to accept rations.
They've been put on these grasslands.
Not really much use for comanches,
but the white cattlemen?
Quanah starts setting up deals
with some of the white
ranchers to graze their cattle.
He becomes an entrepreneur.
He starts acquiring wealth.
He built himself a huge house
where he had comanches
camped around it all the time.
He has eight wives,
at least 20, 25 children.
He becomes this bridge
between two cultures.
Theodore Roosevelt
becomes a friend of his,
and Roosevelt invites quanah
Parker to Washington, DC
for his inauguration on march 4th, 1905.
And quanah talks about
packing his six shooter
to protect the president.
When quanah crosses over,
he's buried right next to his mother
and also the remains
of his sister, topsannah.
Cynthia Ann and quanah
were separated in this life
and reunited at death.
In the end, it's a story
with a legacy of destruction,
of conquest, of dispossession
of Indian peoples,
of cultural genocide
against those peoples.
We are a people with a mixed legacy.
We cannot understand who we are
unless we understand
where we came from
and ask ourselves,
what can we do better?
What can we do better?
Despite the violence
these two empires
inflicted on each other,
it's not just the us military
that defeats the comanche.
It's the advancing power
of American industry.
Comancheria is carved up
by trails, rails, and telegraph lines.
The land is farmed and
grazed to feed a growing nation
and fuel its economy.
The open skies and
rolling plains still remain,
but the comanche are
confined to reservations.
While Cynthia Ann and quanah Parker
both found a way to
embrace a different culture,
the story of Texas, a land
conquered by American settlers,
will play out again in California.
Only this time,
the hunger for land is eclipsed
by the power of gold fever.