ABSOLUTELY AUTHORITATIVE AND IMMEDIATE, this is the story of the rise and fall of the most powerful of American Indian tribes. It is the saga of the Comanches--the Nermernuh, they called themselves, the True Human Beings--who rode into modern history in a headlong collision with Western civilization. And this is how their struggle to preserve their culture, to extend and protect their lands, affected American life and history in crucial and permanent ways.

For more than a hundred years, the Comanches maintained their awesome and unquestioned territorial mastery of the plains. T.R. Fehrenback here re-creates their rise to power, form their first harsh struggles for survival in the Eastern Rockies of what is now Wyoming, through uncounted generations of Comanches who desperately resisted privation and suffering until they discovered their great engine of predatory conquest--the horse--brought by Spanish settlers. (The Comanches bred them until an ordinary warrior owned 250 horses, a war chief as many as 1,500.) And this is how, on horseback, they swept out of their ancestral lands to seize control of the plains: destroying the ancient dreams of Spanish empire in North America, blocking the French advance into the South-west--and becoming for more than sixty years the single greatest obstacle to Anglo-American conquest of the continent: and how, at last, they themselves were conquered, falling before the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army in the great raids and running battles of the mid-nineteenth century, in defeat after defeat that culminated in their virtual annihilation as a society--until, after the Civil War, only random clumps of tipis stood where once encampments had stretched for miles.