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Zusatztext “For a complete history of the Comanches! this book probably has no equal.” –Dee Brown! author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee “This is a very good book. Like virtually all good books about the American Indian! it tells a tragic story! but unlike many of them! it tells it well. The author has mastered an extensive and complex subject: he is flexible! well-organized! and sensitive.” –Larry McMurtry “Fehrenbach is a highly interpretive and original writer! whose work rests on solid scholarship. His book ranges grandly across the disciplines from folklore to anthropology to history.” – Southwestern Historical Quarterly Informationen zum Autor T.R. Fehrenbach was born in San Benito, Texas in 1925 and graduated from Princeton University in 1947. He was a contributor to many publications, including Esquire, The Atlantic, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New Republic. He is the author of the best-selling Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans and Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico , among other works. He passed away in 2013, at the age of 88. Klappentext Authoritative and immediate! this is the classic account of the most powerful of the American Indian tribes. T.R. Fehrenbach traces the Comanches' rise to power! from their prehistoric origins to their domination of the high plains for more than a century until their demise in the face of Anglo-American expansion. Master horseback riders who lived in teepees and hunted bison! the Comanches were stunning orators! disciplined warriors! and the finest makers of arrows. They lived by a strict legal code and worshipped within a cosmology of magic. As he portrays the Comanche lifestyle! Fehrenbach re-creates their doomed battle against European encroachment. While they destroyed the Spanish dream of colonizing North America and blocked the French advance into the Southwest! the Comanches ultimately fell before the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Army in the great raids and battles of the mid-nineteenth century. This is a classic American story! vividly and poignantly told. 1 THE AMERINDIANS As far back as history can scrutinize, man's intellectual and spiritual potentialities have not changed . --J. Frank Dobie THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO, NOT LONG AFTER MEN BEGAN FORGING INTO a still subarctic Europe out of central Asia, other men marched east on an incredible trek into the Americas. The origin of man on earth is still a mystery, and what physical and psychic circuitry was imprinted on man by his long evolution on this planet is far from scientifically established. No one knows where or when Homo sapiens, man in his present form, appeared or how he became separated into subspecies or races and diffused across the globe. The evidence of old bones suggests that the game-rich savannas of Ice Age Africa were the human birthplace, but the evidence is fragmentary and not decisive. Whether Homo sapiens evolved once in a single region, or whether there were parallel evolutions of protohuman stocks in several places--thus accounting for distinctive racial differences--is not clear. One thing does seem to be clear, however: man did not originate in the New World. No evidence has ever been found of the remains of high apes, hominids, or half-men such as the Neanderthals in the Americas. The oldest manlike relicts in the Western Hemisphere are perfectly human, and they show that the creatures who scattered them had both tools and fire. The most ancient human skulls unearthed from American limestone are distinctly those of Homo sapiens, men and women whose physical characteristics and, presumably, mental potential were not markedly different from present-day man. Other things about these bones and long-extinguished campfires are clear--they seem to have been left by a dolichocephalic or longheaded r...
