>> i see what you were saying. it is very human to have one people have made that journey and gun situated in a new place to actually want to close the door. many of the people who migrated, each wave of migrants had to face that. every single new wave had to face that until they could become citified and until they could be season into the new world that they were in. the urban league used to pass of them fliers to tell people don't wear your head rags outside. don't hang your laundry out in the front. put shoes on her children. there were all kinds of things of they were being told to help them adjust to life in the north because ambitious and fearless as they might have been distilled the know quite get the rules of the new place to iran. once they knew the rules, it was almost like tasing.

you want to make sure that anybody knew has gone through the same paces. >> flip that and deal with what has happened to our children and grandchildren who are just rebelling. .. >> that have not made that full immersion into some -- they've gotten involved in gangs and drugs. some other groups, italians, mexicans. what happens is that -- the

succeeding generation does not have within them the sense of sacrifice and the sense of want and the sense of the old world with values that propelled the first generation to leave in the first place. and be i think that what is, to me, from what i've done in this research what often is missing is how do you translate that, how do you transfer those old world values that had meaning? the beautiful, hard work ethic of the south, the spiritual grounding of the south, the face of people in the south, the willingness to sacrifice and defer gratification, although they didn't get create for that. -- credit for that. one thing about this migrant generation is there's so many myths and misconceptions about them that were totally untrue. of that's one of the things i learned in this process. those people who migrated from the south actually were more likely to be married than those in the north already. that's astounding to me.

that's not at all what you hear. they were more likely to raise their children in two-parent households. you never hear that. they were more likely to be working than not working, they were less likely to be on welfare. they were more likely to be making more money than the people who were in the north already, and do you know why? it's not because they were actually making more income, they were working longer hours or multiple jobs just like most immigrant groups do. so there's something -- what this is all about is what it means, what do human beings do when they're in certain situations? it's not about black and white, it's about what do human beings do when they're in a particular situation and they want to make life better for themselves? and that first generation and that second generation of people in the new world regardless of whether they're italian, irish, german, it does not matter, african-american, they are going to do whatever it takes to succeed. they cannot fail. failure is not an option because they cannot go home and have people saying, see, i told you

it wasn't going to work. [laughter] i knew they weren't going to make it up in new york. [laughter] yes. >> hi. good evening. my name is debbie brown, and i'm originally from south carolina. i've been living in georgia for 25 years, i'm an origin south carolinian as i've traced my family roots back to 1705 -- >> wow, congratulations. >> the french hugh nots came from canada to the charleston area and from west africa as well. my roots run very deep. as a matter of fact, my family history was with chronicled in the movie with deliberate speed with sidney poitier which is thurgood marshall's first case in south carolina which was brig g v. elliot. >> congratulations. >> and up into brown v. board of education in topeka, kansas. my question is -- although i'm

from south carolina, educated in virginia, i stayed in the south as many of my relatives did because a lot of them worked for the railroad which was a pretty good job during that time, and there was no reason to lee -- leave the south. but a number of them took the same route your mother did, it ran through south carolina, took you to philadelphia, new york, boston, connecticut and those areas. in many speaking with the, i guess, the original migrants to the north and west and, well, north and the west, did you find that a lot of their children and grandchildren are doing a reverse migration? because what you're seeing in atlanta itself a lot of those people are coming back and rediscovering their southern roots. and any comment on that? >> i think there are many reasons why. one reason is that african-americans actually are, as americans, doing what many other people are doing. there's a movement toward the sun belt because particularly in

the '90s that was where the economy was going so much stronger. but the second thing is one thing about that generation is that they didn't really talk that much about what they'd experienced, and i think the younger generation, the succeeding generations after the migration, the children of the migration had questions. they didn't have that same personal, the personal memories that might have been so painful that the parents might have had. they were more willing to take a chance in coming back. it was, it was a new place. it was the warmer sun, you might say. and so there was not that same resistance to coming back and seeing. my own parents, for example, my mother may not like me saying this, but they came back kicking and screaming, basically. they, basically, were not excited about coming back to the south. [laughter] and, ultimately, they ended up enjoying it and loving the opportunities and the fact that it had changed.

but the younger generation is much more open to that, and i think that's reflective of how much the south has changed, how much the country has changed, and in some ways it might be argued that that's one of the great legacies of the great migration. those people leaving helped force the south to change. they were voting with their feet. and now it's so much better place for all of us to live. >> [inaudible] >> two more? okay. yes. >> just in thinking about the length of time it took you to come to this final product and your previous successes, i just wondered what you found to be inspiring or motivational for you or who encouraged you during the times when, i'm sure, kind of there were lows and you current sure if you wanted to continue doing it or what have you. >> thank you for asking that question. i think the greatest inspiration was the people themselves. these, the three people that i focused on and the 1200 or more

that i also talk with willingly shared their stories with me. they wanted their stories told. they wanted people to know what they had experienced, and many of them would -- i remember in oakland one particular visit i had where the people, where a man actually came up with papers to show what he had experienced. and he had tears in his eyes. and so people wanted their stories told. and when i had moments of wondering whether i'd be able o make it through to the end, i felt i had to finish it for them because they had entrusted their stories to me. one of them said, you know, if you don't finish this book in time, i'm going to be proofreading from heaven. [laughter] and he was right. yeah, he was right, unfortunately. so that was what -- the ultimate inspiration was the people really. thank you for asking. >> good afternoon. my name is fleda mass jackson,

and my question is one about the land. you talked about gardening as a really a real essential element in terms of the southern experience that was taken to the north. but i want to know did people talk about from the southern side landownership? and those who migrated, the loss of land b so that land becomes a real central feature of this movement back and forth, maintaining it or losing it, giving it up. the whole discussion around land and land other thanship. >> land is fascinating because, first of all, the land is so beautiful to begin with, the south. and secondly, there has been such a difficult relationship between the land and the people anyway. you work the land, you knew the land, but you didn't own the land in many cases. in other cases you owned the

land, but it could be taken from you. and as it happens in my own family, both the homes that my -- both my mother and father lived in were razeed to make room for highways. that's another way that the land is taken from people. so you're right, the land becomes in some ways representative of the only thing that african-americans might have had to connect them to something that had meaning and value. and then that was taken as well. but for the people that i ended up talking to, they had to leave all of that in order to go to the north and start all over again, start from scratch, start from nothing. and to me the lesson of that is a spiritual one with. again, getting to the idea that the sun is within all of us, the land is within all of us, and we take that with us wherever we go. and that's sort of what i take from the meaning of the title and the land that you speak of.

it is our land. but it is, it is not us, you know? the people in the families, the families and what make us our, make us who we are is beyond the land. so i found that they were willing to look past all of that, and i took a lesson from that. a spiritual one. and i think that that's a useful one for us all. doesn't mean it's not important, it just means that what can you do if it's been razeed, we went back trying to find my mother's home, and it was gone. there were no touch points for it. and so we had to let that go and recognize that we had to be grateful for what we had and accept the blessings that we had been given. so thank you. [applause] >> this event was hosted by the atlanta history center. to find out more, visit atlantahistorycenter.com.

>> we're at the national press club talking with charles ogletree about his book "the presumption of guilt." what made you decide to write about this incident? is. >> a lot of people emailed me, sent faxes and calls after his arrest saying this happened to my grandmother, my uncle, my niece, my brother, and it was an amazing reaction. and it created news because it was professor gates, not jamal who lives in the community. and it became even more of an issue because my dear former student and our president, barack obama, came to his defense, and that created a national issue that led to the beer summit. it was a natural thing to do, and i wanted people to say if professor gates can get arrested in situations like this when he gives two forms of id in his house and his only crime is arguing with the police officer in his house, then what happens to those who don't have a lawyer, who don't have power? and the this book explores that case, but it mothers -- explores

the broader issue of racial profiling. >> did you learn anything that surprised you while you were researching the book? >> everyone thought that the woman who originally called was the nosey neighbor, she was racially profiling. in fact, when we got the 911 transcript what did we learn? she is the hero. she says, i see people, i'm calling, but i don't know if they live there or work there. the dispatcher said are they white, black or hispanic? she said, i don't know, i think one's hispanic. the police report says they're black, she never said that. so all these things we thought we knew in 2009, investigation, research and analysis showed it was not the real story, and that's why the book has been so important. the last adapter's called 100 ways to look at a black man because for all these calls and faxes and other material i received, most of the people who got in contact with me about

racial profiling were professional black men. and i started doing research on that, thurgood marshall, the late johnnie cochran, john hope franklin, spike lee, our attorney general, eric holder, federal judges, ministers, every -- doctors. and it just amazed me how many people had encounters with racial profiling, and most of them did nothing. because they don't want a billion dollars, they didn't want the satisfaction of a lawsuit, they simply wanted an apology. and i say that to say that maybe you can use these stories to remind other people there is not hopelessness, but people who find themselves victimized by racial profiling can then tell their story and get other people to respond to it. >> thank you very much for your time. >> next, s.e. quinn discusses his book, "empire of the summer

moon: quanah parker and the rise and fall of the comanches, the most powerful indian tribe in american history." his talk from the 2010 texas book festival at austin is close to 45 minutes. >> once again my name is brian sweeney, i'm the deputy editor of texas monthly magazine, and i have to say it is always a real treat to be invited to work at the book festival. i believe my first one was in '97 when i was a volunteer helping people getting to where they're going, and it's just been really great for me to then have the chance to sit up on stage with authors like sam. sam has written what i think is the best book of the year that i have read. this is called "empire of of the summer moon." it is unbelievable epic history, and yet it is incredible narrative story telling, and so congratulations to you for having written just a fantastic book. [applause]

but in addition to the fact that i admire sam so much, i have to say i'm so excited to be here with him today because sam is one of my very good friends. when i was starting at texas monthly and knew even less about editing than i do today, we went to lunch together, and i had worked on a piece that i didn't feel great about but was okay with. sam and i went to lunch, i'd never met him before. he'd been a national correspondent, he was hired as an executive editor, he is now a senior writer for the "dallas morning news" up in my neck of the woods. and we started talking about this story. and every moment that i thought i had taken a misstep in that piece as an editor, he was able to identify on his own. and yet he was able to do it in sort of a wonderfully supportive and instructive way. i didn't feel bad about not having done it as well as i would have liked to have done it in the first place, and i think that relationship was able to develop over the years in terms

of the stories we'd written, so i'm very happy to be here with sam. i wanted to say in my mind this book has been such a runaway hit, five months now on "the new york times" bestseller list. >> yeah, well, four plus anyway. >> we'll round it up to five. [laughter] i have confidence. the comanche and the story of quanah parker and indians in texas is just such a great story generally. it's one that we all grow up hearing. we see on movies, television, my sense is that every book has on occasion. what was it for you to write this particular history at this particular time? >> that's a good question. about 12 years ago i read a wonderful book by walter prescott webb called "the great plains." and inside this book -- and it was really about texas mostly. and inside this book there was a chapter, or even a subchapter ant the comanches. and it put forth this premise that there was this enormous

force sitting in the middle of the continent that determined how everything happened. and i'm a yankee, i'm going, what? wait a second, i mean, i might know a we quod or a woman know wag, but with i didn't know from comanches. comanches are something that in john wayne movies was code for, uh-oh. [laughter] oh, we're in trouble now, that's a comanche arrow. that was pretty much what it was. so what happened was that was what set off my interest. so i did all the normal things you would do if you're interested in comanches. beyond that, though, i think it was really about a yankee's love affair with the state of texas. when i was time bureau chief i traveled all over the state, when i was a writer at texas monthly, i traveled all over the states. we all at texas monthly looked forward to getting assignments where you had to go to amarillo or lubbock. i know that sounds strange. [laughter] but it was true.

>> [inaudible] we love of you equally. >> so it was a bit of just understanding what the plains were and what a plains indian was. and to me it was all -- and i think a lot of that comes through the book, this kind of oh, wow, the yankee's learned some stuff about the state. i and -- and i think that informs about the book because it was like, wow. >> right. what is it that you learned that perhaps we didn't mow popularly about the comanche? one of the things that struck me is the way you're able to frame the way the comanche existed. my one cheat sheet is i have the sentence from the book. i never thought of it in an ordered, structured way. you write that by 1750 colonial times and back east the comanche had carved out a militaryically and diplomatically-unified nation with precise boundaries that were patrolled and

ruthlessly enforced. how was that possible? what was the comanche nation doing that there were actually boundaries that not only other tribes respected, but the spanish clearly respected? that goes counter to what i would have thought. >> well, basically, what the nation -- [inaudible] about 250,000 square mile piece of land, but it was not an accidental piece of land. it was a piece of land they'd fought over for 1r5 0 years -- 150 years, nearly exterminating people like the apaches. but what it was was a militarily-dominant power from the wind river mountains of wyoming where they had been an insignificant power. but they got the horse, they swept south, and the reason for that 250,000 square mile empire as i call it, they challenge for the richest buffalo plains in the country. that's what it was. in other words, if you were the strongest tribe, what would you want? you would want the richest buffalo plain.

so think amarillo. that's where it was, the southern plains. so they say they called the comanches the lords of the southern plains, well, that's what it was. that fateful day in 1836 when they raided parkers fort, the parkers touched that empire that, of course, didn't look like the roman empire. these are nomadic people. you couldn't see them, you couldn't find them, you couldn't go to a village and burn it down as you could with east coast indians. >> they touched it in such a way that though they had a fort, they were miles and miles away from any support. they were out there kind of, literally, on their own. having no idea what would certainly befall them. >> exactly. i want to talk about that because that aspect of the book informs the way that you've done this structurally which i think is interesting, the way you've crafted the book from beginning to end. you alternate chapters in terms of the grand sweep but then the very specific story about the parkers, and particularly cynthia ann and then quanah. i wanted to ask you

historically, i remember in the office however many years ago now you were talking you were going to write this book, and i had gotten excited about it, and we had talked about certain specific things that i knew a little bit about but was amazed at what you had already uncovered. i want to throw out two dates that seem significant to this in terms of this book in terms of what the comanche were able to do, one, the apex of their power particularly as it related to dealing with the spanish, and then when we see it begin to wane as they begin to fight with mack kenzie and his troops as they take off from west of fort worth. one is march of 1858 and one is october 1871 where mackenzie begins to push west and becomes the most feared indian fighter, at least from the comanche standpoint. can you talk about those and how they inform our understanding of the comanche? >> yeah. i think that what brian's talking about is in 1758 a raid

against the presidio, and it was kind of a funny story because, literally funny because what happened was the apaches had gone to the spanish in san antonio, and they said, you know, we really rethought the way we think about this. we want to be civilized, we want to come into the mission, we want to be christians. all those raids, we didn't really mean that. and the spanish got very, very excited about this. but the apache said we want this mission out here in our homeland. i can't remember what the -- anyway, this is our homeland, we need you to build the presidio which was the fort and the mission that went with it. they always went hand in hand. and this is out in the country. outside of minard. anyway, what happens is the spanish get very excited about this, so they build these thing out there in the middle of nowhere. what it turned out, though, was that the apaches had lured them directly into the comanche land,

and the whole point was to set up a buffer to, in effect, set their two enemies at each other to go fighting. so, of course, the apaches never showed up. [laughter] they never showed up at all. and the spanish are out there going, well, gee. but i think it shows a lot about what it was like dealing in those days if you were the spanish. spanish had enormous trouble with the comanches, basically they bottled them up i in this empire that was empty of all meaning. it was a remarkable show of power. the comanches swooped down on the presidio, and they killed everybody and, you know, it's one of those comanche raids. and reprisal raid, the spanish march north near the present town of ringgold and absolutely get destroyed or beaten, rather, they turned tail and ran at the battle of the spanish fort which was the high water mark of spanish power in america. the other thing you asked about

was 1871. i start my book with the year that these grim warriors who had destroyed the american south, and these guys were nasty pieces of work when it came to battle. i'm talking about grant and sherman and sheraton, that's who it was. they had unleashed more carnage than the world had ever seen. they finally decided in the 1871 -- that's why i start my book in that year. they finally said, okay, enough is enough. this boundary, this frontier has been frozen for 40 years in a single place. no other indian tribe ever held it up for more than a couple of years. think of a line between here and ft. worth, and basically that's where the frontier sat for 40 years. well, 35 years. they just said, okay, enough's enough. there's 4,000 of these guys out there. you know, we have 51,000 casualties at gettysburg alone, okay? so this final will, i guess the will to go get them was the beginning of the end of the

comanches. that was coupled, of course, with the slaughter of the buffalo where they took their commissary and food away. 187 1, and the guy they sent was this guy named ranald mackenzie. mackenzie was grant's favorite officer in the civil war. and so you have, again, these grim kind of warriors unleashing their guy. against quanah parker in the fall of 1871. and so to me it's one of those great kind of moments where it's almost the beginning of the end. the it's the will to destroy them finally. but also, i guess in retrospect, it shows you just how powerful the brain plains indians were. >> that's what's unbelievable to me, just that scope of time that they were able to exert that kind of influence for so long and so dominating. >> right. and i think that that, you know, one of the things i, you know, where a lot of people have asked me about this, you know, did i

set about in if my book to -- about in my book to write a kind of revisionist history of the experience of native americans in north america, and the reason for the question is there's kind of -- i said, well, there's this idea may be driven by bury my heart at wounded knee and that the indians of the '60s were victims. indeed, they were. they were all victims, eventually, of the great american steam roller that came west. but there was also power, and i think that what surprises some people anyway about the book is just how powerful they were. i mean, it was somebody suggested they were more like a nation state like germany or prussia. in many ways they were. so you have the -- it's a kind of -- it's a different way to look at indians. they lost eventually, but they were enormously powerful, and they determined really if you look at comanches, i mean, all these questions that you could ask about the center of the american continent, who was it

that stopped the spanish in their drive north? it was the comanches. who was it the that stopped the french in their drive westward? it was the comanches. it was the fear of the comanches that led the mexicans to let texans in the first place as a buffer against comanches. basically, offering texans up as meat for the comanches. [laughter] well, this kind of backfired on them, right? a little bit. [laughter] >> here we are today. >> but it was, you know, comanches account for the adaptation of the five-shooter and the six-shooter and, you know, the invention of the rangers. and as i say, the static, the fact that a frontier existed for 40 years in a single place. i mean, you just keep going with these guys. i guess on some level it's about power. >> right, right, right. you had mentioned, hey, i would just be curious to ask how many of you are familiar with randall mackenzie?

sam has a good line in the book which i'm paraphrasing, essentially, george armstrong custer became famous in defeat, and mackenzie ended up obscure in victory. i think you have to tunnel down just a little bit to know that. you talked a little bit about that e notion of bury my heart at wounded knee, and i think that's been one of the things that came through for me, i know it's been much discussed. what can you tell us about the daily life if you were a comanche? what is the daily life like? what did you figure out about kind of the social and governmental entities that controlled what they did and why they did it? because i think your conclusions are, perhaps, a little bit different from maybe what we would have thought about. >> to me, they were the kind of ultimate dream of americans in some ways. they had this incredibly flat society. there was no hierarchy. yes, there was a war chief and a civil chief, but on any given day, somebody could organize a

war party, and the war chief couldn't say anything about it. there were no priests castes, it was a stripped-down war machine. they fought, they hunted buffalo, they were -- nobody could ride with them, so you had this incredibly elemental world where if you were a comanche male anyway, you were free to do anything you wanted. there were no restrictions on you. now, the comanches did have a culture. i mean, it was not sophisticated is a hard word to use when you're talking about this, but other tribes wove baskets or built houses or had elaborate art. comanches had none of that. so inside they loved to have fun, they loved to gamble, and they loved to wager and do many, many things. but i saw them as this kind of just absolutely stripped down, spartan kind of war machine that everybody was scared of but that, in fact, offered unbelievable freedom. it was, to me, you know, the freedom that writers and poets in america have always talked

about, that kind of great spatial freedom of the west. but it was also a freedom from institutions, right? i mean, you know, you came west, you got away from all those institutions back there in boston that maybe you didn't like. and, you know, i think that on some level the comanches structured the way they were, and other indian tribes were way more hierarchical than they were if you look at the iroquois or something, extremely sophisticated social order. it was a way this kind of great glorious, wild freedom both spatially in terms of being on the plains, but also culturally in terms of just, you know, you didn't have church and state and -- nothing. anyway, i found that an interesting part of it. >> the dark side to that, that sort of hypermilitaristic culture was clearly what happened on the battlefield though. so i wonder if you might talk a little bit about that sort of -- what was it about their cultural or their society that caused

them to prosecute wars in the way that they did? i think in the raid on parkers fort, for example, and how instrumental, clearly, that is to the comanche history. maybe talk a little bit about that and sort of what -- >> okay. that's a good question. raiding was what they always did. now, go back, let's go back into the 1500s and 1400s. raiding was what everybody did. there were, you know, a raid and you'd take somebody's whatever, his dogs or his women or his buffalo hides or whatever he had, and there was killing, and there was raiding. and this was done, you know, this was done forever. what happened to the comanche was sometime in the 17th century they got ahold of the horse. and it transformed them in a way that nobody had ever been transformed before. and so what you had is, suddenly, okay, everybody's raiding all the time, raiding all the time, okay. but now one tribe can outride just like, you know, somebody said it's like attacking some sherman tanks. you were able to ride a horse, you were able to attack fully

mounted. nobody really did this beside the comanches. and suddenly you had this complete transformation, i guess, of the world that was really, look, before the horse they raided each other all the time and they tortured each other all the time, and after the horse they pretty much did the same thing. the difference was the balance of power shifted. and i don't know if that answers your question, but -- >> the horse -- [inaudible] essentially had been kicked around historically, right? and so was picked on by other tribes and harassed and threatened. the horse was to them what other technological inventions would have been to societies later on, it completely transformed who they were. >> can i think it was compared to steam. on the plains, anyway, i mean, it changed things. so you have to see, i think, the comanches as once empowered with the horse, it, it, you know, if you can outhunt or -- i hunt

buffalo, that helps. but if you can outfight people, that really changes who you are if what you're about is kind of raiding. and that's what you do. suddenly, you're just the uberraider. and, of course, the tribes that got the horse, i mean, the ones that were good at it, you can probably stack them. sioux, arap hoe, chi chen, apache. those were the guys that were good at the horse. >> we're going to go for about ten more minutes and then open it up for questions which we enjoy. so if you have a question, begin to make your way up to the microphone. i want to ask two things, one about content and just one last question about craft and i think is interesting to even who's ever wanted to write a book and has no idea how to proceed. one, the way that you structure this book as i had mentioned earlier is in alternating chapters you do the big, grand

history of the comanche, and then you zoom in on one with starting with what happened at parkers fort and taking it all the way through with quanah parker. that's clearly one of the classic texas stories. it was a big story at the time. memoirs were published, newspaper reports about what happened, but tell us about cynthia ann and quanah -- >> i can sort of merge those two questions together. i'll get to structure in a minute. basically, this was a story, i mean, you know, when you're writing a book, you need to -- it helps if you have something that nobody's ever heard of before. and cynthia ann parker and the whole story of cynthia ann to quanah had kind of been lost. i think people over a certain age in texas all know the cynthia ann parker story. i think there was a bit of forgetting history. my daughter goes to high school, she does not. it was an opportunity to do this story. but the other side of it, and this gets to your question of

structure. what i wanted to do was, you know, i wanted to tell -- what i've been talking about mainly here, i guess, is the rides and fall of the comanches, the big picture rise and fall from their roots, their obscure roots in wyoming to the peak of their power to their fall in 1875. that's great, epic, big story. but what's cool is inside that story there was this wonderful little human narrative of the parker family. and what enabled me to do as an editor -- brian, by the way, is one of the finest editors on the planet earth who somehow, miraculously, all of my best stories for texas monthly was edited by brian. what was i saying? is. [laughter] >> how great i am. >> oh, yeah, before i said how great you were. [laughter] oh, okay, the structure. the structure became the trick of the book, brian and i, this is what we've done for years. we talk structure. this is writer/editor.

this should go first. no, brian says that should go third, this should go first. but the secret of the book, if you will, and kind of my brilliant discovery at one point was that i really needed to alternate the big rise and fall with the little story. so you get the big rise and fall which is like a james mitch they were book -- mitchner book and then goes forward. [laughter] this allowed the story of this little 9-year-old girl who got kidnapped in 1836 by the comanches that set in motion these incredible forces, you know? she became famous really three times, once for having been taken, twice for being the white squaw who refused to return, the third time famous when charles goodknight recaptured her at peace river in 1860, and the fourth time as the mother of quanah. you had this amazing story that then rolls forward with quanah as the last and greatest of the comanche chiefs, and still that's not the end of the story.

quanah's second act on the reservation where he becomes the most influential indian of the reservation period. so to me that's what the appeal was. you could do both of these stories and have them kind of run together, and that's the way the book works. >> the intersection, i think, is really great. once as a reader as it always is you sit down with a book, and you start to go through it, when you realize what it is, i think it really is a wonderful moment in the book how this story is being told. one last question, i swear, and then we'll open up the floor to you all. craft, i'm curious, you have been a writer for "time" magazine weekly, you've been a writer for a monthly magazine, you are now a senior writer for the "dallas morning news" turning out pieces on the finances of bill white and yet also a profile of josh hamilton, so wonderful range. you have written a book previously, though that was a while ago, and it was a business book. >> right. >> so how did you begin the process of figuring all of this out?

what did -- and this could go on, so sort of in a nutshell, what was it about your reporting methods not being a professor of history, someone who who has sof made his living doing this, how did you figure it out? >> it's a very good question, and it's one that's been asked all the way along. it started out like who's going to hire me or give me an advance on a book, i'm not a historian. so i had to go the extra mile on the book proposal and sort of prove that i was. in a lot of ways i found that i'm a reporter, that's who i am, you know? that's what i do. and i found that my reporting skills worked to do history. there is, there was one little thing that i did that i don't think -- and maybe i shouldn't even say this, historians might laugh me out of the room. but one of the things i realized in doing this book was that i had to, that i couldn't be one of these guys that went out and like, you know, beavered away for three years and then came back with this much stuff and all cross-indexed and say, okay,

here we go. let's see, once upon a time. >> let's write a book. >> yeah. let's see, in 1872, you know? i realized that because of what i do, particularly texas monthly -- long narrative fiction -- fiction -- [laughter] my stories are nonfiction. but, you know, so what i did in effect was i read a lot of books just for background. but then i reported this thing chapter by chapter. i read about chapter one, wrote it. and if i found things that were later, i put them away. it was never long between researching it which was largely done at university of texas here, a little bit in oklahoma and the panhandle, you know, it was that kind of just doing that. but, you know, i really found to my surprise, i guess, that, you know, when i went into the archives at university of texas where i spent months and months, that the reporting skills that i have evolved just being a reporter, they're the same. i think in some ways, you know, book writing's just really,

really slow reporting. [laughter] >> great. this has been great. it's been a real treat for me. we already have a gentleman who wants to ask a question, and a woman here. please, if you have questions, it would be better if you came up to the microphone. we have about 15 minutes to go. immediately after this session, sam will be at the book signing tent, and so if you have a copy -- and i think if you haven't read it yet, hopefully, this discussion has shown this is just really a fantastic book, so i hope you'll read it if you haven't. yes, sir. >> great book with, thank you for writing it. my question has to do with the comanches' behavior if they were captured by someone who was inclined to torture them like they seem to torture people? did they have some kind of code of behavior, informal, of course, that they would have been raised from youth in how to respond to that, being tortured situation? >> not that i know of.

i mean, the only thing i know of is there was kind of a weird golden rule that applied on the plains. it applied all over america. and that was a comanche male who was taken in battle by a crow or a ute or something, and if he was alive would automatically be tortured to death. and it would be quick if they didn't have much time, and it would be slow, they gave him to the women if there was a lot of time. there was no exception to it. and what astonished the white people, and i don't think there was a code necessarily, but indians would fight to their last breath, every single one of them. and, and the white men eventually learned why, because if you got captured alive, it was really not pleasant. it's thought that even though this wasn't written widely about, it was thought that rangers always saved one bullet in the chamber because you didn't -- but it was the same, there was just a version of the indians you did not want to be

taken, you could not possibly be taken. i think torture is one of the things that, you know, i devote a big piece of the chapter, but it's something we all have to come to terms with when we look at indians. although, you know, i swear i just read a memoir of the war in the pacific, stuff the japanese did would have been fully in line with what koreans did and, obviously, not singling out japanese, but things that are going on in africa today are just as bad or worse in rwanda or places like that. anyway, yes. so, ma'am? >> [inaudible] >> is it not on? >> how would i know? >> there it is. [laughter] >> what was it like to be a comanche woman? >> be a comanche woman? is. yeah. this is one of the things i tried to do in talking about

cynthia ann. i mean, they did all the work. they had very -- they didn't have much status, but they did all the work. and it was astonishing what they did do. they also fought. but, you know, the process of tanning buffalo hides is brutal work. and they just, they did this all day long. they were the ones who -- these were nomadic tribes that moved all the time. they were entirely in charge of the logistics of the move. the men, it was real clear; you hunt, you fight, there was nothing else. women did absolutely everything. so it was a kind of a brutal, a brutal life, i guess, for a woman without the freedom that the men had. so it was, you know, and i think cynthia ann lived that life, of course, when she came back, she voted with her feet. she kept trying to escape. as hard as it may have been, it was still her world. a hard world for women, though, very hard. >> yeah, over here? >> >> you talked about having done a lot of research and reading.

what's a nice book about just day-to-day life, fiction -- i'm thinking i read one by kelton called "buffalo soldier," and i have nothing to base on how accurate because it talks about the spiritual life and how important hunting and this -- >> so are you talking -- i'm sorry, are you talking about a specific book? >> kelton's "buffalo soldier" -- >> i haven't read that book. >> a little bit about what motivated a comanche warrior spiritually and why was it so important to hunt and to capture people and to torture. >> it was -- the society, the comanche society evolved particularly during the years of the apache conquest when they nearly annihilated the apaches. they evolved into a tribe where status relied on military success.

and that, i think, changed everything. so you have to look at them as -- i mean, you can look at the spartans the same way. there was nothing but military success. now, religiously they had a very simple version of religion. magic and taboo all around, magic lived in beavers and wolf withs, magic lived in be trees, so the idea was to harness in whatever you could do to harness it. there was not a complex -- as other native american tribes in north and south america had, it was pretty simple. and it didn't necessarily, i don't think, inform that much their warring habits. i mean, there was -- on the other hand, that was their great weakness as warriors, you know, you kill the chief and ruin the medicine, and they flee. so there was a lot of that. they were kind of easy to spook. but i think that in some ways you have to see them as a stripped-down war machine where all the status in the world depended on victory in battle.

and it got to the point where i think it even got a little out of hand. that's all they wanted anymore, and they -- anyway. so, yes, ma'am. >> i thoroughly enjoyed your book too having grown up in lubbock and, basically, spent 20 years of my life at the canyon at girl scout camp. i really enjoyed that. how was it that quanah parker after all the things he did as chief was able to turn that around and completely become part of the white man's society? why internally did he think that he -- did he not main tan that hatred -- maintain that hatred he had originally? >> the world's greatest museum, if you haven't been there, panhandle plains historical museum. you've been there, haven't you with, brian? >> i've read about it. >> incredible. anyway, where was i? [laughter] quanah. quanah had something that most

indians did not have in the reservation period, and that was optimism. he was an optimistic fellow. and it was interesting, he was very gregarious, and he was very social and convincing. in fact, it's interesting. if you look at what the skills were needed in a comanche society where, basically, your power as a chief rested in be your ability to go recruit a war party, i mean, you go around the tepees and say we're going to do a war party against the utes, do you want to come? and if chief wasn't convincing, you'd maybe get three people, but quanah was really good at it. he was the guy who was a talker. he was optimistic, he was out there, he was gregarious, he was social, he was positive, he was a recruiter, basically, and the things that made him a great chief in some ways carried over. now, it didn't carryover for many other people who were good at being a chief; and i think there was something about him, and i don't know where it came from, but he had an optimism and

a hope and a feeling that things were going to get better. and then when he got to the reservation, he was like everyone else. he was living in line for rations, and he had nothing. and yet he thought things were going to get better. i one of the reasons i love quanah is he's a great american hero, i think, but he shares what i think, to me, is probably the single most defining american trait, and that is just sheer optimism. the belief that it's gonna work, that you're gonna get better, your kids are going to have it better than you do or you're going to do better this year than you did last year. he donated land at some point, built a school and became the first chairman of the school board because he was going to build a school board. that's the kind of guy he was. and it's interesting to note thattier on know was kind of a drunken old curmudgeon. they knew each other. ier -- geronimo.

>> outstanding book. my wife picked it up while we were in your territory while we were listening to the it, the unabridged version. i particularly liked your -- i thought you were very balanced in your approach to both the white man and the indian. but when i got back, i started reading some reviews, most of them were good. but there was a lot of reviews that kind of took you to task a little bit. i think it was from the indian standpoint that maybe you were a little harsher on the indians than you should have been. i thought it was balanced, but how do you respond to that concern. >> i haven't -- there's been a little bit of that, but i expected more kind of blowback than i got, to tell you the truth. i didn't -- i had lunch with a chickasaw film maker the other day, and he was talking about his comanche friends. they were -- they don't like

necessarily my portrait of the brutality although i could have gone much farther in what i did. but they, i think on the other hand they believe that the portrait of the overall portrait was fair. it's, i mean, my view of how to do this was really not to take any political agenda at all, not to say the white men were less cruel than the indians. i'm just a reporter, and i gather my reporting, and the reporting showed there were unbelievable white atrocities and also what we consider to be unbelievable indian atrocities, and that's just the way the frontier was with. but i haven't, to tell you the truth, a little bit, i was expecting much more, and i think i would have heard by now. anyway, yes? >> cynthia parker is probably the most famous indian captive, especially in texas, but she certainly wasn't the only one. was she different from all the others? >> um, i'm trying to think of that famous one in mary -- what

was her name? anyway, she was very unusual. in history. she is not the only one who wouldn't come back or who fully assimilated, who crossed the line. the, there are a few other examples in history, but it was pretty unusual. in fact, it was so unusual at the time that a white woman could choose the savagery over the civilization. i mean, it was shocking to people. they couldn't believe it. that you could possibly be so fully assimilated as she was to forget her own language, to take, to take all of the apache -- sorry, the comanche ways to herself. and so, yeah, i mean, i think it's -- in her era, anyway, she was considered to be absolutely unusual and extraordinary. there were many, many, many captives, most were returned relatively quickly. most of the adult women who were

returned were considered damaged goods and had kind of trouble with their lives, but anyway -- yeah. >> with the power that they had, why didn't the comanches just sweep the plains west with of the mississippi river like a genghis khan, and does that have anything to do with the low birth rate? >> i think that's part of it. i think their numbers weren't big enough for that. but the real reason, i think, is that indians never really, they didn't see property in strategic ways. they would never fight to take a position. they would never do a go liply, sacrifice large amounts of people to take a piece of land. so i think the way they saw their empire was simply the southern plains where the buffalo were. that was where it was. so the idea of sweeping northern mexico clean which people had

suggested they could do too or sweeping to the -- that's more of the european idea. that's not so much an indian idea. they never thought that way because there would have been no point. from their point of view, there were no buffalo there, so there were no buffalo over by the mississippi. all they wanted was that. they never really did understand property, and i think some indians still have -- >> i was going to say we have the five-minute signal, so maybe we'll do another question or two. i'm sorry if we don't get to everybody but, please, go ahead. >> i was curious -- it was a great book, i really appreciate it. i learned a lot. what about the canyon and how did that inform their society and talk about how i that was sort of almost the way you describe it a kind of fortress and undiscovered place that white man didn't know about? >> if any of you've seen it, it's the second biggest canyon in the west. it became toward the end of the comanches' era kind of ground

zero for comanches. it had always been a winter camp for them, but it was just this unbelievably gorgeous river-cut, stream-cut place where you could hide, and ultimately, the red river war was fought there because it was such a great place to hide. but i think they were no mad, and so i think historically they would end up in the cannon for winter camps, and i just think it became part of their society. one of the most interesting moments in the history of the west, at some point quanah and these guys said, look, you've got to let us out to have another buffalo hunt. i'm sorry, this was in the reservation years, so quanah said we would like to go on a buffalo hunt. he lobbies for that, so final finally they let him go. they trust him at this point. they're shocked and astonished that they find no buffalo

because by this point most of the buffalo had been killed. well, they get to the canyon, and lo and behold they find out that a white guy owns it. [laughter] a guy named charles goodknight now owns the place. and quanah goes, what do you mean you own the place? you know, it's one of those conversations where the indians go, wait a second, you own this? [laughter] what does own mean? own in be what sense? like, did god give it to you? that was, to me, the great moment when you saw how fast it changed because it was only a few years before that goodknight literally owned it and then you have barbed wire stringing through western oklahoma. anyway. i guess one more? you get the last shot. >> i promised my sister i would ask this question. you talk a lot about the dogs that accompanied the comanches. >> uh-huh. >> were you describing a particular breed, or were they mostly wolf or what? >> i don't know. that's a good question. i assume they were, they were

wolffish, but i don't know. the, my favorite dog moment in the book was -- well, there were two dog moments. at the battle of peace river as the dogs fought to defend the helpless indians -- and they were all killed, of course -- but the other one was there was a moment when the -- this is during the battle of the blanco canyon. the bluecoats had chased the indians over the edge of the plains, and there's this pursuit going on, and the indians are getting away. the bluecoats are so close behind that the indians are kind of shucking things fast. one of the things they were shucking were dogs, and some of them were puppies. so you had this strange moment where these mackenzie's soldiers riding into a blue norther with puppies on their -- just one of those weird moments in the west. anyway, i don't know much, but the dogs were ubiquitous in the comanche camps. there were always dogs. before the horse, a dog carried

their belongings when they moved. so anyway, i guess that was it. are we done? >> >> do you want to squeeze one more in? >> we can do one more. >> i'm a writer and journalist myself and i found a failing in the book being where are the maps? >> maps in the book? >> maps all over the book. >> other people have noted that, duly noted. i think it could have used more maps. >> -- by your publisher. >> second edition. granted. [laughter] >> i'd like to thank you all for being here, and i'd like to thank sam gwynee. [applause] he will be at the book signing tent immediately after this. >> this talk was part of the 2010 texas book festival. for more information about the festival, visit texasbookfestival.org. >> we're here at the national press club talking with spencer abraham about his book, "lights out." can you tell us what some of

these solutions are to our energy crisis that you detail in the book? >> i will. as energy secretary, i watched what seemed to work and what i felt was not working, and we've got a real energy challenge chasing america going forward. and i think first we need to increase dramatically the role nuclear energy plays here in the united states. right now it's 20% of our power, and i think it should be 30% by 2030. we also need to increase the role of renewable energy here in the united states. right now it's wind, solar, biomass, geothermal, these renewables are only about 2% of our energy, and we really need them to be much, much higher. and so we need to support that effort. and i'm a conservative, so i believe in conservation. and one of the things we'd also need to do is to find ways to improve our energy efficiency so that we don't demand as much growth in energy demand as right now is projected to be the case. >> and what do we do