somebody's grandfather had done business with quanah parker. there's a sense of the immediacy of the frontier. often in my travels, it was this weird mixing of legend and history. i am up in a little town near wichita falls in north texas. i am up there and doing a story about these great baseball gloves. the factory burned down and the town was struggling. i was sitting at a bar with some old guy and he was telling me about this battle that took place. i had no idea what he was talking about. what he was talking about was the end of the spanish power in the new world. it was the battle in a 7058 where the comanches rode the spanish back. i'm talking about the end of the spanish world. in the new world. it was the stories and things like that. here i am, traveling around the state. one of the reasons of course is for the immediacy of the frontier, the last of the indians surrendered in 1875 and after that, there was a good deal of jostling on and off the reservation. things are happening validity 20th-century. -- well into the 20th century. the

adobe walls, the last spasm of power that one of parker led -- quanah parker led was in part because of the death of his father. the comanches were very brutal, so were all plains indians so were all native americans in terms of treatment of captives. if you are a historian in the field you have to come to terms with that because it happened. perhaps i was a little naive when i started writing the book but i remember somebody was interviewing me on the radio after my book first came out and said did you have to stop and take a deep breath before you sat down and wrote a complete revisionist history of native americans? and i am sitting there, thinking fast, complete revisionist history? what you meant was, and i have gotten the court -- what he meant was, and i have gotten the question since then, there was a notion that was popular particularly in the 60's, and the best example would be a book called "bury my heart at wounded me" but there were others, the impression was that the indians were the gentle and spiritual people fundamentally decent people who were steamrolled by this cu

he establishes the leadership of quanah parker and relations between american settlers and native americans in the west. recorded at a savannah book festival in 2012, this program is a little under 45 minutes. mr. gwynne: hello, everybody. thank you for coming. i want to talk this afternoon about how i came to this book or how the book came to me. how a connecticut yankee public career in journalism and failed attempts at fiction suddenly decides he wants to be a historian. not only that, but that he wants