Several years ago on a trip out west, I saw a catchy message on a “ T-shirt beneath a picture of some obviously unhappy Native Americans holding rifles. The caption read: “Homeland Security: Fighting terrorism since 1492.”

At fi rst the slogan is good for a chuckle and even sympathy, combined with the uncomfortable knowledge our ancestors may have been some of those early terrorists. But generally we Americans tend to think of the nation’s cowboy and Indian period as something akin to romantic fi ction and leave it at that. What we are not taught, largely because we don’t really want to face the story in any depth and detail, is the real history of how our relatives of European descent conquered and replaced those who were already here.

Growing up watching westerns on the big screen, I remember the awe of seeing the Indians dressed in feathers, war paint and leather emerging on horseback over the rim of a mesa, stretching their numbers across the horizon. It was as if there was an endless supply of native humanity equal to the endless supply of buff alo. At that point in the movies, battles almost always ensued with so-called “savages” attacking either white men of the cavalry or white settlers, who had circled their wagons, orboth. Usually Hollywood’s justifi cation of the mutual violence weighed toward slaughter being the price of “civilization.”

From what I can remember of American history, as it was taught when I was a kid, only the most famous Indian wars, like those at the Red River and Custer’s Last Stand, got much mention in the textbooks. It was not until I saw the bloody realities of the killing on both sides in the 1970 movie “Little Big Man” that my emotions were impacted enough for me to realize the true cost of the taking of this land.

Recently I fi nished reading S.C. Gwynne’s “Empire of the Summer Moon,” about “Quanah Parker and the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history.” Having spent my grade school years in Mexia, Texas, where my dad was editor of the newspaper, I had learned about the Parkers at an early age.

Fort Parker, a reconstructed log replica of the original fort built in 1835 by settlers of the Parker family, was not far from Mexia. Every kid in our town had heard the stories of Cynthia Anne Parker, who at age 9 was kidnapped in a Comanche raid on the fort and raised as an Indian. She married a chief and was the mother of a chief, Quanah.Texas Rangers recaptured her when Quanah was 12, and they never saw each other again. She also never learned her son was still alive nor lived long enough to see him become the last major leader of the Comanches.

This deeply researched book reads like a novel charging the reader across the plains chasing buff alo, raiding, warring and escaping with the tribe, whose riding skills had made them one with the horse, their greatest asset. It is not a story that is easy on the stomach or the heart, but it is one every citizen of this nation should learn. We need to put our past to work in analyzing our present behavior as a nation and to put in perspective what may happen to our culture as human territories and fortunes evolve or disappear both here and across the world.

Gwynne’s telling of this history shoves the natives west across the decades until they had no place left to live by the only means they had ever known. “For those who witnessed the change at a very intimate and personal level ... the speed with which that ideal world was dismantled must have seemed scarcely believable.”

The environmental losses in the 19th century that had limited or destroyed the Indian’s food and water resources and their low birth rate and deaths from war decimated these people of the plains. “By the latesummer of 1874 there were only 3,000 Comanches left in the world,” writes Gwynne. This line hit home with me because I thought about the Mrs. Young building on the Fayetteville square crowned with the date1887. Right here we can still see what settlement looked like while the Indians were struggling to survive on what was left over. As Gwynne says, “It was manifest destiny made manifest.”

This is an incrediblebook. Don’t miss reading it.

FRAN ALEXANDER IS A FAYETTEVILLE RESIDENT WITH A LONGSTANDING INTEREST IN THE ENVIRONMENT AND AN OPINION ON ALMOST ANYTHING ELSE.

Opinion, Pages 15 on 11/11/2012