Customer Reviews

Comanches in the New West, 1895-1908: Historic Photographs (Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture)

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Excellent job by the authors with both the text and the selection of photographs. This is a very desirable book for readers interested in Comanches, the development of North Texas, early photography, or the process of Texas transitioning from frontier cultures into society as we have it today.

This book was ordered because I have a history with some of the photos in it. As a researcher for my historical body of works in oil, I was given permission to paint photos of this local early day photographer, Alice Snearly. The owner of her glass negatives at the time is a friend of my husband. Alice died in 1908 I believe. I interviewed her second cousin in Henrietta, TX. before she died about Alice and looked at some of the photos she had. One of my pieces that is in this book has been given as a permanent loan to the Asbury Complex in Comanche, OK, titled "Beef Time." It portrays many horses, wagons, Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, and Wichita Indians getting their beef issued by the Government out of Fort Sill. After painting a body of historical works on her, Larry McMurtry purchased the glass negatives and I believe donated them to the U. of Texas thus this book has been written. So, I feel a kinship in a way since I was a forerunner in some ways by painting from her work, writing about her and interviewing her family. I even have the name of the Comanche Indian police there keeping order.

The historical introduction in this book has filled a huge gap by detailing the events of the lives of Commanches after they were placed on the reservation up to about 1915. Most of the happenings are the same for other reservation peoples and yet few nonIndians are familiar with the sequence of events after various native groups of people were put on reservations.

The photographs are unique and ones not previously seen before. Larry McMurty has provided a valuable service by making these images available through the University of Texas archives.

This book is based around prints of 31 glass-plate photographs made primarily by Alice Snearly in and around Cache, OK, at the turn of the 20th century. The collection was acquired by Larry McMurtry, who donated the plates to the University of Texas Press, the publisher of the book.
Noyes, who wrote Los Comanches, provides some interesting but mainly inessential notes that at times border on the annoying, particularly when he noodles off into pointless speculation about how the subjects were thinking or feeling when their photo was taken based on the expressions on their faces.
There is a brief historical survey of the treaties that landed the Comanche on the reservation and the work of various Anglo religious, social, and political factions that gerrymandered their fate afterwards. Noyes also provides information on the Comanches' reservation life and their association with the Kiowa and Kiowa-Apache who shared their reservation. Commentary on the dress of the subjects is informative with respect to the assimilation of the Comanches into Anglo cultural and dress patterns during this transitional period in the tribe's history, but numerous notations on tribal dress also indicate how important the peyote ceremony had become for the tribe in captivity.
The photos are generally soft-focus and relatively low contrast, making it difficult to pick out detail, and there are no magnified views. The notes, however, do well at identifying individuals and pointing out notable objects in the prints. Also, Noyes delivers some interesting anecdotal material on Quanah Parker and some of the other tribal leaders during the reservation years.