Reviews 85 Comanche Days. By Albert S. Gilles, Sr. Bicentennial Series in American Studies, III. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1974. 126 pp. $6.95.) In 1875, Quanah Parker’s Gomanches surrendered at Fort Sill, term inating their 170-year war for dominion over generous parts of Colorado, Kansas, and Texas. The Indians then settled into subdued existence around Faxon, Oklahoma, near Fort Sill. There, in 1902, fourteen-year-old Albert S. Gilles moved from Kansas with his Scottish father and mother to open a trading post. The Gilleses offered Indians and Anglos alike such com modities as one hundred pounds of chewing tobacco a week, groceries, clothing, and household medicine (calomel, quinine, Black Draught, and epsom salts). But, more importantly, the merchant family offered the Comanches honest dealing and their friendship, rare commodities indeed in days when the white man often spoke with “forked tongue.” The Comanches especially admired young Albert Gilles, large for his age, who worked hard at the store and elsewhere and who made a con certed effort to learn the Indian language. One of the Comanches, Charley Ross, had attended the Carlisle (Pennsylvania) Indian School and often served as mediator between his people and the white world. He gave Albert Gilles the Indian name Para-da-de-a (Big Boy) as a sign of tribal affection. Albert S. Gilles left Faxon in 1907 for school and then became a lawyer in Oklahoma City, but he did not forget Quanah Parker, Charley Ross, and scores of other Indian friends from his youth. About ten years ago, then, he began preparing his book Comanche Days. Gilles was nearly seventy-five at the time he started the work, and thus reminds one of Roy Bedichek who wrote four distinguished books after he was seventy. Gilles’s purpose, he says, is to provide a corrective for what he considers to be the misunderstanding and neglect of the Comanches, often depicted as a “bad breed.” One of the popular criticisms that Gilles has in mind could be Colonel Richard I. Dodge’s remark in 1882 that “it is difficult to decide which of the Plains tribes deserves the palm for stealing. The Indians themselves,” however, “give it to the Comanches.” Whatever the reasons for misunderstanding, the neglect is obvious. Wallace and Hoebel’s The Comanches, Lords of the South Plains (1952) is the only full-length study other than scattered reminiscences even in these days when Dee Brown has made books about Indians more popular than soap opera. Reminiscence is what Gilles offers mostly in Comanche Days. The book opens with an epistolary preface followed by a brief informal history of the Comanches, whose name came down from the Utes and Spanish as Komantcia (all time fights). Thereafter, the book presents twelve parts of largely anecdotal material. In addition to Quanah Parker and Charley Ross, the following personages emerge: (1) the “lost ones,” young Comanches who, like Ross, had been educated at Carlisle but who, unlike Ross, failed to capitalize on their opportunities; (2) the comic combative squaw who 86 Western American Literature accidentally sat down on Gilles’s mother’s cactus plant in the store; (3) the tragicomic Indians on “whiskey nights”; (4) Mo-Cho-Rook, kidnapped as a baby by Comanches in a raid on his Mexican home, who became a cruel warrior; (5) Wer-que-yah, the “Jesus-Man Comanche” and the opposite of Mo-Cho-Rook; (6) Ca-vo-yo, the giver of names; and (7) the mysterious Anglo cowboy who miraculously set the broken bones of an Indian after a white doctor had despaired of tackling the job. Gilles demonstrates understanding of and affection for the Comanches of his youth. He humanizes a people too often stereotyped. But finally he fails to generate the total response that he desires from the reader. His failure, I think, is the fault of his vehicle. Reminiscence, at least as prac ticed here, depends too heavily upon exposition. The drama inherent in the subject seldom surfaces. Moreover, Gilles’s premise about the misunderstanding of the Coman ches remains open to operation. Even granted the intemperance of evalua tions such as Dodge’s, most writers on the subject — Atkinson, Bollaert...