Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

I know nothing of the specific history of Native American tribes in the United Staes, and this was an accessible way to start that learning process.
The later half of the book focuses on Quanah Parker, the son of a captured white woman and a Comanche chief. He lived an extraordinary, almost surreal life, consider this: He was a brilliant and vengeful warrior, a war chief at 21 who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of white Americans, and who, in his second act, became a cattle rancher and school board chairman, acted in a movie, and palled around with President Teddy Roosevelt, who invited Parker to his 1905 Inauguration.
'Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History' gives a blow-by-blow account of the hardscrabble and bloody life on the Texas frontier in the middle decades of the 19th century. Atrocities were as common as blue northers, and lives on both sides of the great divide ended or were disrupted in the most horrific ways. Parker and his white mother, Cynthia Ann Parker, were prime examples.
Parker’s maternal relatives were homesteading way out on the Texas frontier in 1836, south of modern Dallas, lured there by generous land grants offered by the Mexican government. Even though they had built a fort and were armed, it required courage and optimism to pursue such a lifestyle. Indian raids were common in central Texas, and the Parkers had no backup: no neighbors, no town, no cavalry. To flee the attack that transformed Cynthia Ann into a Comanche, brutally killed five Parkers, and took five more captive, survivors walked 65 miles to Houston and safety.
Cynthia Ann was 9 years old when she was taken, having witnessed the gruesome slaughter of her kin and subsequent abuse of fellow captives by the raiding party. She would resurface 10 years later when a Texas peace delegation spotted her, blue-eyed and light-haired, in a Comanche village, covered in gore from skinning buffalo. She could no longer speak English and wanted to stay right where she was. She was bilingual, however, speaking Spanish and Comanche.
The first white man to enter Comanche territory was Spanish explorer Francisco Coronado in 1540, and 330 years later the tribe was still fighting to keep its own empire, which once encompassed parts of five current states, including much of Texas. Indeed, the Comanche had stopped the Spaniards dead in their tracks, preventing them from controlling wide swaths of what is today the United States. The conquistadors had handily defeated tribes below the Rio Grande, but the Comanche, though far less numerous and civilized than the Aztecs, were an obstacle of a different brand. The year of the Parker raid marked the beginning of 40 years of war among Texans, Americans, and Comanches. No other tribe would resist westward expansion so relentlessly. During the 1860s, Comanches and their fellow travelers actually rolled the frontier back as much as 200 miles.
The Comanche's were all about war, and once they mastered the horse, which the Spanish introduced into North America, they became the most nimble and deadly light cavalry on earth. Their style of fighting was perfectly suited to the plains, whose trackless and unforgiving expanses were almost as frightening to soldiers as the Indians they fought. Defeating invaders often didn’t require firing a shot: At night Comanches would stampede their horses and let the country have its way with them. they were the Mongols of North America. The book chronicles their capitulation to authorities and the disgraces that followed, but the book is a fitting tribute to a warrior tribe.