"On May 19, 1836, a Comanche raiding party swept down on the frontier settlement of Parker's Fort in northern Texas, killing five adult men and carrying off two women and three children, including nine-year-old Cynthia Ann Parker. This event had a significant effect on Texas history over the next 75 years, as is outlined in S.C. Gwynne's Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History. The book is both a biography of Chief Quanah, and a history of the Plains Wars and following reservation period.

The Comanches were the fierce Cossacks of the Southern Plains. Their mastery of the horse in the 17th century enabled them to dominate the regional geopolitical landscape. They halted northward Spanish expansion from New Mexico and westward French incursions from Louisiana. Their dark forays ranged from the Arkansas River to deep into Mexico. They drove the Apaches off the Texas plains and into the New Mexico-Arizona mesa country. Their boldness sent them to attack Taos, New Mexico, in 1706, and the following decades saw continued savage harassment of the pueblo communities. Raids on Mexican haciendas netted horse herds numbering in the thousands. For two centuries the Spanish, then Mexican, and finally the American presence was mostly powerless against them. The raiding parties traveled at night, and to this day a full summer moon in Texas is called a "Comanche Moon.""

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Comanche Moon (The American Spectator 9/21)