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Historical person
1800–1870
Buffalo Hump was a leading war chief of the Penateka Comanche during the mid-nineteenth century. He helped organise the Great Raid of 1840, in which Comanche forces struck deep into the Republic of Texas after the Council House Fight. Later he negotiated with United States officials, moved his people towards reservation life and tried to adapt to the destruction of traditional hunting grounds and the growth of settler power.
Larry McMurtry’s Comanche Moon makes Buffalo Hump a major character and connects his campaigns to the early careers of the fictional Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae. The novel is not a biography and reshapes events for dramatic effect, but it introduced many readers to the scale of Comanche power before the Civil War. Fictional portrayals should avoid reducing him to a simple antagonist in a settler narrative.
In Larry McMurtry’s Dead Man’s Walk, their first service exposes them to Comanche warfare and to Buffalo Hump, whose attacks reveal how little the new recruits understand about the plains.
Series
The Lonesome Dove quartet follows Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call from their first service as young Texas Rangers to old age at the closing of the nineteenth-century frontier. Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon trace their early experiences during the Republic of Texas, the Santa Fe expedition and…
All books in this series
