Nelson Lee

Grim's Hall Book Club: Nelson Lee's Three Years Among the Comanches:

Quite a story! The most memorable scene for me is the shipwreck, early in the tale, where Lee describes hanging from the mast and watching the swirling waters below. What was the part that sticks with you?

The question attending Lee's book is whether or not it is legitimate. It would be welcome, in a sense, to suppose that it wasn't: then we could dismiss the various cruelties, especially toward babies, as being simple legends. Indeed, one of the oddities is the cruelty toward babies; we see that with tales about the Comanches, but normally frontier stories suggest that the Indians kept captured children and raised them, even if they slaughtered adults or traded them as slaves.

So is it legitimate? The Handbook of Texas, Online, says:

Of this probably spurious classic work, Walter Prescott Webb stated that "there is no better description of the life of the Texas Rangers than that of Nelson Lee." The book has since been a source for several writers about Comanche culture. But in 1982 anthropologist Melburn D. Thurman called Lee's account of Comanche ceremonies "blatantly erroneous" and demonstrated that Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel's discussion of the "Comanche" Green Corn Ceremony in The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (1952) employed questionable data from Lee's book. Though noted Indian scholars have long identified the Comanches as a nonsedentary and therefore nonagricultural people, Lee narrated to his New York editors that Comanches planted corn, beans, and tobacco. Other wildly erroneous claims abound. Lee said that the Comanches wrote hieroglyphics on tree bark; built villages with central squares, streets, and houses of important men located on the squares; and resolved irreconcilable differences between two adversaries by lashing them together with a cord and requiring them to fight to the death. Accordingly, Thurman and other specialists of Plains Indians disputed Lee's captivity claims and, by extension, other claims he makes concerning his exploits.

I'm left admiring the quality of the tale, but I think we have to believe that some of the wilder stories were put in to make it salable.

Yet the Rangers have always liked this book, and still like it, as evidenced by the fact that it's posted on their website. What do you think?