The Life of Ten Bears: Comanche Historical Narratives by Francis Joseph Attocknie (review)

The Life of Ten Bears has a literary origin story almost as incredible as its eponymous topic. Ten Bears (1790–1872) was the principal chief of the Yamparika Comanche tribe from 1860 to 1872, and negotiated several treaties with the United States government on behalf of his people. His name references his amazing story of survival—he was found ten days after he was left for dead as an infant during a Lakota raid on his family's village. In the 1950s, Ten Bears' great-great-grandson, Francis Joseph "Joe A" Attocknie, attempted to gather these and many other tales from his family tree passed down via oral tradition into a written format. This wealth of information was thought lost for years after the original manuscript disappeared due to the theft of a vehicle. Though Attocknie was not able to reconstruct the narrative before his death in 1984, amazingly, The Life of Ten Bears editor Thomas W. Kavanagh rediscovered a complete photocopy at the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives in 1987.

In The Life of Ten Bears, Kavanagh presents the multitude of disparate tales Attocknie gathered into two separate categories: dated narratives and undated narratives. To begin the dated narrative section, Kavanagh presents a "Life of Ten Bears" chronology that mixes collected tales with historical events. This section wonderfully illustrates the nomadic life of Ten Bears' tribe, detailing stories ranging from tribal negotiations in Kansas to military expeditions in Mexico. The Life of Ten Bears is devoid of illustration, and this section suffers from this deficit the most. I feel it would be a fascinating digital humanities project to track Ten Bears' tribal movements over the time period covered in the dated narratives.

Worthy of note are the caveats Kavanagh places on the veracity of the included tales. The reader should remember the fact that the majority of these tales represent stories from the Ten Bears family tree and, therefore, certainly do not epitomize life for the entire tribe. Kavanagh also references Attocknie's "Comanche Pride," and how it could have undoubtedly slanted certain tales, especially those involving other Native American tribes. Taken in the proper context, however, The Life of Ten Bears provides such a wealth of information regarding Comanche raids and rituals from this era that it should prove of immense value to researchers for decades to come.