Philipp Meyer · 2013 · overland
Philipp Meyer's 2013 Texas epic. In 1849, thirteen-year-old Eli McCullough is taken captive by a Comanche band that murders his family, and carried up into the Comancheria of the high plains, where he is remade as one of them. Returning at last to a Texas that has broken the Comanche, he builds a dynasty of cattle and then oil across the brush country - a saga of blood, land and power.
- 1The homestead
On the raw Texas frontier in 1849, a Comanche raiding party storms the McCullough homestead, killing Eli's mother and sister and carrying off the thirteen-year-old boy as a captive into the plains.
- 2The Comancheria
Up on the high plains of the Comancheria, adopted into the band and named Tiehteti, Eli is remade - learning to ride, hunt buffalo and raid, until disease and the settlers' tide break the free Comanche for good.
- 3San Antonio
Returned to a Texas he half-scorns, Eli rides as a Ranger and a Confederate colonel through the country around San Antonio, hardened by everything he has seen into a man who takes what he wants.
- 4The ranch
In the South Texas brush country the Colonel raises a vast cattle empire - built in blood over the Tejano families he displaces - that his heirs will turn, when the grass gives out, into an even greater fortune in oil.