I hope Hollywood doesn’t screw this up. The plot involves Indian fighter/army captain Christian Bale, who is charged with escorting a captive Cheyenne chief, in what seems to be a brief moment of compassion in Indian policy, back home to die.

The escort, which is made up of Buffalo Soldiers (accurate to the setting, 1892) is set upon by a common enemy–Comanches, easily the most feared tribe on the Great Plains.

You know all those old Westerns that show Indians firing at full gallop while hanging along their horses’ flanks? Only the Comanches could do that. All the other Plains tribes–even the Lakota, the majority present at the rubbing-out of Custer’s command–fought dismounted, just as the Bluecoat cavalry did.

All the other Plains tribes reckoned their wealth in horses. The Comanche saw their horses as utilitarian only. They would ride them to death, it is said, and then eat them. The formidable Apaches, who shared territory, very briefly, with the Comanches, were terrified of them. I think that’s what makes one of my favorite Westerns, The Searchers, so riveting: when the Comanches show up, unseen except for a flickering mirror-signal and unheard except for their mimicking of bird calls, you know the settlers they’re about to attack are doomed.

The book about them, Empire of the Summer Moon, and about their leader Quanah Parker–and about the raid and kidnapping that inspired The Searchers–is first-rate. It would turn out that the only fighters equal to the Comanches were the Texas Rangers, and what gave them their edge was their scrappiness (think Woodrow and Gus from Lonesome Dove), and, even more important, the technological advantage the Rangers gained once they’d armed themselves with Samuel Colt’s revolver.

The about-to-get-here film features Wes Studi, a wonderful actor, as the dying Cheyenne leader. He was Magua in Last of the Mohicans [a book it is not at all necessary to read: Mark Twain’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” is far better] and the title character in Geronimo: An American Legend, which was a far better film that the stupid title would indicate.

My favorite Studi role, however, came on a chance viewing of Reading Rainbow. He read a Native American version of “Cinderella” to very little kids, who were enthralled. His remorseless Magua was just a role. This is a very gentle man.