The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

years of the eighteenth century a long-standing military and political alliance that remained an essential part of Comanches’ power base until the mid-eighteenth century. Cemented by intermarriage and kinship ties, the alliance offered compelling strategic advantages for both. Utes were locked in an on-and-off war with the Navajos over raiding and trading privileges in northern New Mexico and were eager to obtain Comanches’ military assistance in their efforts to keep the numerically superior Navajos in the west and farther away from New Mexico. Utes also needed Comanches’ military aid in their conflicts with the Indians of Tewa, Tano, Jémez, Picurís, and Keres pueblos, who had seized Spanish weapons, armor, and horses during the Pueblo Revolt and encroached into

  Ute territory to hunt deer, elk, and bison. In return, Utes shared with Comanches their land, their horses, and their knowledge of the political and ecological intricacies of the Spanish borderlands.¹¹

  As the union solidified, Comanches turned their course west and crossed

  the Front Range into Ute territory.¹² There, in the eastern Colorado Plateau, they entered a period of spectacular change, reinventing themselves within a few years technologically, economically, militarily, and socially. Living with and learning from their Ute allies, they adjusted to their new homeland, an ecological patchwork that extended from the Great Plains–Rocky Mountain foothills

  ecotone across the densely forested Sangre de Cristo and Jémez ranges, featuring snow-covered alpine mesas, deep, glacier-carved valleys, spruce-fir, juniper, and pine forests, and semiarid grass and shrublands.

  The diverse environment supported an equally diverse economy. Utes and

  Comanches spent the fall, winter, and early spring in small bands, hunting ante-

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  lopes; trapping jack rabbits; and gathering berries, nuts, and yampa roots. In the spring, the scattered bands congregated into larger units and traveled eastward to the upper Arkansas River valley, where they hunted bison and lived as tipi-dwelling plains nomads. Summer was the main season for warfare and raiding,

  witnessing Ute-Comanche squadrons moving into Navajo country and northern

  New Mexico. Utes also introduced Comanches to New Mexican markets, and

  soon the two allies were regular visitors at Taos and San Juan where, under temporary truces, they bartered robes, meat, and Navajo slaves for maize, horses, pottery, and cotton blankets at great fall fairs. Although most Utes and Comanches followed this general yearly pattern, there were significant variations among different bands. It was probably here in the Great Basin that the Comanches

  began to distinguish among three broad subdivisions, whose names evoke di-

  versifying economic and dietary frontiers: Yamparikas (Yap Eaters), Kotsotekas (Buffalo Eaters), and Jupes (People of Timber).¹³

  While initiating Comanches into the complexities of their new home terri-

  tory, Utes also ushered them into a new technological age. They provided their new allies with horses as well as the knowledge of how to use them in transportation, hunting, and warfare. By the 1710s, only a generation after obtaining their first horses, Comanches were lashing northern New Mexico with uncontainable

  mounted raids. But the raids were only the most visible manifestation of a profound material revolution that came with horses. A horse could carry two hundred pounds on its back and drag up to three hundred pounds on a travois, four times as much weight as a large dog could move, and it could cover at least twice the distance in a day. With the rise of equestrianism, Comanches could transport more hides, meat, and household utensils, and they could search for prey over a wider range and kill the animals more effectively. Their reach of trade was multiplied, as was their ability to wage war, plunder, and defend themselves. In almost an instant, the world became smaller and its resources more accessible.¹⁴

  Behind these practical advantages, however, was an even more fundamen-

  tal change. More than a mere hunting and transportation tool—a bigger and

  stronger dog—the horse represented a new way to tap energy. Dogs used plants, the most prolific reserve of processed solar energy available for animals and humans, only indirectly, by consuming the flesh of herbivorous animals their owners fetched and fed them. Horses, in contrast, drew their strength directly from plant life, allowing their masters to eliminate one arduous phase in their search for power. A conduit between immense, abstract solar energy and concrete, immediately available muscle power, the horse redefined the realm of the possible, bringing Comanches a step closer to the sun, “the primary cause of all living things.”¹⁵

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  Utes also introduced Comanches to European crafts. Having traded regularly

  in New Mexico since the 1680s, Utes had accumulated enough guns and metal

  tools to pass some of them on to their Comanche allies, who now moved, literally overnight, from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. Although Comanches used

  the new technology to replace their traditional tools and elaborate on their old techniques, not to realign their basic economic system, it was a momentous leap nonetheless. Iron knives, awls, needles, and pots were more durable and effective than their stone, bone, and wooden counterparts, making the daily chores of hunting, cutting, scraping, cooking, and sewing faster and easier. Spanish laws prohibited the sale of firearms to Indians, but the ban was widely ignored in New Mexico’s trade fairs, especially in the northern parts of the province. The few guns available at the fairs were cumbersome and fragile flintlocks, but they nevertheless profoundly changed the nature of intertribal warfare. Firearms allowed Comanches to kill, maim, and shock from the safety of distance and to

  inflict wounds that the traditional healing arts of their enemies were unaccustomed to treating. And like horses, firearms gave Comanches access to an un-

  foreseen source of energy—gunpowder—further expanding the world of new

  possibilities.¹⁶

  With Ute assistance, Comanches incorporated themselves into the emerg-

  ing slave raiding and trading networks on New Mexico’s borderlands. By the

  time Comanches arrived in the region, commerce in Indian captives was an

  established practice in New Mexico, stimulated by deep ambiguities in Spain’s legal and colonial system. Although thousands of Pueblo Indians lived within the bounds of the Spanish-controlled New Mexico, strict restrictions prohibited their exploitation as laborers. Encomienda grants of tributary labor, the economic keystone of early Spanish colonialism in the Americas, were abolished in New Mexico in the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt. The repartimiento system of labor distribution continued, allowing the colonists to pool and allot Pueblo labor for public projects, but that system operated on a rotating basis, making Indian laborers a communal rather than a personal resource. Most Pueblo Indians, furthermore, were at least superficial Christian converts, whose exploitation was strictly regulated under Spanish law. Eager to obtain personal slaves to run their kitchens, ranches, fields, and textile workshops—and to reinforce their fragile sense of honor and prestige—Spanish elite turned to captive trade in indios bárbaros, savage Indians. Spanish laws specifically prohibited the buying, selling, and owning of Indian slaves, but the colonists in New Mexico cloaked the illegal traffic as rescate (ransom or barter), whereby they purchased captive Indians from surrounding nomadic tribes, ostensibly to rescue them from mistreatment

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  and heathenism. In theory, these ransomed Indians were to be placed in Spanish households for religious education, but in practice many of them became common slaves who could be sold, bought, and exploited with impunity.¹⁷

  Utes had first entered New Mexico’s slave markets as commodities seized

  and sold by Spanish, Navajo, and Apache slave raiders, but the allied Utes and Comanches soon inserted themselves at the supply end of the slave traffic. When not raiding New Mexico for horses, Utes and Comanches arrived peaceful
ly

  to sell human loot. Their raiding parties ranged westward into Navajo coun-

  try and northward into Pawnee country to capture women and children, but

  their main target were the Carlana and Jicarilla Apache villages in the upper Arkansas basin at the western edge of the southern plains. Traffic in Apache captives mushroomed in New Mexico. By the late seventeenth century, the people

  in New Mexico possessed some five hundred non-Pueblo Indian captives and

  were emerging as major producers of slave labor for the mining camps of Nueva Vizcaya and Zacatecas; they even sent slaves to the tobacco farms in Cuba. By 1714 slave trade had become so widespread in New Mexico that Governor Juan

  Ignacio Flores Mogollón saw it necessary to order all Apache captives baptized before taken to “distant places to sell.” Many of those Apaches were purchased from Utes and Comanches, whose mutually sustaining alliance had put them in

  a position of power over their neighboring Native societies.¹⁸

  By the early eighteenth century, the Ute-Comanche coalition dominated

  the northern borderlands of New Mexico. The allies shut off Navajos from the prime trading and raiding locales in New Mexico and treated the colony itself as an exploitable resource depot. They alternatively traded and raided in northern New Mexico, sometimes bartering slaves and hides for horses, maize, and metal goods, sometimes making off with stolen livestock and foodstuffs. Spain’s shallow imperial control of its northern frontiers could not keep the villages united, and the region began to disintegrate socially and politically. Utes and Comanches traded and intermarried with the Native inhabitants of Ojo Caliente, San Juan, and Picurís—many of whom were former slaves of theirs—while at the

  same time raiding Taos, Cochití, and other settlements for plunder. By 1716 Ute and Comanche raiders had so exhausted northern New Mexico’s horse reservoirs that the settlers were not able to “march out in defense.”¹⁹

  Short of men and money, Spanish officials in Santa Fe were powerless against these exploitative policies. Voicing their growing frustration, one official demanded in 1719 that “war should be made upon the Ute nation and Comanche

  nations, who, always united, have been committing robberies of horseherds in the name of peace.”²⁰ But by the time the Spaniards started to take cognizance

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  of the threatening situation in the far northern frontier, Utes and Comanches had begun to shift their ambitions elsewhere—to the vast grasslands opening to the east.

  Comanches had discovered unexpected riches and opportunities in their

  adopted homeland, but the same forces that helped them prosper in the valleys and mountains of the southern Rockies also pushed them out of the region. The more tightly they geared their lives around mounted hunting, slave trade, and European markets, the more they felt the pull of the great eastern grasslands.

  By the 1720s, a mere generation after their arrival, they were gone. It might be tempting to imagine that the Comanche exodus onto the southern plains was inspired by the endless horizons and unlimited opportunities opening to the east, but it is more likely that the migration—which also pulled several Ute bands away from their mountain homelands—began as extended slave raids. As the

  attacks of Comanche and Ute slavers intensified around the turn of the century, the Jicarillas and Carlanas sought refuge deeper on the plains and abandoned their old campgrounds at the headwaters of the Arkansas and along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Rather than bringing relief from raids, however, the retreat drew Comanche and Ute slavers into the very heart of Apachería. Tracking the fleeing Jicarillas and Carlanas to the plains, Comanches and Utes turned the upper Arkansas basin into a war zone. In 1706 a Spanish expedition led by Juan de Ulibarrí encountered near the Arkansas valley a small group of Penxaye Apache refugees who were trying “to join all the rest [of the Apaches] who live along those rivers and streams in order to defend themselves together from the Utes and Comanches.” Ulibarrí also learned that Comanches and Utes had recently attacked two Apache villages near the headwaters of the Purgatoire River, more than a hundred miles south of the Arkansas corridor. When assessing the Comanche-Ute invasion in 1719, New Mexico Governor Antonio Valverde y

  Cosío wrote that the allies were drawn into the upper Arkansas valley and the outlying plains “by the interests they have in robbing the enclosures that exist in the rancherías [villages] of the Apaches.”²¹

  By the time Valverde penned his report, the transitory slave raids of Coman-

  ches and Utes had already escalated into a full-blown colonizing project, which was aimed at carving out a new home territory in the plains and displacing the resident Apaches. Behind that shift in purpose was a shift in vision: if opportunities for slave raiding had drawn Comanches and Utes to the open plains, a

  promise of a new life made them stay there. During their extended forays into Apachería, Comanches and Utes came to realize the plains’ immense possibilities for a mounted way of life. The Spanish horses they had pilfered in New

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  Mexico and then rode onto the plains found a nearly perfect ecological niche on the southern grasslands. Descendants of the North African Barb stock, the resilient, smallish Spanish mounts had been bred to survive in desert conditions, to live entirely off grass, and to cover enormous distances between water sources.

  They were, in other words, pre-adapted for life on the relatively arid southern plains, whose thick layer of buffalo and grama grasses provided an abundant, year-round supply of forage, and whose scattered streams and playa lakes yielded sufficient water for the hardy desert animals.²²

  It was this auspicious match between horses and the plains environment that

  lured Comanches and Utes out of the mountains. The deeper they pushed onto

  the grasslands and the longer they stayed there, the more their horses flourished, growing rapidly in numbers. This in turn allowed Comanches and Utes to transform the plains’ most immediately striking bounty, the seemingly inexhaustible bison herds, into an accessible and predictable resource. Moving their belongings on horseback, the newcomers could follow and find the dispersed, ever-

  moving herds with relative ease and, once they reached them, bring down the

  large beasts from the safety of horseback. Liberated and empowered by the horse, the Comanches and Utes moved to the plains to organize their lives around the bison.²³

  The possibilities of mounted bison hunting were the plains’ primary attrac-

  tion, but there was another enticement: commerce. When Comanches acquired

  manufactured goods from New Mexico and the Utes in the late seventeenth

  century, they soon found themselves in a quandary. Impressed by the efficiency and durability of the new weapons, tools, and utensils, they were anxious to obtain more, but northern New Mexico, with its limited reserves of manufactured goods, failed to meet their needs. The plains, on the other hand, bristled with commercial opportunities, which centered on the upper Arkansas valley, the

  Comanche entryway to the grasslands. When Comanches followed the river val-

  ley to the east, they stepped into an ancient, vigorous trading niche. Stretching between the urban centers along the Río Grande and the farming villages of the southern prairies, the Arkansas valley had for centuries been a major entrepôt of trade, a transition point where plains hunters bartered hides and meat for maize and other village products in east and west. By the time Comanches arrived in the Arkansas valley, moreover, its potential had already been discovered in French Louisiana. French merchants began westbound journeys soon after

  1700, trading guns and metal to Apaches, and turning the Arkansas channel into a major artery of colonial commerce.²⁴

  Responding to various economic incentives, Comanches and their Ute allies

  moved in masses to the southern plains during the second and third decades of

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  the eighteenth century. The result was a drawn-out and deadly conflict with the many Apache groups, whom Spaniards knew as Palomas, Cuartelejos, Penxayes,

  Carlanas, Sierra Blancas, Jicarillas, Pelones, and Lipans, and who controlled the entire western plains south of the Platte River. These Apaches had little to do with the later stereotype of the plains Apaches as a doomed, feeble people incapable of resisting the Comanche onslaught. By the time that the wars with the Comanches erupted, in fact, the Apaches were in the midst of an expansionist burst of their own.

  If the Comanche expansion was fueled by the shift to bison-centered eques-

  trian hunting and consequent economic specialization, the Apache expansion

  was driven by a contrasting process of economic diversification. Like Coman-

  ches, Apaches had expanded their horse herds during the Pueblo Revolt, when

  the Pueblo Indians seized Spanish horses and traded them to other Native groups, but unlike Comanches, only a few Apache groups specialized in mounted hunting. While experimenting with more intense equestrianism, Apaches also ac-

  celerated their conversion to agricultural production. Many Apache bands had practiced light farming for generations, but it was not until the turn of the seventeenth century that agriculture permeated the Apache way of life. Shaken by a series of droughts that decimated bison herds and inspired by the expertise of Pueblo farmers who had sought refuge in Apachería during the second Pueblo

  uprising in 1696, Apache groups across the plains took up systematic farming.

  They built small irrigation works in streambeds, lined river valleys with flat-roofed mud houses, and began to cultivate crops of maize, beans, squash, water-melons, and pumpkins. The new hybrid economy required a careful seasonal

  balancing of farming and hunting, but its rewards were compelling. Profusely supplied with proteins and carbohydrates, the Apaches enjoyed a steady population growth in an environment where droughts and European microbes con-

  stantly threatened the viability of Native societies.²⁵