The Comanche Empire
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There are two distinctive variations of “Los Comanches.” One emphasizes
the mutualistic, supportive aspects of Comanche–New Mexican relations and
depicts the two peoples as potential allies and fictive kinspeople, bound together by a nexus of economic, social, and cultural transactions. In this version, a group of Comanches led by their chief, El Capitán, enter a New Mexican pueblo, seeking an image of El Santo Niño, the Christ Child. They break into one of the
houses, seize the sacred image, and force their way out of the village. During the dash, however, El Capitán is separated from his daughter, La Cautiva, who is taken captive by the villagers. Once they realize this, the Comanches turn back, reenter the pueblo, and meet the villagers at the main plaza. An elaborate sequence of ritual and redemption commences. El Capitán and the head of
the pueblo agree on the terms of exchange, and the Comanches surrender the
Christ Child. The villagers in turn offer the Comanches food, wine, and cash.
Finally, they return his beloved daughter to El Capitán, but they do so only after the chief promises to visit the village again for trade.
This version of “Los Comanches” underlines the need for and the persistence
of cross-cultural transfers in a world structured and defined by mutual violence.
Comanches, as depicted in the drama, represent to New Mexicans enemies and
strangers who nevertheless become loyal, esteemed allies through a ceremonial bestowal of material gifts and reciprocal return of captives. The play’s overarching motif is the fundamental interdependence of the two groups, and its moral thrust emanates from a sensitive process of intersocietal reconciliation and emergent understanding between two antagonistic peoples. The drama culminates in the redemption of La Cautiva and El Capitán’s promise of future trade.³⁶
Another variation of “Los Comanches” offers a strikingly different image of
Comanches and their relationship with New Mexico. Celebrating Carlos Fernán-
dez’s shocking victory over the Comanches in 1774, this version of the play em-
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phasizes and elaborates Comanches’ bellicosity and power and New Mexicans’
mixed emotions of horror, disgust, anguish, and envy. Rather than pagans who instinctively gravitate toward the Christ Child, Comanches now emerge as irredeemable savage heathens who must be exterminated for New Mexico to sur-
vive. The focus of the drama is Comanches’ material wealth, which they had
largely accumulated by plundering New Mexico. That wealth, at this moment
of New Mexican triumph, becomes an object of unbridled greed. Here, the relationship between Comanches and New Mexicans is openly exploitative and, un-
like the parallel version of the play, allows no possibility for accommodation or coexistence. Mesmerized by their tormenters’ affluence, the impoverished but suddenly victorious New Mexicans go on a killing and looting spree of their own.
Barriga Duce, a Spanish camp follower, describes the battle from a distance: Let them die, the more the better,
There will be more spoils for me.
Soft tanned skins of elk and beaver,
What a comfort they will be.
Meat of buffalo in abundance,
Everything that one might need,
I will fill my larder plenty,
I have many mouths to feed.
My good wife shall want for nothing,
She shall cook a gorgeous meal.
. . . . . . . . . . .
Ah, at last I’ve reached their treasure,
There is plenty here indeed.
Sugars, fruits, and meats, and jellies,
What a life these heathens lead.
Everything to tempt the palate,
What a feast, fit for a king.
I shall eat and then I’ll gather,
I’ll not leave a single thing.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Give no quarter, comrades, smite them,
Do your duty, have no fear,
Strike them, without mercy,
Strike them, smite them, without mercy. . . .³⁷
A symbolic rendition of a complex and controversial past, “Los Comanches”
is open to many interpretations, and historians have used its moral messages to make a range of arguments about cross-cultural relations in the Southwest
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borderlands. James Brooks, for example, has made powerful use of the first
version of the romance, employing it as a window into a disorienting once-
was world in which the familiar dichotomies between exchange and violence
or masters and victims had become vague, almost meaningless.³⁸ Perhaps the
most essential fact about “Los Comanches,” however, is the very existence of the two contrasting versions. The parallel versions evoke New Mexicans’ struggle to come to grips with their capitulation to the exploitative, manipulative, and divisive power policies of the Comanches. They are an attempt of an increasingly powerless people to understand their place in a volatile world over which they possessed little control.
The 1770s witnessed a dramatic expansion of Comanche power in New
Mexico, but the decade also saw the emergence of two other Comanche raiding
domains around the colony. The first of these domains lay to the north and west of New Mexico, extending across the Rockies toward Ute territory. Sporadically at first, and then with growing intensity, Comanche war bands followed the Arkansas River to its source, sidestepping New Mexico’s northern tip into Ute country. The forays may have started soon after the breakdown of the Comanche-Ute alliance in the 1750s, and they probably began as plundering expeditions aimed at seizing slaves and horses. Over time, however, the raids escalated into a sustained expansion that carried several Comanche rancherías deep into Ute ter-
ritory. Comanche population, which was growing explosively in the late eigh-
teenth century, possibly exceeded the southern plains’ carrying capacity, thus creating a compelling impulse for renewed expansion. It is also possible that the invasion of Ute lands was an attempt to weaken the alliance that had developed between the Utes and northwestern New Mexico in the 1750s and 1760s. That
alliance, born out of mutual fear of Comanches, revolved around a lucrative
trade in Abiquiu, a trade that each year brought hundreds of Ute visitors to the colony, thus compromising Comanches’ unhindered access to their raiding and
trading domains in northern New Mexico.³⁹
In 1776 two Franciscan friars, Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre
Vélez de Escalante, led a meandering exploring expedition around the Colo-
rado Plateau and toward the Pacific, hoping to locate usable routes linking New Mexico to newly colonized California. The friars expected to find in the northwest lands that were ready for Spanish colonies and missions, but instead they entered a volatile world enveloped in Comanche violence. Domínguez’s and
Escalante’s observations revealed a drastically shifted balance of power between the Comanches and Utes. A map prepared by the expedition’s cartographer, Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco, shows two clusters of Comanche rancherías between
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the Front Range of the Rockies and the Green River in present-day east-central Utah. The map also places a Yamparika ranchería on the western side of the
Green River, where it stood separated from Comanchería proper by four hun-
dred miles of rugged mountains, deep canyons, and thick forests. Those Comanche rancherías may have been temporary outposts for long-distance raids, but they may also have been more permanent settlement colonies signifying actual territorial takeover. Fray Domínguez l
abeled the lands east of the Green River simply as the “territory of the Comanches Yamparicas.”⁴⁰
Deep in the Colorado Plateau, the Green River formed the ancient heart of
Ute territory. By the mid-1770s, however, many Ute bands had retreated west to the Utah Lake valley, where the Domínguez-Escalante expedition found them
in desperate straits. Terrified of the wide-ranging Comanche war bands, they were unable to conduct hunts and suffered from starvation. Hoping to gain access to Spanish horses, metal, and protection, they begged the Franciscans to come and build permanent houses among them and they promised to “live as
the tatas [friars] . . . taught them.” Moved by their suffering and apparent willingness to convert, Domínguez and Escalante offered them salvation in Jesus
Christ. They taught them to chant “Jesús-Maria” and promised them eternal life in Heaven, free from the Comanche heathen who “cannot enter Heaven, but go
to Hell, where God punishes them, and where they will burn forever like wood in the fire.” In the meanwhile, on Earth, Utes should wait patiently while the friars acquired authorization for a mission project. The project never materialized.⁴¹
Simultaneously, yet another phase of Comanche expansion across the South-
west was gathering momentum. Since their withdrawal to the southern Llano
Estacado and the Río Grande valley in the 1750s, the Apaches had had little
contact with the western Comanches, whose territory centered on the north-
ern Llano Estacado and the upper Arkansas basin. Denied access to the buffalo plains, various Apache bands—whom the Spaniards now knew collectively as
the Mescaleros—began raiding Spanish settlements in Coahuila, Nueva Viz-
caya, southern New Mexico, and southwestern Texas, slowly building a new
economy on livestock poaching and herding. The relocated Apaches also forged commercial ties with more marginal Spanish settlements, and at times these ties matured into local alliances that saw Apaches, socially marginalized Hispanics, and fugitive slaves trading, intermarrying, and joining their forces in attacking Spanish outposts. By the late 1770s, the Apaches seemed to have developed a
secure way of life in their new southern homelands.⁴²
But then the western Comanches launched another offensive. In 1776
Comanches came upon and attacked a Mescalero village near the headwaters of
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the Colorado River and reportedly killed three hundred families. Two years later Spaniards encountered several fleeing Mescalero bands near the Organ Mountains in southern New Mexico, and soon Apaches began arriving in El Paso and lamenting that Comanches had invaded their lands in the Sierra Blanca Range.⁴³
The far-ranging Comanche bands may have been raiding parties seeking horses
and captives to supply Comanchería’s growing pastoral economy and booming
slave traffic in Taos or they may have been seek-and-destroy attacks aimed at eliminating the Mescaleros from Comanchería’s southwestern border. But these southbound expeditions also anticipated an expansion that in the early nineteenth century would carry Comanches to the Río Grande and deep into north-
ern Mexico.
At the same time that western Comanches realigned New Mexico and its sur-
rounding regions to serve their interests, eastern Comanches imposed a similar Comanche-centric order on the Texas borderlands. Like their western kindred, eastern Comanches achieved this by breaking off old alliances while forming
new ones, by aggressively seeking trade and resources, and by blocking their rivals from markets. And like western Comanches, they used Spain’s colonial
outposts simultaneously for trading and raiding, although they did so in a much larger geopolitical frame: they raided one Spanish frontier—Texas—to fuel
their trade in another—Louisiana. The broader canvass also meant that east-
ern Comanches’ ascendancy was more a convoluted process than that of their
western relatives. Before establishing their hegemony in Texas by the late 1770s, eastern Comanches had endured repeated shifts in Spain’s frontier policy, faced challenges from several Spanish-Indian coalitions, and absorbed the disruptive repercussions caused by the collapse of two colonial empires.
Since the early 1750s, eastern Comanches had fought Lipan Apaches and
Spanish Texas side by side with Taovayas, Tonkawas, and Hasinais, a collabo-
ration that culminated in the 1758 sacking of the San Sabá mission. But like the Comanche-Ute union, the Comanche-Taovaya-Tonkawa-Hasinai coalition
lasted only as long as the wars against the Lipans and Spaniards did. Eastern Comanches preserved their alliance with Taovayas, who supplied them with
essential European goods and farming produce, but Tonkawas and Hasinais pos-
sessed less economic weight and consequently had more tenuous relations with Comanches.
Tonkawas’ ties with Comanches unraveled during the 1760s, paralleling their
declining power in the changing colonial world. Never populous, Tonkawas
became increasingly marginalized after 1763, when Spanish officials moved to buttress Texas against the British, who had began to fortify the Mississippi valley.
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Tonkawas had raided Texas for decades, exhausting the colonists’ patience. With the British threat looming, Spaniards cancelled Tonkawas’ trading privileges and persuaded the Wichitas, who maintained a fluctuating alliance with Texas, to discipline them. Isolated and impoverished, Tonkawas retreated from their traditional homelands on the middle Brazos and Trinity rivers toward the Gulf
Coast—and farther away from Comanches. There are no records of Comanche-
Tonkawa interactions after the late 1760s, and soon Tonkawas were reported
to be “disliked and even abhorred as vagabonds” by their former allies. They forged a tenuous alliance with the Lipans, another refuge group dislodged by Comanche expansion, but failed to maneuver out of their marginal position.
In the early nineteenth century the Tonkawas lived in pitiful conditions along the lower Guadalupe River, unable to hunt bison “out of fear of meeting the
Comanches.”⁴⁴
The collapse of Comanche-Hasinai relations, too, was caused by the allies’ diverging fortunes. In the early eighteenth century Hasinais were the most powerful of the Caddoan peoples who lived in large riverside towns on the southeastern prairies between the Ouachita and Neches rivers. They occupied a gateway position between the lower Mississippi valley and the southern plains, controlling the east-west commerce in European and indigenous goods, but they were
greatly weakened by two unwelcome imports of colonial trade: alcohol and epidemics. Hasinais lost their pivotal position around midcentury, when the Wichita tribes—Kichais, Tawakonis, Iscanis, Guichitas, and Taovayas—moved in from
the north and built large villages on the Red, Brazos, Trinity, and Sabine rivers, just west of Hasinai range. The Wichita villages became commercial citadels
that Spanish merchants from Texas, Franco-Spanish peddlers from Louisiana,
and British contraband traders from the Mississippi valley frequented. Hasinai-Comanche relations collapsed soon after. Hasinais lost their connection with Comanches and with that their access to the bison-rich shortgrass plains. Caught in a spiraling decline, they were eclipsed by the Kadohadachos, their northeasterly relatives, whose confederated villages at the Great Bend of the Red River emerged as the new center of the Caddo universe.⁴⁵
While their relations with Tonkawas and Hasinais dissolved, eastern Coman-
ches’ alliance with the Taovayas continued to flourish. The two groups shared hunting ranges and periodically joined forces to keep Lipan hunting parties out of the southern plains, but commerce was the heart of their union. Comanche-Taovaya trade linked together several economic systems. Taovaya farmers raised lar
ge crops of maize and squash on the sandy beds of the Red River and sold
much of their surplus to Comanches in exchange for dried meat, hides, and
Apache captives. The food and slave trades were complemented by a growing
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exchange in colonial goods. Comanches lived near south-central Spanish Texas, whose ranches and farms had so many horses that they sometimes had to be shot as a nuisance. Taovayas had close ties to Louisiana, whose rapidly growing population had a secure access to various manufactures through its Atlantic links but suffered from such a serious shortage of livestock that its economic growth was hindered. The asymmetries between Comanches’ and Taovayas’ respective resource domains stimulated a vigorous cross-borderland trade. Comanches pil-
fered horses from Texas and carried them to Taovaya villages, and wide-ranging Louisiana traders then hauled the animals to Natchitoches, Atakapas, Opelousas, Pointe Coupeé, and Bayou Teche. Louisiana’s transfer from France to Spain in 1763 did not disturb this trade, for many French traders stayed on to become Spanish subjects and continued their operations with southern plains Indians.⁴⁶
Comanche-Taovaya trade took place mostly beyond direct European obser-
vation, but developments at the terminal points of the raiding-and-trading chain demonstrate that the system was thriving. Comanche horse raiding in Texas
escalated steadily in the late 1760s and 1770s. “Made proud by their great number, and led by their propensity to steal,” one Spanish official wrote in 1770, Comanches “let few seasons pass without committing bloody outrages.” And if
Spanish officials in Texas failed to curb Comanche raids, Spanish officials in Louisiana were equally powerless to stop the importation of stolen Spanish stock to the colony. In 1770 Louisiana Governor Alejandro O’Reilly tried to eliminate the economic incentive behind Comanche raids in Texas by prohibiting
the import of horses and mules from the plains, but his decree had little effect except turning the livestock trade into a lucrative smuggling business. O’Reilly also outlawed the enslavement and sale of Indians in Louisiana, again with limited results. The flow of Apache slaves from Comanchería to Taovaya villages and Louisiana continued uninterrupted through the 1770s.⁴⁷