The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  than three hundred people and carrying many into captivity. The Comanche

  onslaught also exposed Texas to attacks from other Indian groups. With troops tied to the Comanche front, Texas could not fight the Karankawa raiders along the Gulf Coast, nor could it oppose Osages’ expansion toward Natchitoches.

  Lipans, Natagés, and Mescaleros raided settlements in southern Texas virtually unopposed.⁶²

  Mirroring the concurrent developments in New Mexico, eastern Comanche

  raids reduced Texas to a captive territory. Its population dropped by 10 percent between 1777 and 1784, from 3,103 to 2,828. Bucareli was abandoned; countless missions, ranches, and farms were stripped of horses; and fields were left untended. The attacks peaked in 1780 and 1781, which in Croix’s words saw “in-

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  cessant attacks of the Comanches, so horrible and bloody that, if they continue with the same steadfastness, the desolation of the province will be consequent, irremediable and immediate, and (as the governor believes) very few vassals of the king may remain to contemplate this misfortune.” Croix described a wasteland: “The province is overrun with these Indians, now alone, or as allies of the Nations of the North; at the moment not a foot of land is free of hostility. Its fruits of the field are despoiled, cattle ranches and farms that the happy days of peace had built up are rapidly being abandoned, and the settlers in terror taking refuge in the settlements, nor do they venture to leave the neighborhood without a troop escort.” Watching his colony wasting away, Governor Cabello was

  reduced to buying respites from destruction by handing out any available goods to Comanche chiefs. Croix approved the policy after the fact, sending the pitiful advice that the gifts should be handed out in such a fashion that the Indians

  “may not be given cause for conceit or arrogance nor acquire our gifts as if we had been forced to give them.” By 1781, Croix had accepted that peace with the Comanches would be possible only if Spaniards began annual gift distributions at San Antonio.⁶³

  The raids were more than simple plundering excursions; they were also an in-

  strument of power politics that helped restructure Texas and its borderlands for further exploitation. In 1780 Comanche pillaging forced Texas ranchers to suspend their vitally important livestock drives to Louisiana. This deprived Texas of a major source of imports just as Spain’s involvement in the American Revolutionary War began to generate material shortages throughout the empire, but it was a boon for the Comanches themselves: the cessation of drives fueled the demand for their horses and mules in Louisiana, where animals were needed

  for the Spanish and Patriot troops fighting the British along the Gulf Coast.

  Like western Comanche raids in New Mexico, eastern Comanche raids in Texas

  served a double function: they yielded valuable goods while also creating markets for those plundered goods.⁶⁴

  The decline of Spanish power in Texas and its borderlands was astoundingly

  precipitous. As late as 1778 Spaniards were still dreaming of a great imperial future for Texas. Commanding General Croix proposed that Texas build a

  series of outposts among the Taovayas on the Red River, which would mark the northern limit of effective Spanish rule in the continent’s center. “This new line would be the palladium of war,” he envisioned, “but from it to the interior of our now distant frontier there would be no enemies, and the provinces which

  now suffer hostilities would experience prosperity.” Even the usually cautious de Mézières had been widely optimistic about the prospects of colonizing the Taovaya country. “It is certain that if this place comes to be settled,” he predicted, “it

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  will be one of the most important [Spanish colonial outposts], both at present and in the future, because it is the master-key of the north, where the friendly nations will be dealt with through their [Taovayas’] mediation, the unfriendly, such as the Comanches and the Osages, will be won over, or, with the help of the friendly nations, conquered.” A Spanish colony on the middle Red River,

  he believed, could also be turned into a buffer “where any new enterprise or invasion of the neighboring English will be prevented” and an interimperial nerve center “where prompt and easy communication will be had with Natchitoches,

  Ilinoeses, New Mexico, and Bejar.”⁶⁵

  Only a few years later, however, an almost diametrically contrasting geopolitical pattern had emerged. Texas was sliding into political and economic paralysis, and it was the Comanches who extended their sphere of authority to the

  coveted Red River valley and among the Taovayas. They usurped much of the

  Wichita commerce along the Red and Brazos rivers and extended their camping

  and hunting grounds south toward the lower Brazos valley. They incorporated

  large numbers of Taovaya warriors into their raiding parties, which sent Spanish officials into speculating that the Comanches had spawned a large anti-Spanish coalition that could obliterate the entire colony. By the early 1780s, the terror of Comanche assaults had become so entrenched on the Texas frontier that when

  a smallpox epidemic brought about a sudden hiatus in violence in late 1781, it stirred greater anxiety than the actual attacks. The years 1782 and 1783 passed in Texas with relative peace on the frontier—and rampant rumors of an imminent

  Comanche invasion.⁶⁶

  That the Comanches held a large sector of Spain’s far northern frontier in

  a state of siege in the late 1770s reflected the fact that Spaniards had not been able to envision such a possibility in the first place. As Spanish strategists scru-tinized the new imperial order created by the 1763 Treaty of Paris, they made a fateful miscalculation. Convinced that the main threat to New Spain came

  from the suddenly magnified British territories, they channeled money and men to those places where the two empires brushed against one another. By 1770,

  as a result, the Spanish empire had expanded into Alta California to fend off the British from North America’s Pacific shores, turned lower Louisiana into a buffer colony against British West Florida, and buttressed the newly established St. Louis to shield upper Louisiana against the far-ranging British fur traders from the Ohio valley and Canada. Then, in 1776, in an unprecedented effort to foster military defenses and economic growth in the far north, King Carlos III placed all northern provinces of New Spain under a new, semiautonomous administrative entity, the Commandancy General of the Interior Provinces. On

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  a map, the Interior Provinces were a prodigious creation, encompassing eight large provinces shielded by a continuous frontier stretching from the Pacific Coast through New Mexico and Texas to the Mississippi valley.

  That frontier was a cartographic illusion. While maps were being drawn, the

  geopolitical ground kept shifting. In Sonora, Nueva Vizcaya, and Coahuila, at the heart of northern New Spain, the grand empire was slowly caving in. The

  Apaches—Gileños, Mescaleros, Natagés, and Lipans—many of them banished

  from the Great Plains by the Comanches, were forging a new Apachería in the

  midst of Spanish settlements. The situation was even more critical farther north in New Mexico and Texas, which served as New Spain’s first line of defense. As Spain fortified the outer edges of its elongated North American realm, Comanches continued their expansion in the interior, drawing their own map of do-

  minion over the continent’s entire midsection. By the late 1770s, Spain faced an ominous situation in the far north: rather than bases for a great imperial extension beyond the Río Grande, New Mexico and Texas had become peripheries in

  a new imperial order that pivoted around Comanchería.

  The Comanche-centric order was the product of two sweeping, interlocked

  sequences of political and economic innovation. The first sequence saw Comanches turning the sou
thern plains from a geopolitical backwater into a major hub of commerce and diplomacy. By doing so, Comanches not only won access to

  food, horses, and guns but also enveloped Comanchería with the kind of political and economic ties that give invading powers staying power. The second sequence, an outgrowth of the first, saw Comanches adopting more aggressive policies toward Spanish colonies. As the eastern Comanches gradually supplanted

  the Wichitas as the trade gateway to the lower Mississippi valley and Spanish Louisiana, they simultaneously turned a large section of Spanish Texas into a raiding hinterland that fueled their trade with stolen stock and captives. Western Comanches treated New Mexico as an imperial holding where they plundered

  virtually at will while also using it as an outlet for stolen Spanish goods and as a source of food and European technology.

  The rise of this new geopolitical order in the Southwest, like the Comanche

  conquest of the southern plains during the first part of the century, was ultimately a matter of numbers—and food. The Comanche population had grown

  explosively during the first part of the eighteenth century, and it continued to do so through the 1760s and 1770s, sustained by a healthy, vigorous economy.

  In the 1760s, after having ousted the Utes, Tonkawas, and Hasinais from the

  southern plains, the Comanches had nearly exclusive access to some seven million bison, a seemingly bottomless reservoir of meat, fat, and hides. This animal wealth, sustained by Comanchería’s prolific patchwork of buffalo, blue grama,

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  and bluestem grasses, supported a highly specialized hunting economy that

  yielded enough food and hides for domestic use and for trade. By exchanging

  animal products for maize, fruit, and vegetables, moreover, Comanches were

  able to create a dietary safety net, which allowed them to diversify their resource base and offset the dangers that accompanied the intense specialization in bison hunting—one-sided diet, overexploitation of bison herds, and the unpredict-ability of bison population dynamics.⁶⁷

  The availability of more and better food translated into an explosive population growth. Numbering between ten and fifteen thousand at midcentury, the

  Comanches may have tripled their population during the next three decades. In 1773, Gaignard learned, either from Taovayas or from Comanches themselves,

  that the Comanches “comprise fully four thousand warriors.” Assuming that

  warriors made up half of the total male population and that the Comanches had more or less balanced gender ratio, Gaignard’s account suggests a total Comanche population of sixteen thousand. Other sources support this notion of rapid growth. In the mid-1780s, according to Spanish observers, the western Comanches alone numbered between sixteen and eighteen thousand, while a 1785 ac-

  count states that the eastern Comanches had two thousand fighting men, which translates into a total eastern Comanche population of some eight thousand.

  But that same account also notes that the eastern Comanches had lost a few

  years earlier two-thirds of their members to smallpox, which suggests that the pre-epidemic population approached twenty-four thousand people. This would

  mean that the total Comanche population in the early 1780s reached or exceeded forty thousand people—more than the Spanish colonies in New Mexico

  and Texas had combined.⁶⁸

  Comanches needed a large population base to balance their swelling foreign

  political ambitions, which in the late 1770s seemed almost overwhelming. In the space of a single year, they may have fought the Utes deep in the Great Basin, attacked the Apaches near El Paso, and raided the Taovaya villages on the eastern fringe of the Texas plains. They may have pillaged horses and slaves across New Mexico and Texas, sent raiding expeditions to the lower Río Grande, and

  blocked the Osage hunters in the east and the New Mexican hunters in the west from entering Comanchería’s bison range. They may have sponsored a series

  of trade fairs on the upper Arkansas valley, bartered with British peddlers on the Red and Brazos rivers, and visited the Taos markets. The Comanche foreign policy, in short, was a dynamic, constantly changing balancing act that only a demographically powerful nation could carry out without overstretching itself.

  If a large population formed one underpinning of Comanche power, political

  organization formed another. To Spanish officials, however, Comanches were

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  savages who were incapable of planning or organization. Puzzled and put off by their constant shifting between raiding and trading and violence and mediation, they labeled Comanche maneuvers as prepolitical acts springing from “bizarre discipline” or such inborn impulses as “cruelty” or “propensity to steal.” They saw little or no planning behind Comanche actions. Modern scholarship often

  echoes these assessments, depicting the Comanches as a collection of autono-

  mous bands that spontaneously responded to local conditions rather than to

  centralized leadership and planning. A closer look reveals, however, that underneath the localism and individualism that permeated Comanche political cul-

  ture, there were compelling centralizing elements that instilled coherence and coordination to Comanche foreign policy.⁶⁹

  In 1767, just as the western Comanches launched their extended raiding spree in New Mexico, Governor Mendinueta learned from a Comanche captive that

  “a barbarian has raised himself up among that nation with the appearance and accouterments of those of a little king.” This man, Cuerno Verde (Green Horn), was said to have “near his person a guard of armed men, pages who serve him

  when he mounts and dismounts from his horse, holding a canopy or shade of buffalo skins for him in which he takes his seat.” “All obey him” and two “confidants execute his orders,” concludes Mendinueta’s report. Twelve years later, when the Comanche raids had nearly destroyed New Mexico, Cuerno Verde reentered historical record. In 1779 Juan Bautista de Anza, Mendinueta’s successor, depicted him as “the cruel scourge of this kingdom” and “the leader of the barbarians”

  who had “exterminated many pueblos, killing hundreds and making as many

  prisoners whom he afterwards sacrificed in cold blood.” Together, Mendinueta’s and Anza’s accounts portray Cuerno Verde as a man of considerable authority, whose name and vision marked western Comanche foreign policy during the

  crucial period between the late 1760s and late 1770s.⁷⁰

  But Mendinueta and Anza probably missed the subtleties that defined the

  scope and substance of Cuerno Verde’s authority. It is unlikely that Cuerno

  Verde was an autocratic “little king,” for the very idea would have been alien to the consensus-bound Comanches. Instead, Cuerno Verde was probably a Jupe

  war chief, mahimiana paraibo, who also established himself as a paraibo, civil leader, and rose to lead western Comanches’ burgeoning raiding industry in

  New Mexico. He may have appeared to Spanish observers as a warlord operating in a milieu of political anarchy, but there is no reason to believe that his actions were not sanctioned and structured by Comanche conventions. Cuerno Verde’s

  authority probably stemmed from traditional Comanche leadership qualities—

  personal charisma, courage, and generosity—which made it possible for him

  to forge a large network of tʉbitsinahaitsInʉʉs (true friends) and haits (formal

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  friends), who themselves may have been leaders of local rancherías. Such a network would have allowed Cuerno Verde to influence—and perhaps even domi-

  nate—decision making at the periodically convening grand councils, which had defined the western Comanche political culture at least since midcentury. As was shown in the previous chapter, the complex treaty negotiations with New


  Mexico in 1752 and 1762 had revealed a sophisticated western Comanche po-

  litical organization, complete with institutionalized leadership positions, a hierarchy of “superior” and “secondary” chiefs, and massive divisional meetings.⁷¹

  It was within the confines and possibilities of such a political culture that Cuerno Verde maneuvered his way into a position of authority. He may have

  been able to manipulate western Comanche politics to his own advantage, but

  that does not mean that the western Comanche political system lacked organi-

  zation or order. In fact, rather than promoting political anarchy, Cuerno Verde’s rise seems to have fostered political centralization. “His own nation accuse[s]

  him, ever since he took command,” Anza’s 1779 report notes, “of forcing them to take up arms and volunteer against the Spaniards, a hatred of whom has dominated him because his father who also held the same command and power met

  death at our hands.” Anza’s Cuerno Verde may have been the son of the Cuerno Verde Mendinueta had mentioned twelve years earlier, a possibility that only reinforces the notion of consolidated political authority among the western

  Comanches: chiefs not only possessed considerable power but could pass their offices on to their descendants.⁷²

  A similar political culture existed in eastern Comanchería, as Spaniards discovered in the mid-1780s when two of their emissaries toured the region. In-

  stead of the anticipated political chaos, the emissaries found in eastern Comanchería a structured and centralized polity. The estimated eight thousand

  eastern Comanches were divided into twelve local rancherías led by capitanes (captains) or capitanes chiquitos (little captains). The rancherías did not have a fixed number of people, which suggests that the local chiefs competed among

  one another for followers. As in most nomadic societies, band membership was fluid, and each capitane competed with the others for the critical mass of adher-ents needed to form a functioning ranchería. This kind of fluidity was crucial in the Southwestern borderlands where communities had to adjust to constantly

  changing political, economic, and ecological circumstances. Since families