and individuals could move freely among the rancherías, they could also move swiftly to exploit emerging opportunities for raiding, trading, and diplomacy on Comanchería’s expansive borders.
But these diffuse elements of the eastern Comanche politics were balanced
by strong centralizing institutions. The local chiefs, the visitors observed, consid-
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ered themselves “subjects” to two head chiefs whom they listened to with “much respect.” The Spaniards also mention “principal or general councils” where important political matters were introduced and, if consensus was reached, de-
cided. Those general councils also served as a forum where the head chiefs were selected in formal elections in which all eastern Comanche chiefs and warriors were entitled to participate. Reflecting the importance of raiding to eastern Comanche economy in the late 1770s and early 1780s, war exploits were the
main criteria for head chieftainship: an impressive war record attracted followers who hoped to benefit from the association with a prominent warrior, who in turn could capitalize on the support of his many followers in the elections.⁷³ The eastern Comanche political organization thus appears a near replica of the western Comanche system. Both were at once diffuse and centralized, both featured
large-scale formal councils, and both placed great value on leaders’ personal military skills.
The commonalities between the western and eastern Comanches call at-
tention to the last factor behind Comanche ascendancy: macroscale political
cooperation. At first sight, the late eighteenth-century Comanche nation with its distinct western and eastern branches appears deeply fractured; in fact, the nation seemed to be dissolving in its new, vastly expanded geopolitical setting.
Until the mid-eighteenth century, the three original Comanche divisions—
Yamparikas, Jupes, and Kotsotekas—shared a relatively small land base on the western plains between the Arkansas and Red rivers. Because of territorial proximity, political identities were fluid and the three divisions often appeared indistinguishable from one another.⁷⁴ This politicogeographical compactness exploded in the 1750s and 1760s, however, when several Kotsoteka bands—the
eastern Comanches—broke away from the main Kotsoteka body and pushed
deep into the Texas plains. From then on, divergent foreign political ambitions began to pull the two branches in opposite directions and even farther apart.
Western Comanches fashioned a raiding and trading economy that spanned
New Mexico and the northern plains, and they were drawn, both politically and physically, to the west and north. Eastern Comanches focused on raiding Texas and trading toward the Mississippi valley, gravitating to the south and east.
The apparent dissolution of the Comanche community was, ironically, ac-
companied by a concurrent process of national unification. If political and economic specialization was pulling western and eastern Comanches away from
one another, it also helped draw them back together. By the late 1770s, the two branches were engaged in an active trade that was fueled by their contrasting—
and complementing—resource domains. With their secure access to European
goods through the Mandan and Hidatsa villages, western Comanches provided
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guns, powder, ammunition, cloth, and metal utensils to their eastern relatives, who had a more tenuous access to European markets but, thanks to their proximity to Texas ranches, possessed vast surpluses of horses and mules. Eastern Comanches sold a part of their surplus to the western Comanches, who then
funneled the animals to the central and northern plains through the upper Arkansas trade center, the paramount redistribution point of livestock across the midcontinent.⁷⁵
The interdivisional trade was a means for material sharing, but, less obviously, it also doubled as a social and political adhesive. The regular trade fairs that convened around Comanchería served as an arena where Comanches nourished
their sense of common identity. When western and eastern Comanches met for
trade, they exchanged not only commodities but customs, ideas, and political views as well. They intermarried and forged crucial personal and kinship ties that bound their fractured nation back together. The unity of the larger Comanche community made a deep impression on foreign visitors. “Cumanches Occi-
dentales,” one wrote, “are differentiated from the Orientales only by the haircut.
They speak the same language and see each other as brothers, and compan-
ions, and assist each other in their wars when necessary.” The same year, Estevan Rodriguez Miró, the governor of Louisiana, sent a similar account from Louisiana. Comanches, he wrote, “dominate all the neighboring tribes, and although divided into several war parties, or parcerías [rancherías], they all live in perfect friendship.”⁷⁶
Those commonalities and connections, always essential culturally but per-
haps less so strategically during the 1760s and 1770s, became critically important after the 1780s, when the reinvigorated Spanish empire moved to contest Comanches’ hegemony in the Southwest. Building on their enduring tradition
of mutual support and solidarity, Comanches fashioned in the late eighteenth century a new agency of political unity, the Comanche confederacy, which enabled them to repulse and eventually overturn the last expansionist effort of New Spain.
3
The Embrace
On February 25, 1786, Juan Bautista de Anza, lieutenant colonel in the Span-
ish Army and the governor of New Mexico, stood in front of his palace, preparing himself for the ceremony. He had waited for this moment too long, ever since the glorious day on the llanos seven years ago when he held the green-horned headdress in his hands. The memory of his triumph was already growing faint, making his gubernatorial tenure seem like a failure, but now there was hope
again. He examined his subjects— hispanos, indios, genízaros, men, women, children—who swarmed in the dirt plaza, filling it with nervous expectation.
Then the crowd shivered, erupting into shrieks and yells, and Anza saw him.
Ecueracapa, the capitan general of the western Comanches, emerged at the end of a corridor of shouting people. The Indian rode slowly toward him, flanked by three adjutants and escorted by a column of Spanish soldiers and Santa Fe’s most prominent citizens. He calmly crossed the square, dismounted in front of Anza, and gently embraced him. It was there, in the arms of the man he could think of only as a savage, that Anza knew there would be peace.¹
The embrace brought together two men and two nations, and it saved New
Mexico. The meeting of Anza and Ecueracapa put an end to a century of on-and-off warfare, which in the 1770s had nearly broken the kingdom of New Mexico.
For the remaining Spanish tenure in the Americas, the western Comanches
maintained an uninterrupted peace with the Spaniards, allowing New Mexico
to heal and even prosper. A similar and simultaneous development took place
in Texas, where the eastern Comanches and Spaniards forged a separate peace
treaty, ending thirty years of nearly constant bloodshed.
But if Anza and Ecueracapa’s encounter is one of the cardinal moments of
the colonial Southwest, it is also one of the most enigmatic. What made the
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Comanches give up their lucrative raiding-and-trading policy which brought
them unforeseen prosperity and gave them such power over New Mexico? And
why did the Spaniards, who had fought, feared, and despised the Comanches for generations, suddenly welcome their embrace?
When Spaniards later chronicled the dramatic transformative events of the
mid-1780s, they thought they could explain them clearly and exhaustively: th
ey stemmed from Spain’s rediscovered imperial resolve. During the 1760s and
1770s, even as New Mexico and Texas were disintegrating under the Coman-
che pressure, the core of Spain’s New World empire had experienced a gradual but sustained revival. Building on sweeping domestic reforms in Spain during the early eighteenth century, Carlos III, the most American-oriented of Spain’s Bourbon monarchs, had implemented a series of reforms that modernized New
Spain in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Carlos and his officials sought to rationalize administration, curb the power of the church, increase the flow of revenues to the mother country, foment economic growth in the lagging parts of
the empire, and domesticate the wild, unruly frontiers. Collectively known as the Bourbon Reforms, these initiatives seemed to have given New Mexico and
Texas the power to stop the Comanche tide.
The Bourbon Reforms in northern New Spain bore the distinctive mark of
José de Gálvez, who served between 1765 and 1772 as visitor general to New
Spain and then, from 1776 to 1787, as minister general of the Indies. Possessing almost unrestricted power to modernize the empire’s administrative structures, Gálvez implemented and supervised an astounding array of reforms. He reorganized the tribunals of justice, reformed taxation, and was a central force behind the ordinance that expelled the Jesuits—potentially the strongest opponents
to Carlos III’s secular reforms—from New Spain in 1767. He devised plans to
boost the circulation of currency in the northern provinces and subsidized the region’s silver production at the expense of Peru. He streamlined the top-heavy mercantilist bureaucracy, dismantled the suffocating monopoly of the merchant guild of Cádiz on the imports and exports to American colonies, and established royal monopolies on the manufacture and sale of tobacco and gunpowder. He
founded a colony in the valley of Sonora and initiated the colonization of Alta California.
The creation of the Commandancy General of the Interior Provinces of the
North in 1776—in many ways an emergency measure to repel the seemingly
uncontainable expansion of Comanches and Apaches across northern New
Spain—brought unparalleled top-level administrative attention to the empire’s northern territories. Under the new strategic layout, New Mexico and Texas were
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assigned crucial roles as buffers for the silver mining districts of Sonora, Nueva Vizcaya, and Coahuila. More funds, livestock, and high-caliber administrators poured to the beleaguered far north and particularly to New Mexico, whose
large population and economic potential earned it special treatment. Com-
merce between northern Mexico and the frontier provinces—an activity that
had suffered greatly in the late 1770s under Comanche and Apache attacks—
was revived, and from the 1780s on unprecedented amounts of commodities
moved between New Mexico and Chihuahua City along the Chihuahua Trail.
In the closing years of the eighteenth century, New Mexicans shipped annually fifteen to twenty thousand sheep and several tons of wool, cotton, textiles, and foodstuffs southward to Chihuahua markets, while huge northbound caravans
carried various manufactured goods to New Mexico. After nearly two centuries of relative isolation, the far north finally became an integral part of the empire’s economic fabric.
Thanks to their strategic importance as barriers against Comanche expansion, New Mexico and Texas also fared well in the wholesale reorganization of frontier defenses that was finally brought to a conclusion in the late 1770s—years after marqués de Rubí had submitted his recommendations. The new layout
rested on a cordon of fifteen presidios that connected the gulfs of Mexico and California roughly along the thirtieth parallel, the true frontier line in Rubí’s mind. Seven garrisons north of that line were abandoned. Texas lost the presidio of Los Adaes (which now lost its status as the province’s capital to San Antonio), but both Santa Fe and San Antonio retained their garrisons, even though they sat far to the north of Rubí’s cordon. The two northern presidios also received extensive backing from the royal treasury and in the early 1780s had more soldiers than any other presidio in the Interior Provinces.²
The restored force of Bourbon Spain caught up with the Comanches in 1779,
when Anza, New Mexico’s governor for two years, moved to make war on the
western Comanches in their own territory. A third generation army officer, a veteran Indian fighter, the pioneer of the Sonora-California overland trail, and one of New Spain’s ablest servants, Anza had been handpicked by Commanding
General Teodoro de Croix to pacify the Comanches and restore order in the
troubled, ailing far north. Anza mustered almost six hundred presidial soldiers, militias, and Indian auxiliaries and equipped each man with a good horse. He set out in mid-August from Santa Fe. As the expedition made its way toward
Comanche camping grounds northeast of Taos, some two hundred Utes and
Jicarillas joined it, making Anza’s party the biggest military expedition Spain would ever send on the plains.
Anza’s eight hundred fighting men marched northward from Santa Fe, care-
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fully avoiding the open plains, and surprised a Comanche ranchería of 120 lodges on present-day Fountain Creek. They killed eighteen warriors and thirty women and children, “the latter running where their fathers were,” and captured thirty-four women and children. The prisoners divulged startling information: Anza’s troops had stumbled upon the ranchería of Cuerno Verde, the legendary “little king” of the western Comanches. The captives also told that Cuerno Verde had left with some fifty warriors to attack Taos. Anza saw here an opportunity to strike at the heart of western Comanche military organization and decided to follow the raiders’ path back toward New Mexico. Two days later, Anza encountered the returning Comanches “who gave themselves up to a blind and head-
long fight.” The Comanches repulsed the first attack, but the next day Anza’s troops cut their forces in two and trapped Cuerno Verde and his closest followers in a gully. Cuerno Verde, along with “his first-born son, the heir to his command, four of his most famous captains, a medicine man who preached he was immor-tal, and ten more,” perished. Anza returned to Santa Fe with more than thirty captives, displaying to the citizens the green headgear of the fallen Comanche chief. He reported a major victory to his superiors and sent the headdresses of Cuerno Verde and his “second in command” to Commanding General Croix as
the “first trophies which I pay in tribute to you from this province.” Comanche raids to New Mexico stopped immediately, and some Comanche leaders began
to make peace overtures to Anza. While the previous twelve years had witnessed almost constant attacks, there were only occasional forays after 1780. With a single strike, the Spaniards believed, Anza had brought the raids to a bloody halt and reduced the fearsome Comanches to submission.³
A closer look suggests, however, that Anza’s victory was more temporally convenient than it was militarily decisive: it occurred just as the Comanches faced a series of crises, whose combined impact forced them to reevaluate their policies toward Spaniards. For years Comanches had enjoyed relative tranquility on their borders, but in the late 1770s wars flared out again. The Kiowas, with whom western Comanches had traded peacefully since midcentury, pushed from the
central plains toward Comanchería. Drawn by the warm weather and vast herds
of feral horses of the southern plains, and pressured by the westward migrating Cheyennes, Kiowas marched into the Arkansas River basin, where they clashed
violently with Yamparikas and Jupes. Hostilities also broke out between the
Comanches and Pawnees, destroying the alliance that had existed since 1750.
The causes of the rift are not clear, but it is pos
sible that the two nations collided over hunting privileges in the upper Arkansas basin, where bison herds had became depleted during the drought years of the mid-1770s. By the early 1780s, Comanchería’s entire northern border had become a battle zone. And while
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new wars erupted in the north, old ones smoldered on other fronts. Osage hunting and war parties continued to test the hold of Comanchería’s eastern border, and Apaches fought bitterly to keep Comanches out of their raiding sphere in southern Texas. The early 1780s also saw the Comanches’ seemingly unstoppable expansion into the Ute territory west of the Rockies turn into a retreat.⁴
Engulfed in war, Comanches were also struck by severe economic and com-
mercial reversals. Not only did western Comanches see their long-standing trade links with Kiowas and Pawnees disintegrate into bloodshed, but they also lost their connections with Kansas and Iowas, whose trading power was undercut
by overhunting and Osage attempts to monopolize Spanish fur trade from St.
Louis. Eastern Comanches faced a similar commercial crisis. In the late 1770s, after a protracted rivalry, they had finally replaced Wichitas as the trade gateway to the lower Mississippi valley—only to see how changing imperial geopolitics smothered the eastern markets. The first blow came in 1779, when Spain joined the thirteen rebelling colonies against Great Britain and seized the eastern bank of the lower Mississippi valley, thus preventing British traders from slipping into Comanchería. Then Franco-Spanish traders of Louisiana withdrew from the
plains in order to reap profits from the war that raged up and down the Mississippi and along the Gulf Coast. By the early 1780s the westbound trade from
the lower Mississippi valley had all but dried up, rendering eastern Comanches’
victory over Wichitas meaningless: they were a trade gateway without trade.⁵
But such military and economic setbacks pale in significance to the demo-
graphic disaster that fell upon the Comanches. In 1780 or 1781 a sprawling
continent-wide smallpox epidemic descended into Comanchería, causing un-
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