The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  them and present them gifts,” “set free certain prisoners and criminals,” and

  “build them houses of wood forming a plaza” on the Colorado River. The last

  request, like the San Carlos experiment two decades before, seems to have been spurred by a dry spell and the need to secure additional Spanish aid. The governor furnished the visitors with gifts, promised to send constructors, and, finally, offered unrestricted trade with favorable terms: “On giving the staff of office ( bastón) to the [Comanche] general, I had him give his word that they would come every year to trade and I promised him justice in exchange of [their] goods for [those of our] goods which were desired, saying that this was a good way to avoid unpleasantness.”⁶⁶

  Ultimately, the Spanish attempts at political manipulation crushed against

  the persisting traditions of Comanche political culture. Bourbon officials insisted on labeling the supreme chiefs as marionettes whose very existence was dependent on Spanish support, but in reality all western Comanches head chiefs entered the foreign political arena as established leaders who already enjoyed wide support in Comanchería. Spanish officials always learned of their appoint-ments after the fact, and Comanches only asked them to recognize the chiefs’

  authority with appropriate gifts. Spanish endorsement was not a requirement for Comanche leadership positions.⁶⁷ Western Comanche head chiefs maneuvered

  the diplomatic space between the Spanish empire and Comanchería, but they

  were not Spanish creations.

  And even if Spanish officials did manage to exert limited influence on some

  western Comanche chiefs through gifts and titles, the Comanche political cul-

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  ture contained several built-in mechanisms that made the nation relatively immune to such external manipulation. The maxim that important decisions were

  to be reached through consensus functioned as an effective screen against external interference. Such charismatic and powerful chiefs like Ecueracapa could wield considerable influence over divisional and interdivisional politics, but even they could not dictate policies because the Comanche political culture

  demanded that all crucial decisions had to be unanimous. Comanches made

  a considerable effort to press this point on Spanish officials by allowing them to witness grand councils that made final decisions on such paramount issues as the 1786 New Mexico–Comanche treaty. The tradition of fluid band membership reinforced the filtering effect of consensus politics, for if a chief tried to enforce decisions that seemed corrupt, he risked losing his social face, and with that, his political support. If Comanches sensed corruption in their leaders, they simply walked away from them.⁶⁸ Beneath the surface, then, the diffuse nature of the western Comanche political system endured.

  Comanches modified their political structures to accommodate the pressures

  exerted by the reinforced Spanish empire, but they did so within the parameters of their traditional culture. As they had done at least since the mid-eighteenth century—and possibly since they had first moved to the southern plains—they

  dispersed into multiple rancherías, which periodically congregated into divisional meetings to deliberate important community-wide issues. The head chiefs with access to Spanish authorities introduced Spanish initiatives to these councils, but it was the attending mass that decided how the community responded to those initiatives.⁶⁹

  The Bourbon strategy of political manipulation failed even more glaringly in Texas, where Spanish officials operated in a more complicated and delicate geopolitical setting and with fewer funds than their counterparts in New Mexico.

  While New Mexico was surrounded by three big Native nations, the Coman-

  ches, Navajos, and Utes, Texas balanced among two major Native powers, the

  Comanches and Wichitas, as well as a multitude of smaller groups, such as the Akokisas, Tejas, Tonkawas, and Karankawas. It placed overwhelming demands

  on Texas’s limited imperial resources; in 1795, for example, thirty-three nations solicited Spanish friendship, commerce, and gifts in San Antonio, which had access to only a fraction of Santa Fe’s wealth. New Mexico spent each year four to six thousand pesos in Indian diplomacy or “peace expenditures,” but Texas often had less than half of that sum available for supplying its numerous Indian allies.

  Trade fairs, too, were more modest in Texas, which lacked its western counterpart’s access to the prosperous Chihuahua markets and consequently suffered

  from a chronic shortage of guns, iron tools, and other valuable commodities.

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  Because Texas could offer only few material incentives, eastern Comanches felt little need to conciliate the Spaniards with an appearance of a centralized government. Texas officials made desperate efforts to gain an access to eastern Comanchería’s political elite, but their attempts were destined to fail: throughout Spain’s tenure in the Southwest, their maneuverings were limited to supporting a small number of local Comanche chiefs.⁷⁰

  Comanches’ success in neutralizing Spanish interference meant that the

  cross-cultural space between the two nations would become a setting for a

  battle of wills over the meaning of the alliance. Bourbon authorities sought to attach the Comanches to the Spanish empire as political vassals, but to status-conscious Spaniards the idea of treating illiterate, nomadic Natives as social equals was unthinkable. Comanches, by contrast, regarded the alliance as a pact between equals and sought merger in the social realm and autonomy in the

  political. The language that the two sides used to explain their relationship to one another captures the discord. Spanish officials employed patriarchal father-children metaphors and used the diminutive designation “children” for Coman-

  ches, whereas Comanche chiefs spoke of Comanches and Spaniards as brothers

  bound together by affinial ties and obligations. Casting themselves as fathers, Spanish officials meant to command, but Comanches expected them to act like

  siblings who would care for their needs. These debates over words and meanings remained largely hidden, emerging only when Spanish officials, acting on their belief that they could dictate to Indian children, pressured Comanches to adopt courses of action that did not correspond with Comanche interests.⁷¹

  A series of events and episodes during the last decade and a half of the eighteenth century revealed to Spanish officials just how tenuous their influence over the Comanches was. The first episode occurred in the late 1780s when the officials tried to resolve the question of captives and captive trade. Treaty stipulations obliged Comanches to return all Hispanic captives, but when Spanish

  officials pressed the issue, Comanches understood—or purposefully misunder-

  stood—the demand as an offer to ransom the captives. They did return Hispanic women and children to Texas and New Mexico, but the Spaniards had to pay

  exorbitant sums for them, which ran as high as eight horses per captive. Comanches also conducted sporadic raids into the Coahuilan missions and Spanish-

  protected Apache establecimientos de paz, possibly to obtain female captives for the illicit slave traffic that continued unabated in Spanish Louisiana. In 1790, after repeated peace overtures from Faraone, Gileño, Natagé, and Mimbreño

  Apaches, Governor Concha brought several bands from all four groups back

  to New Mexico, hoping that they could be turned into settled farmers at El Sa-

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  binal, a small Spanish community forty miles south of Albuquerque. Coman-

  ches, however, seem to have viewed the reservation experiment as a threat to their commercial interests, which since 1786 had hinged on their exclusive control over New Mexico’s markets. Ignoring Spanish objections, they raided El

  Sabinal for four years until the settlement was nearly abandoned.⁷²

  Th
e joint military campaigns against the Apaches formed another arena

  where Spanish authorities found their influence over the Comanches seriously compromised. In 1790 Concha requested western Comanche chiefs to supply

  men for yet another collaborative military campaign, this time against Apache settlements near the Big Bend of the Río Grande. By that time, however, most Apaches had retreated far from Comanches’ sphere and no longer posed a threat to their interests. The chiefs rejected Concha’s appeal and instead asked him to provide troops for an incursion against the Pawnees on the central plains. The proposal was at odds with New Spain’s Indian policy, which targeted Spanish

  military muscle against the Apaches and avoided conflicts with other Native

  nations, but Concha accepted it nonetheless, explaining later that “if we had not granted their requests they would have developed a grudge which might have

  had regrettable results.” The expedition itself was a failure. Operating under Comanche leadership in unfamiliar conditions, the Spanish auxiliaries (20 vecinos and presidial troops) disrupted the routines of the 340-lodge-strong Comanche outfit that doubled as an army and a movable village. Eventually, after repeated quarrels, Ecueracapa and Paruanarimuca sent the Spanish troops back

  to New Mexico. This marked the effective end of Comanche-Spanish military

  collaboration. In 1797 Governor Chacón made one last bid to draft military aid from Comanchería when he asked Chief Canaguaipe for men against Mescalero raiders around El Paso. The governor offered guns and abundant rations but was flatly refused by the Kotsoteka captain, who declared that his warriors were preparing for military campaigns of their own.⁷³

  Even more alarming to Spanish officials was the unauthorized war Coman-

  ches declared in the early 1790s on the Utes and the Navajos. The Comanche-

  Ute-Navajo peace had unraveled soon after its inception in 1786, evidently

  because Utes and Navajos feared that the Comanche-Spanish union would

  marginalize them and shut them out of New Mexico’s markets: Concha noted

  tersely a few years later that the Utes “hate the Comanches because of their present friendship with us.” The severe drought in the late 1780s also fueled rivalry over local resources and induced Utes and Navajos to send raiding campaigns into Comanchería. Spanish officials tried to placate Comanches by re-

  trieving stolen horses and captives, but in 1792 Comanches went to war, ignoring Spanish pleas for pacification. This independent maneuvering not only revealed

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  the fallacy of Comanche submission to Spanish control but threatened to turn New Mexico once again into a war zone. “Regrettable are the consequences,”

  Concha lamented in 1793, “which the Province may suffer if the Comanches

  are not restrained in their just anger which they feel toward the Navajos, because to search out and attack them in their haunts, [the Comanches] will be forced to pass through the center of New Mexico, thus disrupting the tranquil state that has been maintained up to this time.”⁷⁴

  Behind such lamentations lay a deeper truth that would become increasingly

  clear during the early nineteenth century: Comanches, not Spaniards, would

  dictate the limits of the alliance and determine its character. Comanches would continue to formulate their relationship with Spanish colonists through their own interests and on their own terms, and the Southwest would remain an open field of power where relations among nations were determined on the ground,

  not in distant colonial centers. And out of this configuration would emerge an imperial order the Spaniards could not have imagined: the Comanche empire.

  4

  The Empire of the Plains

  The first half of the nineteenth century was the era of American imperial expansion in the Southwest. Powered by burgeoning industrial, technological, and demographic growth and roused by the chauvinistic nationalism of Manifest

  Destiny, the United States purchased, fought, and annexed its way from the Mississippi valley to the Río Grande, infringing Spain’s imperial claims, sweeping aside the Mexican Republic, and dispossessing dozens of indigenous societies.

  This expansion was set in motion in 1803 by the Louisiana Purchase, which

  roughly doubled the size of the nation, and was followed, in rapid succession, by the founding of the Anglo-dominated Republic of Texas in 1836, the annexation of that republic nine years later, and the market incorporation of Mexican New Mexico. The expansion culminated in the Mexican-American War in 1846–48,

  in the aftermath of which the United States bought New Mexico and Califor-

  nia for fifteen million dollars and extended its territory to the Río Grande by assuming responsibility for the three million dollars its citizens claimed against Mexico. Finally, in 1853, the United States purchased a strip of land south of the Gila River from Mexico, thereby stretching its border to what today are southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.

  But growing American power alone does not define this era, for it also saw

  Comanches resuming their expansionist thrust. Intensifying and elaborating the foreign political strategies that had fueled their expansion before the hiatus of the mid-1780s, Comanches built in the early nineteenth century a loose but

  imposing empire on the southern plains and in the Southwest, in conjunction

  with the emerging American empire. In the late 1840s, just as the United States prepared to oust Mexico from the Southwest by war, Comanches reached the

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  zenith of their power. They had revived their defunct trade and alliance network and expanded it into a vast commercial empire, which allowed them to integrate foreign economies into their market circuits and control the flow of crucial commodities on the lower midcontinent. They had halted the expansionist Texas in its tracks and carved out a vast raiding domain in northern Mexico. They held several nearby peoples in a state of virtual servitude and their market-oriented and slavery-driven economy was booming. Comanchería itself had transformed

  into a dynamic, multiethnic imperial core that absorbed large numbers of voluntary immigrants from the weaker societies and radiated cultural influences across the midcontinent. Like the imperial Americans, Comanches were powerful actors who had the capacity to remake societies and reshape histories.

  That may sound implausible. How could one region, even one as broad as the

  Southwest, accommodate two simultaneous and successful imperial projects?

  Would not the expansion of one power inevitably impinge upon, and eventu-

  ally cancel out, the expansion of the other? But such traditional zero-sum logic does not necessarily apply to the early nineteenth-century Southwest, because the Comanche and U.S. expansions stemmed from disparate impulses and advanced on divergent levels. Comanche power politics were aimed at expanding

  the nation’s access to hunting grounds, trading outlets, tributary gifts, and slaves, whereas U.S. expansion, shaped by a bitter sectional dispute over slavery, focused on securing formal territorial claims and extending the nation’s boundary to the Pacific. Comanches desired the resources of the land, Americans wanted legal titles to it. Distinct in their objectives and strategies, Comanche and U.S.

  expansions posed a fatal threat to neither. In fact, as I argue in the next two chapters, the parallel expansions did not so much clash as co-evolve, feeding on one another’s successes.

  In this and the following chapter I flesh out the form and function of the

  Comanche empire, here examining Comanches’ political, economic, and cul-

  tural power on the Great Plains, and in chapter 5 exploring their foreign policies in the Southwest. The chapters are based on the notion that U.S. expansion

  into the Southwest was built on a Comanche antecedent. Comanches are at

  the center of the story and
the westward-pushing Americans remain in the sidelines, stepping in, often unknowingly, to seize territories that had already been subjugated and weakened by Comanches. The narrative does not ignore the

  vast imperial ambitions and resources of the United States, but it shows that the stunning success of American imperialism in the Southwest can be understood

  only if placed in the context of the indigenous imperialism that preceded it.

  But in the beginning, at the turn of the eighteenth century, it seemed that

  the Southwest’s imperial future belonged to neither the Comanches nor the

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  United States. New Spain, revitalized by the Bourbon Reforms and bolstered by a dynamic Indian policy, was determined to control the region and its peoples.

  Spanish officials envisioned a great imperial extension to the interior, and they pinned their hopes on the Comanche nation. Like the Iroquois to the British, the Comanches were to Bourbon Spain the Indian proxy through which a vast

  continental empire could be claimed and commanded.

  In 1800 Spanish authorities in New Mexico and Texas thought they had a

  firm hold over the Comanche nation. Border fairs thrived across the frontier from Taos to Natchitoches, and Comanche delegations often stayed for weeks in Santa Fe and San Antonio, interacting freely with the Hispanic and Indian residents. As they collected the annual treaty presents, Comanche chiefs routinely renewed their allegiance to New Spain, projecting the image of devoted allies.

  “In this tribe,” New Mexico Governor Fernando de la Concha wrote in 1794,

  “one finds faith in the treaties that it acknowledges, true constancy, and hospitality, and modest customs. . . . The need for which we make them liberal grants of arms and ammunition makes them dependent upon us.” Deplored as “in-constant and mistrustful” savages only a few years earlier, the Comanches were recast by early nineteenth-century Spanish officials into ideal allies, almost archetypal noble savages. Pedro Bautista Pino, New Mexico’s representative in the Spanish Cortes, wrote a brief treatise on the “idea of the Comanche” in which he marveled at the “magnificent size,” “graceful appearance,” and “frank martial air” of a typical Comanche. After condemning the cruelty and obnoxiousness of the Apaches—the necessary dialectic counterpoint—Pino confidently declared