Commerce, however, was the heart of the union. The three groups embarked on
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an active exchange, which involved a distinct division of labor: Kiowas and Naishans acted as middlemen between the upper Arkansas-based Comanches and
the Mandan-Hidatsa villages on the middle Missouri valley, carrying horses and mules to the north and metal goods and high-quality short-barreled British muskets back to Comanche rancherías. It was a lucrative arrangement for Coman-
ches, whose livestock was in high demand in the horse-poor northern plains. In the early years of the nineteenth century the standard price of a stolen Spanish horse in the middle Missouri villages was “a gun, a hundred charges of powder and balls, a knife and other trifles.”³⁹
Western Comanches’ northbound exchange channel soon became a main
axis of the Plains Indian trade system, a central conduit that siphoned crucial commodities back and forth across the interior. But the thriving commerce also attracted competitors, most notably the allied Cheyennes and Arapahoes from
the northern plains. Pushed out from their homelands near the Black Hills by the expanding Lakotas around 1800, several Cheyenne and Arapaho bands
moved southward to the central plains, where they gradually ousted the Kiowas and Naishans from the middleman trading niche and entered the Comanches’
expanding of alliance network of trade and peace. In 1820 a U.S. exploring expedition led by Stephen H. Long learned about a mixed western Comanche,
Kiowa, Naishan, Cheyenne, and Arapaho camp on the upper Arkansas, and a
year later, on the Big Timbers of the Arkansas, another American expedition
led by Jacob Fowler came across a massive western Comanche-sponsored trade
assembly that hosted some five thousand Kiowas, Naishans, Cheyennes, and
Arapahoes as well as many Spanish traders from Taos. If anything, the shift in middlemen was favorable for western Comanches. Cheyennes emerged in the
early nineteenth century as highly specialized middleman traders who carried Comanche horses not only to the upper Missouri villagers but among the powerful Blackfeet as well.⁴⁰
Already bustling with activity, western Comanches’ trade system received a
further boost when they established commercial ties with their Shoshone relatives. Once a single people, Shoshones and Comanches had split in the late
seventeenth century, when the former left the central plains and headed north and the latter moved toward the south. By 1800, however, Shoshones had pulled back from the northern plains under the pressure from well-armed Blackfeet
and Crows and crossed the Continental Divide to the mountain ranges of Mon-
tana and Wyoming. Cut off from the Canadian fur trade and the northern plains buffalo country by their enemies, Shoshones turned to the south and sought
to restore their ties with the Comanches. Both the Long and Fowler expedi-
tions encountered Shoshones among the many groups who attended western
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163
To view this image, please refer to
the print version of this book.
4. Yamparika Comanche. Watercolor by Lino Sánchez
y Tapia, ca. 1836. A Comanche man displays his trade
gun, gunpowder pouch, metal ax, and metal-tipped
lance. Comanches’ far-reaching trading empire gave
them access to numerous market outlets and varied
European manufactures, making them attractive
commercial partners for near and distant Native
groups. Courtesy of Gilcrease Museum,
Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Comanche trade fairs in the upper Arkansas valley in the early 1820s. The chief attraction for Shoshones must have been Comanches’ gun supply: in 1802 one
traveler had found them hiding “in caverns from their enemies,” unable to fight back the armed forces of Blackfeet with their small bows and stone war clubs.
In exchange for the much-needed weapons, Shoshones were able to offer large
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numbers of horses, for they maintained vast herds in the deep, protective valleys of their Rocky Mountain homelands. Shoshones were not the only far northern group drawn into Comanchería’s commercial sphere. As the Mandan and
Hidatsa trading villages on the middle Missouri River began to decline in the early nineteenth century, Crows, too, began to send trading convoys among the Comanches from their homelands on the northwestern plains.⁴¹
In the early nineteenth century, then, western Comanches once again ran a
flourishing commercial center in the upper Arkansas basin, with exchange links fanning out over a vast area, connecting them to New Mexico, American market entrepôts along the Mississippi valley, the Mandan and Hidatsa trade citadels in the Missouri valley, and the rich horse reservoir of the Rocky Mountains.
Pawnee, Kiowa, Naishan, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, Crow, American,
and New Mexican trading convoys frequented western Comanche rancherías,
which seasonally morphed into vibrant cosmopolitan marketplaces where Yam-
parikas, Jupes, and Kotsotekas could transmute their horses for guns, skins for fabrics, and meat for corn. Winter months, when Plains Indians gravitated to the south and west in search of warmth and the bison, were the main trading season, and in December, January, and February one could find massive trading villages spreading out for miles along the deep protective valley of the Arkansas River.
Sites of intensely concentrated commercial activity, those trading villages were also symbols of an increasingly Comanche-centric economic configuration of
the Great Plains.
But then, just as eastern Comanches faced an economic crisis in the after-
math of the Indian Removal, western Comanches too faced a sudden reversal
of fortunes. In the late 1820s, Cheyennes and Arapahoes abruptly cut off diplomatic and commercial ties with western Comanches and forced their way into
the upper Arkansas basin. They did so in part because their existing economic arrangements on the central plains could no longer sustain them. Repeated waves of disease epidemics and Lakota raids had pushed the Mandan and Hidatsa trading villages into a steep decline, which in turn cut into the profits the Cheyennes and Arapahoes could make operating as middlemen between the middle Missouri and Comanchería. Forced to search for new economic strategies, Chey-
ennes and Arapahoes began to push toward Comanche territory, lured by its
powerful economic inducements: hospitable climate, lush horse pastures, and
proximity to New Mexico’s border markets. Cheyennes and Arapahoes were not
alone in this bid to march into Comanchería. In around 1830 they forged an alliance with two prominent St. Louis merchants, Charles and William Bent, who
ran a small fur-trading post near Pike’s Peak. Yellow Wolf, a Cheyenne chief, approached the Bents and asked them to move their post near the Big Timbers of
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165
the Arkansas River. Fully aware of the region’s history as a commercial hub, and persuaded by Yellow Wolf ’s promises to provide protection, the Bents joined the invasion into Comanchería as gun dealers for the Cheyennes and Arapahoes.⁴²
Fighting lasted for several years, during which the Bents built an imposing
two-story adobe fort on the north bank of the Arkansas River, a few miles upriver of the Big Timbers, just off the northwestern corner of Comanchería. But as on the Comanchería–Indian Territory border, mutual economic interests gradually steered the rival coalitions toward conciliation. In spring 1839, with death tolls mounting on both sides, the Cheyennes sued for peace, sending messengers
among the Comanches and Kiowas, who in turn dispatched a Naishan delega-
tion to establish an armistice. Pre
liminary talks were held the next year near the mouth of Two Butte Creek on the Arkansas, where the chiefs of the five nations smoked the calumet and buried the war. The final peace was concluded a few
months later in a massive council near Bent’s Fort. Trade, which before the outbreak of the hostilities had bound the five nations together, was the key discussion point. The negotiations lasted for two days and featured several rounds of elaborate gift giving during which Comanches and Kiowas gave away hundreds
of horses and mules. The gifts placated mourners and covered the casualties
of the war, but they also framed the future relations among the nations. With the gift exchanges completed, one of the Cheyenne chiefs announced: “Now,
we have made peace, and we have finished making presents to one another;
tomorrow we will begin to trade with each other. Your people can come here
and try to trade for the things that you like, and my people will go to your camp to trade.”⁴³
The “Great Peace” of 1840 was a momentous diplomatic feat that spawned
an enduring alliance among the Comanches, Kiowas, Naishans, Cheyennes,
and Arapahoes, reconfiguring the geopolitics of the southern and central Great Plains. As a territorial agreement, the accord established a joint occupancy of the Big Timbers of the Arkansas valley. The Cheyennes and Arapahoes retreated on the northern side of the Arkansas, keeping their home ranges on the central plains, but they retained a right to winter in the Big Timbers. As a political pact, the accord created a loose but lasting political coalition among the five nations, who in the mid and late nineteenth century would often fight together encroaching Texan settlers and the U.S. Army. As an economic agreement, the
accord launched a thriving commercial partnership that eventually came to include the Bents as well.⁴⁴
Under the new commercial arrangement, Comanches, Kiowas, and Nai-
shans bartered horses and mules for the manufactured goods that Cheyennes
and Arapahoes obtained from Fort Laramie, Fort Lupton, and other American
To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.
5. Bent’s Fort. From Message from the president of the United States: in compliance with a resolution of the Senate, communicating a report of an expedition led by Lieutenant Abert, on the upper Arkansas and through the country of the Camanche Indians, in the fall of the year 1845, 29th Cong, 1st sess., S. Ex. Doc. 438. Courtesy of Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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trading posts that emerged on the central plains in the 1830 and 1840s after the collapse of the Rocky Mountain–based beaver trade. The peace also made possible direct trade between the Comanches and the Bents. The Bents had begun
to shift to livestock trade since the economic panic of 1837 in the United States, and they were eager to expand their supply area into the horse-rich Comanchería. They maintained a moderately successful log post on the south fork of the Canadian River between 1842 and 1845 and a larger post, the “Adobe Walls,”
just north of the Canadian during the winter of 1845–46. Comanches, however, centered their activities on Bent’s Fort, drawn by its abundant wares, standardized exchange rates, and multicultural social milieu. By 1841 the Bents expected fifteen hundred Comanches would visit their post.⁴⁵
In America’s historical memory, Bent’s Fort stands as a vanguard of the
westward expansion. It was the pioneering frontier post that introduced mod-
ern capitalist institutions and ideology to the Plains Indians and into Mexican New Mexico, preparing the ground for the U.S. takeover of the Southwest. For Comanches, however, Bent’s Fort represented simply another commercial outlet, a conduit that facilitated the movement of goods between Comanchería and distant markets. Through Bent’s Fort, the western Comanches gained a secure
access to the vast American markets, and like their relatives in eastern Comanchería, they became the chief suppliers of an extended trade chain that channeled horses and mules to the expanding settler-farmer frontiers in Missouri, Arkansans, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Comanches also traded Mexican
captives, whom the Bents used as herders and laborers at the fort, as well as large volumes of buffalo robes, which found ready markets in eastern urban centers. That outpouring of livestock, robes, and captives was matched by a sizeable inflow of various staple products, craft items, and manufactured goods. Fed by regular supply trains from New Mexico and Missouri, Bent’s Fort siphoned
into Comanchería commodities from several distinct markets—Pueblo maize
and Spanish shawls from New Mexico; blankets from Navajo country; beads
from Iroquois villages; molasses from New Orleans; and coffee, flour, knives, kettles, pans, and hoop iron from all across the United States. Most important, Bent’s Fort provided quantities of lead, powder, pistols, and high-quality British muskets—enough for Comanches to keep hundreds of warriors well armed and
enough for them to extend their military hegemony from the Southwest deep
into Mexico.⁴⁶
The twin commercial networks of the eastern and western Comanches—the
eastward-facing gateway of the former and the multibranched trade center of
the latter—together formed an imposing trading empire. Featuring a thick web
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of short, midrange, and long-distance exchange routes that arched across the midcontinent from the upper Río Grande valley toward the northern plains,
the Mississippi valley, and Texas, the trading empire connected Comanchería to several different ecosystems, economies, and resource domains. And while the trade network reached outward to affix Comanchería to surrounding regions, it also opened inward, connecting Comanche groups to one another. Rancherías
met regularly for exchange and social recreation, and summers saw thousands of Comanches gravitating toward Comanchería’s center for massive communitywide political councils, which doubled as trade fairs. As a result, the imports that entered Comanchería at its various exchange points also circulated within Comanchería, ensuring that the tools and sources of power—guns, metal, and
corn—were accessible across the realm.⁴⁷
Commercial dominance brought prosperity and, predictably, security. Like
other Native trade systems in the Americas, the Comanche trade network was
embedded in a social nexus. Comanches feasted, smoked the calumet, and ex-
changed gifts with foreigners whom they considered more than trading part-
ners: they were fictive kinspeople who were socially obliged to supply for each other’s needs through material sharing. Affinity was the medium through which Comanches organized exchange across boundaries, and their trading empire
can be seen as a vast kinship circle where ritual exchanges of words, food, gifts, and spouses stabilized intersocial spaces, creating a high threshold for intergroup violence. Comanches fought the removed eastern Indians as well as the
Cheyenne-Arapaho coalition in the early 1830s, but the carnage of those years was exceptional: by standards of the age, early nineteenth-century Comanchería was a safe place to live. Like the Iroquois in the Northeast, the Comanches attached on their sphere numerous Native and non-Native groups as exchange
partners, political allies, and metaphorical kin, enveloping themselves in a protective human web. This process had its most dramatic manifestation in the massive intergroup gatherings along the upper Arkansas valley, where thousands of Comanches, Kiowas, Naishans, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Shoshones, Americans,
and New Mexican comancheros regularly gathered to trade, socialize, and me-
diate political issues, creating vast ephemeral multiethnic worlds on Coman-
chería’s northern edge.⁴⁸
Commerce and kinship helped build and maintai
n peace, but so too did
power, coercion, and dependence. Comanches nurtured peace on their borders
through active diplomacy, but they maintained stability also through their capacity to influence other societies and govern the relations among them. By
dominating the major east-west and south-north trading arteries on the southern plains and in the Southwest, Comanches were able to regulate the flow of cru-
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The Comanche Empire Page 27
