The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  che empire.

  In spring 1803, when the Louisiana Purchase raised the specter of a U. S. invasion into Spain’s North American empire, the frontier province of Texas was

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  already gripped by fear. Eastern Comanches, who had entered into a formal alliance with the colony in 1785 and honored the peace for a decade, were raiding again. Attacks had continued for eight years, spreading terror across the province.

  Comanche chiefs frequented San Antonio to apologize for the raids and to re-

  turn an occasional stolen horse, but they seemed either unwilling or unable to stop the violence.

  Part of the problem was that the violence had become personal. In 1801

  Spaniards had killed the son of Chief Blanco, a local Yamparika leader, near San Antonio, and Blanco had been carrying out a private vendetta against Texans ever since. The situation had spiraled out of control in spring 1802, when Blanco’s followers attacked a Spanish hunting party on the plains. The fleeing hunters exacted arbitrary vengeance on a lone Comanche they accidentally met and brought his scalp to Governor Juan Bautista Elguézabal in San Antonio. In March 1803 Elguézabal tried to diffuse tension by inviting Comanche leaders

  to a council in San Antonio, but the meeting ended uneasily. The shipment of goods from the south was late that year, and the governor was able to offer the chiefs only few gifts.¹

  A month later the United States purchased Louisiana from France, which

  sparked off a bitter quarrel over the boundaries of the purchased area. Spain insisted that Louisiana comprised no more than the west bank of the Mississippi and the cities of New Orleans and St. Louis, while the United States asserted that it extended to the crest of the Rockies and to the Río Grande, encompassing half of New Mexico and all of Texas. Spanish authorities had feared for some time that Philip Nolan and other American trader-agents operating on the southern plains had fomented anti-Spanish sentiments, and the Louisiana

  dispute elevated the anxiety to a fever pitch. With the United States disputing Spanish imperial claims north of the Río Grande and with Comanches raiding

  again along the frontier, Texas suddenly became the most valuable and vulnerable of Spain’s American colonies.²

  The escalating violence in an uncertain geopolitical situation caused deep

  anxiety in Texas, where the carnage of the previous outbreak of Comanche raiding was still fresh in memory. The officials seemed powerless. They not only lacked the military muscle to repel the raids but knew that hard-line policies ran the risk of alienating the Comanches and pushing them toward Americans. In

  the end, Spanish administrators had only one feasible option: to channel a large portion of the much-needed funds that the Bourbon Reforms had made available into Comanche gifting in the hope of generating enough goodwill to avoid bloodshed. Fueled by fear, the volume of Indian gifting in Texas escalated to the point that in 1810 the colony invested almost four thousand pesos in Indian di-

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  plomacy, handing out presents—weapons, metal utensils, cloth, tobacco, food, vermilion—to more than thirteen hundred Comanche visitors. Such liberal distributions, which nearly bankrupted San Antonio’s treasury, prompting one governor to accuse Comanches of an insatiable “lust for lucre,” did help curb raids for short periods. But they also locked Texas into a tricky dynamic: for the next half century, Comanches would step up and cut back raiding in the province in line with the availability of gifts. Under the ever-present possibility of violence, offerings of diplomatic presents became fixed tribute payments to protect the exposed colony.³

  Most Spanish officials refused to acknowledge this unsettling reversal of

  power relations and insisted on calling the payments presents or charity, and the Comanches, who thought that gifts symbolized social bonds, never explicitly articulated the connection between peace and gifting. Yet, resting on the knife-edge of violence, the relationship was unmistakably tributary in nature. In summer 1803, after two years of fear-inducing attacks across Texas, more than eleven hundred Comanches visited San Antonio to trade and collect presents.

  Generous gifting continued through the next two years, and in 1806 Spaniards gratified more than two thousand Comanches in San Antonio. In 1808 Texas

  ordered seven thousand pesos worth of Indian gifts from Mexico City. In return for liberal presents, Comanche chiefs pressured their followers to curtail raiding and even offered assistance to Spain in a possible border conflict with the United States. One powerful leader, Sargento, attached the name of the Texas governor to his own and as Sargento-Cordero traveled around Comanchería endorsing peace and retrieving stolen horses. What the Comanches did not do was to reciprocate Spain’s generosity. Their recompense was the absence of violence.

  Holding a pronounced power advantage over Texas, they seem to have placed

  the Spaniards in an ambiguous social space where they were not quite friends nor outright enemies.⁴

  The peace lasted only as long as gift distributions did. The outbreak of the Hidalgo Revolt in Mexico in the fall of 1810 disrupted the flow of funds to the northern provinces, undermining Texas’s policy of buying peace. As the gift distributions dwindled, Comanches resumed attacks, raiding and extorting tribute across the colony from the San Sabá River to the Río Grande. Spanish officials made desperate efforts to amass enough gifts to restore good relations, and in the summer and fall of 1811 Comanche chiefs Sargento-Cordero, Chihuahua, Paruaquita, and Yzazat visited San Antonio, sustaining Spanish beliefs that peace would be possible. Then, however, the officials committed a diplomatic gaffe that alienated the entire Comanche nation. El Sordo (The Deaf One), a renowned Tenewa war leader with close ties to Tawakonis and Taovayas, went to

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  San Antonio to report on the raiding activities of his rival Wichita leaders. El Sordo arrived unarmed with his family and under a banner of truce, but Spanish officials, betraying a deepening panic, arrested and jailed him. The diplomatic breach killed the artificial peace. Even Sargento-Cordero abandoned his pro-Spanish stance and joined the other Comanche rancherías in attacking Texas.

  He reentered the historical record—simply as Cordero—in 1817 at Natchitoches where he tried to open diplomatic and commercial relations with the Americans.⁵

  The collapse of Comanche-Spanish peace occurred just as the livestock trade

  between the Comanches and Americans was becoming big business, and the

  consequences were disastrous for Texas. American traders had a seemingly insatiable demand for horses and mules, and the collapse of the Spanish alliance allowed the Comanches to pillage Texas with impunity to meet that demand. Sys-

  tematic pillaging began in winter 1811–12 when Comanches “collected a great

  number of animals both horses and mules, leaving horror and devastation in this industry in the Province of Texas and on the frontiers of the other Provinces.”

  Although Nemesio Salcedo, the commanding general of the Interior Provinces,

  had managed to recruit several hundred militiamen, the presidial forces of Texas failed to the seal the frontier. In early August, after the Comanches had carried off more than two hundred horses from San Marcos, Texas Governor Manuel

  María de Salcedo proposed a series of campaigns against them—only to be de-

  nied by his uncle the commanding general who insisted that “war against the

  Comanches had always been considered the greatest evil that could befall the province.”⁶

  The elder Salcedo managed to deflect the evil of full-blown Comanche war,

  but he could not foresee another evil that was about to fall on Texas. In August 1812, as the Salcedos debated the Comanche situation, a detachment of Mexican and American revolutionaries and filibusterers invaded Nacogdoches to launch a popular revolt against the Spanish regime. Suddenly Texans found themselves
caught in a two-front conflict. The revolt that would eventually fail lasted for a year, and its aftermath left Texas vulnerable and exposed to Comanche raiders.

  The victorious royal army carried out violent purges in San Antonio and Nacogdoches, reducing the colony’s manpower by hundreds, and the Spanish crown

  prohibited settlers from carrying arms, inadvertently compromising their ability to defend the province against Indian assaults. And then, disastrously, the money ran out. The repercussions of the 1808 Napoleonic invasion of Iberia and the subsequent rebellions throughout New Spain had tied up resources, forcing

  the officials in Texas to scale down Comanche gifting. With the Comanche-

  American livestock trade now booming, this condemned Texas to ruination.

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  Soon Comanches were raiding from San Antonio all the way down to the Río

  Grande, attacking supply convoys, razing ranches, killing farmers in the field, and slaughtering entire herds of cattle. By 1814, Texas was expiring. Having lost tens of thousands of animals to Comanchería, it was nearly destitute of livestock, and the governor ordered the ranches around San Antonio to be abandoned.

  Food was scarce, soldiers were left without supplies and pay, and settlers began to flee the colony.⁷

  The year 1816 brought more alarming news: Comanches had made a truce

  with the Lipan Apache group led by El Cojo, ending more than sixty years of

  on-and-off warfare. Spanish officials had worked since the 1770s to weaken the Lipans by isolating them from the other Native groups in southern Texas and

  northern Coahuila. They had feared that an alliance with a powerful Native

  group could turn the strategically located Lipan villages on both sides of the Río Grande into an invasion point into the soft underbelly of Texas, and the accord with the Comanches realized their worst fears. The Comanche-Lipan alliance

  would not survive beyond the early 1820s, but the few years of its existence allowed Comanches to subject almost all of Texas to wholesale pillaging.⁸

  With the truce, El Cojo’s Lipans won hunting privileges in southern Co-

  manchería and in return opened their territories to Comanches, who swiftly extended their stock and slave raids to the lower Río Grande valley and its many villages and haciendas. Lipans, one observer noted, also “served as guides to the Comanche, since they knew the roads, the villages, and the arms, to the

  great detriment of all the populations along the Rio Bravo del Norte.” Texas was struck with constant attacks in the summer, and in the following year a massive raiding party of more than one thousand warriors—probably a joint Comanche-Lipan effort—ran over the town of Refugio near the Gulf Coast, stealing some ten thousand horses and mules, slaughtering cattle, sheep, and goats, and killing several settlers. In 1818 Texas Governor Antonio Martínez despaired that

  “not a single day passes without their [Comanches] making some depredation or attack.”

  Spanish militia and presidial troops were powerless against Comanche guer-

  rilla tactics. Capitalizing on their superior mobility and knowledge of the terrain, Comanches concentrated overwhelming force against a target and escaped before a counteroffensive was organized, sometimes setting the grass on fire to thwart pursuing presidial troops. They regrouped at a safe distance and then attacked another target. Since they hunted while moving about, they could repeat the cycle several times before retreating into the immensity of Comanchería.

  The only way to contain them would have been to bring the war to their home

  range, but Spain’s northern army, debilitated by lack of resources, had consigned

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  itself to a wholly defensive stance: no Spanish military expedition had penetrated Comanchería since Juan Bautista de Anza’s 1779 offensive. The council of San Antonio pleaded in vain with the provincial officials to organize a large punitive campaign against the Comanches.⁹

  Texas spent its last years under Spanish rule as a raiding hinterland of the Comanches, who used it as a stockroom for their export-oriented livestock production system. The province, for all practical purposes, had ceased to function as a Spanish colony. Its connections to the rest of New Spain were frequently cut off, as traders and travelers refused to use the roads in the fear of running into Comanche war parties. Its once-flourishing ranching and farming economies lay in waste, and the colonists were reduced to operating at subsistence level. Cattle were left unbranded and abandoned because the settlers lacked

  horses for roundups and because animal concentrations attracted Comanche

  raiders. Leather, textile, and sugar industries disappeared altogether. The number of Hispanic settlers dropped from approximately four thousand in 1803 to roughly two thousand in 1821. Nacogdoches was hanging in by a thread, and

  San Antonio, the economic heart of the colony, was besieged by the Comanche-

  Lipan coalition.¹⁰

  Comanches had a virtual monopoly on violence in their dealings with Texas.

  Spanish troops were demoralized by constant “attacks of the savages who each time become more daring,” and they were kept in “continuous movement”

  along the frontier, which left their horses in “deplorable condition,” “so weak and exhausted that they cannot even be saddled.” Without massive reinforcements

  from Mexico City, Governor Martínez warned in 1819, “this province will be

  destroyed unwittingly by lack of inhabitants . . . because no one wishes to live in the province for fear and danger and because the few inhabitants now existing are being killed gradually by the savages.” The destruction left a lingering legacy in Texas, as one Mexican officer noted in the mid 1830s: “early in 1810 there was a terrible invasion of wild Indians that destroyed the greater part of the cattle and even property, razing to the ground many of the establishments located at a distance from the centers of population. The decline of Bexar, Bahia del Espíritu Santo [Goliad], and Nacogdoches, the only Mexican settlements that have been able to subsist amidst the calamities that beset them, dates from that time and unless their misfortunes are remedied they will disappear entirely.”¹¹

  Destruction of such magnitude requires explanation. Why did Comanches

  adopt such a relentlessly aggressive policy toward Texas and why did they nearly destroy a colony that posed virtually no military or political threat to them? They did not consider Texans racially or culturally inferior people and had in fact once considered them allies and kin, so why were they so willing to divest them of all

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  possessions? The prevailing contemporary explanation was both perceptive and mechanistic: Comanche violence was fueled by the gifts, goods, and guns that flowed into Comanchería from the United States. Spanish officials came to believe that it was American markets and American machinations that alienated

  Comanches from Spaniards and fomented the violence in Texas. The idea that

  the near-destruction of Texas was ultimately the work of American borderland agents who provided Comanches with the motive (the market for livestock) and the means (guns) to raid became in time etched in the common Texas consciousness. Empresario Stephen F. Austin, casting himself as a victim of Anglo rapaciousness, condemned Comanche–U.S. trade as a “species of land Piracy”

  whereby “traders from the United States fit out expeditions to the Comanches

  . . . who are at war with this nation [Texas], and not only furnish them with arms and ammunition to carry on the war, but hire them to pillage the frontiers by purchasing the fruits of that pillage.” Seeing American intent behind every Comanche action, the contemporaries thus relegated Comanche dominance in

  Texas to a mere by-product of the United States capitalist expansion.¹²

  Although Comanches did gravitate actively and at times aggressively toward

  American marke
ts—thereby inadvertently abetting the United States’ south-

  western encroachment—the link between markets and raids was not as straight-

  forward as contemporary accounts suggest. Where colonists saw American goods and gifts as methods of a proxy war that sent Comanche warriors into Texas,

  Comanches understood those items as symbols of social bonds. If American

  wealth did persuade them to attack Texas, the cause and effect was articulated through the cultural politics of kinship, cooperation, and violence. Liberal trade and lavish gifts drew Comanches toward Americans, who acted like genuine

  kinspeople—and away from Spaniards, who failed to match Americans’ gen-

  erosity. In comparison to the American traders who offered high-quality guns, powder, and ammunition, Spaniards appeared stingy, disrespectful, uncommitted, and unloving.

  In 1808, a year after the U.S. agent John Sibley had courted Comanches in

  Natchitoches and Comanches had replaced their Spanish flag with an Ameri-

  can one, Spanish officials in San Antonio sensed that their ties to the Comanche nation were in jeopardy. Governor Manuel Antonio Cordero y Bustamente

  dispatched Captain Francisco Amangual, a sixty-nine-year-old veteran officer, to resuscitate the alliance. Amangual met with Sofais, a prominent eastern

  Comanche chief, on the Colorado River, and delivered a passionate speech.

  He reaffirmed “the love of our king and father” toward the Comanches and

  urged them to retain their “loyalty and fidelity” to the king. He advised that the Comanches “not trade with any other nation that may come to induce them,

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  for their object is none other than that of afterward turning them from their loyalty to us.” The Comanches responded that “they considered themselves Span-