The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  tary complex now had an international reach. They fought with American and

  British guns and enlisted auxiliaries among the Kiowas, Naishans, Apaches,

  Wichitas, and removed Indians. They used the Wichitas’ Brazos River villages as staging areas for long-distance plundering forays, and their numerous Mexican captives provided crucial intelligence about those unfamiliar lands.²⁷

  From the mid-1820s on Comanches held much of Mexican Texas as a colonial

  appendage. In 1824 and 1825 several multiethnic war bands from Comanchería

  raided across Texas and into Coahuila, seeking horses and captives and killing resisting settlers. Many bands were reported to be using captured Mexican peasants as guides. San Antonio descended from helplessness to humiliation: in June 1825 a party of 330 Comanche men, women, and children rode into the capital

  and leisurely looted the town for six days. Attacks continued through the following year, but in 1827, in San Antonio, Comanche leaders buried the war with

  General Anastasio Bustamante, the military commander of the Eastern Interior Provinces. Mexican officials worked frantically to secure enough gifts to expand the truce into a peace, and when Tenewa Chief Paruakevitsi (Little Bear) visited San Antonio the next year to “renew the bonds of amity,” the officials “showered [him] with gifts.” Comanches embarked on an active border trade, visiting settlements from Nacogdoches to Aguaverde, and their chiefs frequented San

  Antonio to collect gifts and profess peace.²⁸

  But mirroring the developments during the late Spanish era, gift distributions soon morphed into tribute payments, for Comanches kept the peace only as

  long as presents were available. Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, the future president of the Republic of Texas, remarked how the Mexicans “used to have to

  purchase peace from the Comanchees, who came to Bexar [San Antonio] regu-

  larly every year to get their annual tribute.” The arrangement reached a nadir for San Antonio in 1832, when a party of five hundred Comanches entered the

  capital and extorted and tormented its citizens for several days, undisturbed by the Mexican troops in the nearby garrison who failed to intervene. Upon

  leaving, moreover, Comanches forced the disgraced soldiers to escort them back to Comanchería, for a Shawnee war party was in the neighborhood. This incident exhausted San Antonio’s funds for gifting, and Comanches responded with a prolonged raiding spree that lasted until 1834, when presents again became available, producing a brief interlude of tranquility. Gift payments, in short, had become the condition for peace, turning Texans into tributaries of the imperial Comanches. Tadeo Ortiz, a Mexican reformer-colonizer, considered the arrangement intolerable, “an insult and degradation to the honor of the nation.”

  “Millions of pesos are being spent on . . . impossible truces,” he bristled, “which under the name of peace, are ignominiously formed. . . . [Indians’] good will is

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  To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.

  10. Military Plaza—San Antonio, Texas. Steel engraving by James D. Smillie from drawing by Arthur Schott. Before the U.S. annexation of Texas in 1845, San Antonio lingered for decades in virtual tributary vassalage under the Comanche empire. From U.S. Department of the Interior, Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, Made under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior, by William H.

  Emory, Major First Cavalry and the United States Commissioner, 3 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Cornelius Wendell, 1857–59), vol. 1. Courtesy of Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  won with numerous presents at the expense of the people whom they continu-

  ally insult, murder, and despoil of their property.”²⁹

  Although it yielded only imperfect protection, the policy of paying for peace gave the vital Tejano regions of Texas much-needed if tenuous respites from violence. Settlers who had sought protection in urban centers began to move back into the countryside, revitalizing the province’s ranching industry, which had nearly expired under Comanche raids between 1811 and 1821. The number of

  active ranches along the San Antonio–Goliad corridor rose from eleven in 1825

  to eighty in 1833, and several Tejano oligarchs built large estates with multiple buildings and elaborate fortifications. But the policy also had the unintended effect of redirecting Comanche raids into other northern Mexican departments.

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  In 1830, with Comanches trading peacefully in San Antonio, municipalities

  along the lower Río Grande reported intense Comanche attacks. In 1833, Ber-

  landier reported, Comanches “launched a dreadful war against the peaceable inhabitants of the state of Chihuahua.” They “overran several haciendas in Nuevo Leon, in the immediate vicinity of the capital. Around Matamoros they have

  pushed as far as the banks of the Rio Bravo, where they perpetrated a number of atrocities.” Comanche leaders routinely disassociated themselves from the raids in the south to keep their access to the gifts open, but sometimes their stratagems were exposed. In 1834 Berlandier met in San Antonio a Comanche chief who

  blamed “a few hotheads” for the raids in Chihuahua, but he soon discovered

  that the chief too had been raiding in Chihuahua, “for every one of his horses had been stolen from the haciendas of the region he just had warned me away

  from.”³⁰

  By the mid-1830s, it was clear that the Indian policy of Texas was a complete failure. The decision to open the province to American immigrants had backfired. Rather than moving to the interior to shield the province’s core areas around San Antonio from Comanche attacks, most Americans stayed east of the

  Colorado River, beyond the Comanche range and within an easy reach of Louisiana, their main commercial outlet. The result was a splintering of Texas into two distinct and increasingly detached halves. The Anglo-dominated eastern half

  experienced steady growth, developing a flourishing export-oriented cotton industry and spawning nearly twenty new urban centers by 1835. This half was part of Mexico only in name. Its main economic and political ties extended eastward to the powerful mercantile houses of New Orleans, and its settlers often spoke no Spanish, held slaves in spite of a widespread aversion toward the institution in Mexico, and harbored separatist sentiments.³¹

  The Tejano-dominated western half, meanwhile, descended into underdevel-

  opment. As raids and violence engulfed vast portions of western and southern Texas during the early 1830s, basic economic functions began to shut down.

  Villages and farms were stripped of livestock and the reviving ranching industry faltered once again. Agriculture deteriorated as farmers refused to work on fields where they were exposed to attacks. Laredo on the lower Río Grande lost one-sixth of its population between 1828 and 1831 to Comanche attacks and small-

  pox, and Goliad, already weakened by Comanche raids, nearly expired during

  a cholera outbreak in 1834. Settlers lived in perpetual fear and near-starvation even in San Antonio, where, in the words of one observer, “nothing can be

  planted on account of the Comanches and Tahuacanos [Tawakonis] who fre-

  quently harass the city even in time of peace.” Villages curled inward and grew isolated, for settlers “seldom venture more than a mile from town on account of

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  the Indians.” Major roads leading to San Antonio were frequently cut off, and Berlandier traveled on deserted roads lined with crosses marking places “where the Comanches had massacred travellers or herdsmen.” The road from Coahuila to Texas crossed “an uninhabited country” where Indian raiders ruled, and commercial and political links between Texas and New Mexico existed only on

  paper. When assessing the long-term impact of Comanche raids on western and


  southern Texas, Berlandier depicted a decaying, psychologically disfigured captive territory: “Their war against the Creoles in Mexico, when they were allied with the Lipans, spread terror among the settlers up and down the border. . . .

  Their raids then became almost continuous and the garrisons were always be-

  sieged. The fields were left to run wild, and often even the solitary farmers were massacred in the midst of their households. The Comanche so thoroughly devastated most of the eastern interior states that many families there are still poverty stricken.”³²

  It was this divided Texas that in 1835 rebelled against the central government and in 1836 became an independent republic with close ties to the United States.

  The Texas Revolution was the product of several long-simmering problems,

  which came to a head in 1834 and 1835 when the military strongman Antonio

  López de Santa Anna assumed dictatorial powers in Mexico City and imposed a

  conservative national charter known as Las Siete Leyes. Las Siete Leyes ended the federalist era in Mexico and ushered in a centralist regime bent on curtailing states’ rights and sovereignty. The momentous shift galvanized Texas, turning the smoldering tensions over slavery, tariff exemptions, and immigration (further immigration from the United States had been banned in 1830) acute and

  then violent. When centralist forces marched into Texas in fall 1835 to rein in the renegade province, they faced unified resistance that included the vast majority of Anglo colonists and many prominent members of the Tejano elite. In November, delegations from twelve Texas communities met at San Felipe de Austin,

  declared allegiance to the federalist constitution of 1824, and cut off ties to the centralist regime.

  Texan independence may have been predetermined by geography—Texas

  was simply too far from Mexico City and too close to the United States—but

  the event can be fully understood only in a larger context that takes into account the overwhelming power and presence of the Comanches in the province

  in the years leading to the revolt. The need to protect northern Mexico against Comanche attacks had been a central factor behind the 1824 and 1825 colonization laws, which opened the floodgates for American immigration into Texas, and the Comanche threat remained a burning concern into the 1830s, when

  Texas severed its ties to Mexico. In 1832, when delegates from Texas communi-

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  ties met at San Felipe de Austin and petitioned Mexico City for the separation of Texas and Coahuila—a move that bordered on treason—they complained

  bitterly about the utter inability of the distant state capital in Saltillo to deal with the Comanche question: “These communities [Jáen, San Marcos, Trinidad, and

  San Sabá Presidio] have disappeared entirely; in some of them the residents

  dying to the last man. . . . Many early settlers and their descendants have been sacrificed to the barbarians. . . . Every last one of us is probably threatened with total extermination by the new Comanche uprising.”³³

  Many Tejano oligarchs shared those concerns, for their economic well-being

  had become dependent on the Anglo-Texas cotton industry and unrestricted ac-

  cess to U.S. markets. They were deeply incensed with the federal government’s failure to provide the funds and soldiers with which Texas could have protected itself against Indian raids. Santa Anna’s centralist government not only disregarded these sentiments but moved ahead with its plan to dissolve state militias, the safeguard of state sovereignty. That plan, if successful, would have left much of Texas wide open to Comanche attacks, and the federal government’s resolve with the issue alienated many Tejano leaders and pushed them to support the

  revolt. Separation from Mexico remained an alien, even unpalatable idea to

  most Tejanos, who had no illusions about their political position in an independent Texas, but the centralist government’s policy forced them to revolt to save themselves.³⁴

  Comanches represented a potentially fatal threat to American colonists, but

  more abstractly, they also constituted a useful political foil for American newcomers to justify their revolt against Mexican authority and the subsequent takeover of Texas. Like the Anglo-Texan conviction that Tejanos passively submitted to Santa Anna’s dictatorial policies, Mexico’s failure to fend off the Comanches were for Anglo-Texans signs of degradation of the Mexican character—its supposed stupidity, docility, lethargy, and lack of masculine vitality. Anglo-Texans denounced Mexican men guilty of numerous irredeemable defects: they had

  failed to protect property against Comanche raiders, they had paid tribute to heathen savages to save themselves, they had lost women and children to Indian captivity, and they had left Texas soil in the hands of primitives and thus in the state of wilderness. These failures, the Anglo-Texans argued, conveyed a moral and manifest path for history: Mexico neither could nor deserved to keep Texas.

  And predictably, the list of Mexican failures read as an inverse list of Anglo virtues.

  William H. Wharton, a leading Anglo-Texan politician, wrote in the early days of the revolt a pamphlet subtitled “Exposition of the Causes which have induced the Existing War with Mexico.” In it he rationalized the revolt by explaining that Anglo immigrants had not so much received land grants from Mexico as con-

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  quered an underused wilderness from the Indians. Where the “lazy” and fearful Mexicans “could not be induced to venture into the wilderness of Texas,” the robust Anglo pioneers had pushed ahead. And so, “under the smiles of a benignant heaven,” the Anglo colonists “triumphed over all natural obstacles, expelled the savages by whom the country was infested, reduced the forest into cultivation, and made the desert smile. From this it must appear that the lands of Texas, although nominally given, were in fact really and clearly bought.”³⁵

  In the emergent national mythology of the Texas Republic, Anglo immi-

  grants earned Texas because they alone possessed the masculine and martial vigor to wrestle the land away from the Comanches and savagery. (This view

  conveniently neglected the fact that Anglo colonies had by and large steered clear of Comanche range; it also neglected the fact that after the catastrophe at the Alamo, Sam Houston had frantically tried to win over the Comanches and

  persuade them to block Santa Anna’s advance.) When the uprising led to inde-

  pendence, the conviction that Mexicans had lost claim to Texas through their failure to defend it against Indians solidified into a dogma. “Mexico can never conquer Texas!” wrote Mary Austin Holley, cousin of Stephen Austin and the

  author of the first known English-language history of Texas in 1836. “The wilderness of Texas has been redeemed by American blood and enterprise. . . . I repeat it again and again. Mexico can never conquer Texas.”³⁶

  On the borderlands of New Mexico, meanwhile, the relations between

  Comanches and colonial powers followed a different trajectory. While violence and exploitation came to define eastern Comanches’ policies toward Spanish

  and Mexican Texas, western Comanches kept an unbroken peace with New

  Mexico from 1786 until the end of the Spanish colonial era. But this does not mean that the relations between Spanish New Mexico and western Comanches

  had become cleansed of contention, for beneath a thin veneer of tranquility

  the Comanches and colonists were engaged in an intense rivalry. That rivalry was only incidentally a typical Indian-white struggle for subjugation, survival, and territorial control; it was instead a multilayered, essentially imperial rivalry over political sway, the control of labor and resources, and spheres of cultural influence. The result was widespread economic, political, and cultural amalgamation across ethnic lines, amalgamation that was actively embraced by the Comanches and the great New Mexican masses but abhorred by
the Spanish

  and, later, Mexican elites.

  After the landmark treaty of 1786 between Chief Ecueracapa and Governor

  Juan Bautista de Anza, Spanish officials believed that the complete subjuga-

  tion of the western Comanches was but a matter time. The architects of New

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  Mexico’s Indian policy had a specific plan for the western Comanches who were to be made dependent on Spanish gifts and goods, isolated from the United

  States, and, eventually, Hispanized. Once this was achieved, even grander imperial schemes would become attainable. Bourbon officials meant to use the

  Comanche alliance to extend Spain’s reach deep into the North American in-

  terior to prevent the United States from expanding its realm westward. They

  envisioned North America’s heartland as the setting for a human web that was firmly anchored in New Mexico through the powerful yet obedient Comanches.³⁷

  In the course of the early nineteenth century, however, an almost diametric

  dynamic would emerge: it was New Mexico that would became dependent, iso-

  lated, and culturally transformed under rising Comanche power. Rather than

  becoming an instrument for Spain’s imperial extension, the western Coman-

  ches became a hindrance to it. They detached themselves from Spain’s restrictive embrace, refused to accept the role of a subordinate ally, and continued to maneuver independently and on their own terms. They forged ties with American merchants and built an imposing trade and alliance system that gradually mantled the midcontinent. By 1810, the real nerve center of the Southwest was not Santa Fe but the western Comanche rancherías along the upper Arkansas,

  Red, and Brazos valleys, where peoples from numerous nations congregated to

  exchange goods, forge and maintain political alliances, and organize large-scale multiethnic military campaigns. New Mexico’s economic and political ties to

  Comanchería endured, but they had come to reflect its dependence on, not

  control over, the Comanche nation.

  Comanches’ ascendancy over New Mexico was in many ways a straightforward