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matter of economic size and reach. Comanchería dwarfed the densely populated but spatially unimposing colony, and Comanches’ thick and far-reaching exchange network isolated New Mexico almost completely from North America’s
interior. Standing next to Comanchería, New Mexico appeared diminished and
detached. Its political and economic reach extended no farther to the continental plains than Comanchería’s edge, and it was shallow even there. Spain’s weak control over the North American interior was betrayed by its officials’ hazy geographic knowledge of the Great Plains. In 1804, when the Louisiana Purchase
and the Lewis and Clark expedition fomented fears of Anglo expansion, Span-
ish officials anguished that U.S. agents prepared to invade northern New Spain through the Missouri River, which they believed provided an easy access to New Mexico. As the American threat forced Spanish geopolitical imaginings into a sharper focus, the notion of a Spanish-controlled interior suddenly appeared a mere fallacy, as Charles Dehault Delassus reported from St. Louis, now a U.S.
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city: “perhaps it will result that those Indians who are the friends of the Spaniards [now], will become enemies, incited by the Americans.”³⁸
Moreover, in a reversal of Spanish designs, New Mexico grew increasingly
dependent on Comanchería for basic resources. A vigorous border trade bound
the New Mexican and Comanche economies together: both relied on each
other’s products and both experienced steady growth. Comanche exports—
horses, mules, meat, hides, slaves, and salt—revived New Mexico’s subsistence economy, and the many improvements that the Bourbon Reforms spawned in
New Mexico opened new commercial prospects for Comanches. A booming
trade with Chihuahua brought unforeseen quantities of Spanish products to
New Mexico, allowing its inhabitants to supply Comanches with high-quality
manufactured goods. New Mexicans also built a dynamic craft industry that produced woolen stockings, blankets, and textiles for both Chihuahua and Coman-
che markets. Perhaps most important, Comanche peace allowed New Mexicans
to reclaim and rebuild villages, farms, and pasturelands that had been destroyed or abandoned during the prolonged raiding onslaught in the 1760s and 1770s.
Pecos experienced a phoenix-like revival, and other vibrant population cen-
ters emerged in the Mora valley and around Taos, Abiquiu, and Albuquerque.
Genuine borderland creations, these communities produced large quantities of maize, beans, and horses for domestic use as well as for Comanche trade.³⁹
But the mutualism of the Comanche–New Mexican relations faltered after
1800. Western Comanches’ commercial expansion on the plains simultaneously
lessened their reliance on New Mexican markets and isolated the colony from
the grasslands and its resources. The carefully laid out Spanish plans to induce dependence among the Comanches through the sale of inferior technology
crumbled when Comanches extended their trade networks across the plains and
gained access to high-quality British guns. And the trade links that attached Comanchería to distant markets in the east and north also worked to isolate New Mexico from the interior. In the early nineteenth century, Comanches had a
virtual monopoly over New Mexico’s eastbound trade, for the only Plains Indian groups trading in New Mexico were the Kiowas and Naishans, and even they did so only sporadically and likely under Comanche control. This put New Mexico’s Spaniards in a bind: they needed Comanches’ trade more than Comanches
needed theirs. Spanish New Mexico, like the Pueblo communities that it sub-
sumed, had always relied heavily on the products of the plains, but now the
colony depended almost entirely on the Comanches for its access to those ex-
ports. Across the eastern frontier, from Taos to Albuquerque, the border towns looked to Comanchería for the necessities that kept them alive.
Perhaps the most tangible sign of Comanches’ growing economic sway was
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the changing commercial geography on the Comanche–New Mexico border.
At first Comanche trade convoys frequented New Mexico’s border towns, but in time the trade began to shift from Taos, Pecos, and Picurís toward Comanchería.
The declining commercial pull of the Río Grande valley became apparent dur-
ing the first decade of the nineteenth century when the number of Comanche
visits to Pecos and Santa Fe dropped sharply. Comanches shifted their com-
mercial activities farther east and closer to their own rancherías, dividing their trade among new border villages that rose on the eastern side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In 1803 Governor Fernando Chacón described these border
villages as sites of bustling exchange: “The products traded by the Spaniards to said nomad Indians are horses, saddlebags, anqueras (leather skirt covering the horse’s rump), bits, hatchets, war axes, lances, knives, scissors, scarlet cloth, serapes, cloaks, woolens, indigo, vermilion, mirrors . . . loaf sugar, native tobacco, corn in flour and on the ear, bread, and green or dried fruit. In exchange, the nomads give captives of both sexes, mules, moccasins, colts, mustangs, all kinds of hides and buffalo meat.”⁴⁰
By 1810, San Miguel del Vado and San José del Vado along the Pecos and
Mora valleys had replaced Taos and Pecos as New Mexico’s main gateways to
Comanchería. Besides their easy accessibility, Comanches were drawn to these eastern villages by their distinctive ethnic makeup. Many of their inhabitants were genízaros, who had lived in captivity among the Comanches before being ransomed by New Mexicans. Although nominally Spanish subjects, genízaros often maintained attachments to their former masters. Seized as children and raised in captivity by Comanches, they saw Comanches as lost relatives, and that sentiment led many to form new kinship ties: marriages between genízaras and Comanche men were common and several Comanches moved to live in San
Miguel del Vado in the early nineteenth century. Wedded to Comanchería by
deep historical, familial, and economic ties, San Miguel del Vado, San José del Vado, La Cuesta, and other eastern settlements were only superficially part of colonial New Mexico. When authorizing their grants, Spanish officials had envisioned them as vanguards that would shield the province against the Coman-
ches and project Spanish power to the interior, but such designs soon dissipated.
The rise of genízaro settlements did not signify New Mexico’s expansion into the Comanche realm but rather the colony’s persisting gravitation toward the economic and cultural power of Comanchería.⁴¹
Indeed, as the relations between the new villages and Comanches solidified,
the trails that carried Comanches westward to New Mexico transformed into
avenues for eastbound trading expeditions from New Mexico to Comanchería.
In 1789 Governor Fernando de la Concha had authorized New Mexicans to visit
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Comanches for trade, hoping that such interactions would allow Spanish offi-
cials to better monitor developments inside Comanchería, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that the comanchero commerce emerged as a distinct economic enterprise. The early comanchero trade was a fluid, often im-
provised affair that saw small New Mexican parties roaming the trackless Llano Estacado with their carretas, hoping to find some of the migratory Comanche bands, but the exchange could be brisk nevertheless. In 1814, for example, two comancheros traveled two months around the Llano Estacado, bartering forty-six serapes, five hundred pounds of provisions, and large quantities of tobacco for twenty horses and mules and six to eight hundred pounds of meat and lard.
Most comancheros headed to the Canadian and Red rivers, which were easily
accessible from San Miguel del Vado and other eastern villages, but they also frequented the western Comanche trade center in the upper Arkansas. In 1810, for example, more than two hundred New Mexicans traveled to the Arkansas,
and ten years later the Stephen H. Long expedition found a well-marked trail leading from the upper Arkansas toward Taos along the Purgatoire valley.⁴²
The comanchero trade was a borderland institution that rose to meet the
needs of two societies across a narrowing cultural gulf. For Comanches, the trade offered several advantages. It shortened the distance they had to travel for trade and allowed them to avoid the microbe pools that prospered in New Mexico’s
urban centers. By concentrating trade in their own rancherías, Comanches could also exert greater control over the terms, mechanics, and forms of exchange. As for New Mexicans, trading in Comanchería opened a more direct access to the
enormous wealth that circulated within the Comanches’ commercial network.
By taking their trade to the plains, New Mexicans could also shun government control, avoid taxes, and engage in illicit forms of exchange, such as smuggling branded livestock Comanches had stolen from Texas and Nueva Vizcaya. This
kind of underground trade rarely shows up in the New Mexican records, but one American observer noted in the late 1810s that Comanches “carry on a small
traffic with the Spaniards of Santa Fe, from whom they receive blankets, knives, and tobacco, in exchange for mules and horses which they capture from the
Spaniards of the adjacent Provinces” of Texas and Nueva Vizcaya.⁴³
The deepening linkages between eastern New Mexico and western Coman-
chería evoked panic among Spanish administrators, who feared that the border trade to Comanchería had the potential of disfiguring the entire economic structure of the colony. When Governor Chacón conducted an inspection of New
Mexico’s economic conditions in 1803, he was appalled to learn that the strongest economic ties of many local settlements extended eastward to Comanchería.
This was a disturbing development to the Spanish elites who hoped to build an
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ordered surplus-producing economy in New Mexico and then plug that econ-
omy to the market centers in Chihuahua and Mexico City. But as Chacón found
out, much of New Mexico’s wealth did not flow southward along the Chihuahua
Trail but leaked eastward into Comanchería. Disgusted, he contrasted the chaos of the official provincial commerce with the orderliness of the Comanche trade:
“The internal commerce [of New Mexico] is in the hands of twelve to fourteen
[local] merchants who are neither properly licensed nor well versed in business matters. . . . The rest of the citizenry are so many petty merchants who are continuously dealing and bartering with whatever products they have at hand. Territorial magistrates are forced to mediate these exchanges [which are attended by] malicious and deceitful behavior and bad faith. Only does formality prevail in the trading carried on with the nomad Indians ( Naciones gentiles), that being a give-and-take business conducted in sign language.”⁴⁴
Spanish officials, however, fretted more over the Comanches’ social and cul-
tural influence over New Mexico than their economic sway. At the same time
that some administrators still entertained plans for the Hispanization of the Comanches, eastern New Mexico was rapidly blending into Comanchería. By
the early nineteenth century, Comanche was widely spoken in New Mexico’s
eastern frontier, and in such border towns as Taos and San Miguel del Vado one often heard Comanche phrases mixed with Spanish. Also, the subsistence patterns in eastern New Mexico bore a strong Comanche imprint. When Spanish
administrators bestowed land grants to new settlements in eastern New Mexico in the early and mid-eighteenth century, they conceived them as nuclei for what would become urban, Spanish-style agricultural centers with straight streets and central plazas. But the 1803 survey of the province’s economy startled the officials; except for the Pueblo Indians, New Mexicans were “little dedicated to farming.” In eastern New Mexico, bison hunting was taking over. By the early 1810s, the eastern villagers were harvesting between ten and twelve thousand bison a year from the Llano Estacado—enough to meet the subsistence needs
of several thousand people—and the bison hunter, cibolero, was emerging as
the cultural embodiment of frontier New Mexico. Mostly commoners with no
access to raised meats, ciboleros made two annual hunting excursions to the
plains. The first one in June was a relatively quick effort, but the fall hunt after the corn harvest was a large-scale operation that often included entire families and could take several months.⁴⁵
The long trading and hunting trips into Comanchería inevitably promoted
intimate ties with the Comanches, leading to extensive cultural borrowing. The ciboleros lived essentially like nomadic Indians, following the bison in massive caravans. The American trader Josiah Gregg described how they hunted, “like
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wild Indians, chiefly on horseback, and with bow and arrow, or lance, with which they soon load their carts and mules. They find no difficulty in curing their meat even in mid-summer, by slicing it thin and spreading or suspending it in the sun; or, if in haste, it is slightly barbequed. During the curing operation they often follow the Indian practice of beating or kneading the slices with their feet, which they contend contributes to its preservation.” Comancheros, too, fell
under Comanche influence. When visiting the western Comanches trade fair
on the upper Arkansas in 1821, Jacob Fowler encountered a “Spanish” coman-
chero party whose members “were painted like the Indians the day they traded.”
Many nineteenth-century observers found it impossible to differentiate cibo-
leros, comancheros, and Comanches from one another.⁴⁶
In the minds of the Spanish officials, the extensive material and cultural borrowing was but the first step in a deeper corruption of New Mexico. Governor Concha had little but scorn for the colony’s eastern villagers whom he saw as unreliable aliens impregnated by Comanche culture. “Under a simulated appearance of ignorance or rusticity they conceal the most refined malice. He is a rare one in whom the vices of robbing and lying do not occur together.” As the governor saw it, this character degeneration was caused by “the dispersion of their settlements, the bad upbringing resulting from this, [and] the proximity and trade of the barbarous tribes in which they are involved.”⁴⁷
Most disturbingly, Concha believed that the villagers harbored separatist sentiments. When authorizing new villages in Comanchería’s proximity, Spanish officials had expected the settlers to organize militias to defend the frontier against possible Comanche raids. Concha’s investigation revealed a different reality. He noted that as many as two thousand eastern villagers defied royal authority and attributed this to their “desire to live without subjection and in a complete liberty, in imitation of the wild tribes which they see nearby. ” “They love distance which makes them independent,” he continued, “and if they recognize the advantages of union [with Spanish New Mexico], they pretend not to understand
them, in order to adapt the liberty and slovenliness which they see and note in their neighbors the wild Indians.” Looking east from Santa Fe, Concha found it difficult to say where New Mexico ended and Comanchería began. Betraying
his anxiety, he recommended an extreme remedy: “the removal of more than
two thousand laborers to another area would be very useful to society and the state.” In early nineteenth-century New Mexico, the fundamental Spanish fear of being culturally consumed by the bárbaros seemed on the verge of becoming reality.
⁴⁸
Just how tight the economic and cultural bonds between eastern New Mexico
and the Comanches were—and, conversely, how thin the links between the fron-
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tier settlements and Santa Fe had become—dawned on Spanish administrators
in 1805, when the newly appointed governor Joachín del Real Alencaster tried to both control and tap into the Comanche–New Mexican commerce by implementing a new license and taxation system. Furious over this meddling with their livelihood, the settlers of San Miguel del Vado and San José del Vado con-trived to challenge the governor, mount a trading expedition into Comanchería as an act of defiance, and, if necessary, unite with other border villages against Santa Fe. Some reportedly even traveled to Comanchería to incite Comanches
to rise up against Spanish authorities. The conspirators were captured before they could take further action, but their arrest only aroused more uproar. A mob of angry settlers from several villages moved to Santa Fe and threatened to start a rebellion, forcing the humiliated Alencaster to cancel his policy. Alencaster’s successor, Alberto Maynez, further loosened the regulations and issued a slack passport system that allowed New Mexican traders to venture into Comanchería virtually unhindered.⁴⁹
New Mexico’s final decade as a Spanish colony was marked by mounting
Comanche influence within its borders. As revolutionary spasms gripped the
empire’s core areas after 1810, compromising Mexico City’s ability to sup-
port the frontier provinces, New Mexico grew increasingly dependent on the
Comanches for resources and protection. Its settlers traded in Comanchería with such fervor that their long absences from home exposed the border to Ute and Apache attacks, and its officials gratified Comanche delegations with lavish gifts the colony really could not afford, fearing that a cessation of payments would prompt the Comanches to resume raiding and perhaps join the Americans for a
feared invasion into Mexico.⁵⁰
This unflinching pro-Comanche stance set New Mexico apart from the other
Spanish colonies. While New Mexican communities clung to Comanchería,