The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  replicating its culture and economy like a double helix, Comanche raiders exploited and devastated large tracts of Texas, northern Coahuila, and northern Nuevo Santander. Gradually, Comanches divided the vast span of northern New

  Spain from the Nueces River to the upper Río Grande into distinct zones: they raided in one region, drew tribute in another, traded in the third, and peddled stolen Spanish goods in the fourth. Spanish administrators never managed to

  develop a uniform response to this onslaught, a failure that both denoted New Spain’s helplessness in the face of Comanche power and exposed it to further exploitation. By the late 1810s, one observer noted, Comanche politics had fragmented New Spain’s northern frontier almost to the point of nonexistence: “The Comanches have made themselves so redoubtable to the Spaniards that the governors of the different provinces of the frontiers have found it necessary to treat

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  separately with them. Often they are at war with one province and at peace with another; and returning, loaded with spoil, from massacring and pillaging the frontiers of one province, driving before them the horses and frequently even prisoners whom they have made, they come into another to receive presents,

  taking only the precaution of leaving a part of the spoil, above all the prisoners, at some distance from the establishments.”⁵¹

  Liberal gifts and a clandestine trade that did not exclude stolen Spanish property allowed New Mexicans to maintain stable relations with the Comanches

  until the end of the Spanish period, but the transfer to Mexican rule brought about a dramatic change. After having maintained an uninterrupted peace

  with New Mexico for thirty-five years, Comanches began raiding in the prov-

  ince again. The first flash of violence occurred in August 1821, only months after Mexico’s independence, and its causes are revealing. Mexican authorities in

  Santa Fe denied a visiting Comanche delegation the customary annual gifts—

  which Comanches apparently had become to view as a perpetual privilege—and

  the disgruntled Comanche party took revenge on nearby settlements, pillaging several houses, killing sheep and cows, and raping two women. Governor Facundo Melgares pressed other districts to make donations for Indian gifting lest

  “desolation and death” follow, but such emergency measures did little to remove the larger structural problem. Lacking movable funds, the new Mexican nation failed to keep up the gift distributions that had helped maintain the peace during the Spanish era. Acutely aware of the connection between presents and

  peace, Mexican officials struggled to scrape together enough money for gifting, but their efforts were undermined by the meager support they received from the central government, which was preoccupied with the internal power struggles

  among the self-designated Emperor Iturbide, the congress, and the insurrec-

  tionists led by Generals Santa Anna and Guadalupe Victoria. By 1822, officials in Santa Fe had been forced to borrow more than six thousand pesos from the

  private sector for Indian gifts but received no compensatory funds from Mexico City.⁵²

  As gift flow from New Mexico to Comanchería ebbed and flowed in the fol-

  lowing years, so too did the tempo and intensity of Comanche attacks in the

  province. The relations continued to deteriorate through the early 1820s, and by mid-decade the situation became so bad that the federal government had a

  reason to fear that New Mexicans might revolt if they did not receive better protection against the Indians. Santa Fe received in 1826 less than seven hundred pesos for gifts—not nearly enough to gratify New Mexico’s many Indian neighbors—and the next year Comanches raided the border from Taos to Abiquiu.

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  But in 1827, in the aftermath of the failed Fredonian Rebellion in Texas, General Anastasio Bustamante extended a proclamation of truce to the Comanches. In

  August 1828 New Mexican ambassadors met with some six hundred western

  Comanches on the Gallians River and witnessed how they elected Toro Echi-

  cero (Sorcerer Bull) as head chief and ratified a formal treaty. Comanches promised to refrain from raiding on the condition that gifts would be made available in New Mexico, and in 1829 Paruakevitsi, the prominent Tenewa chief, met with Mexican officials near Bosque Redondo, endorsed Bustamante’s peace declaration, and received generous gifts. But in 1830 funds were once again scarce, forcing Governor José Antonio Cháves to plead with Comanche chiefs to accept inferior gifts and honor the peace, but to no avail. A wave of violence of such force swept over New Mexico and the neighboring Chihuahua that the Mexican

  authorities cut all commercial ties to Comanchería and declared a general war on the Comanches.⁵³

  It was at this juncture of escalating Comanche violence that New Mexico

  began to cut loose from Mexico City. The colony had began to turn from cen-

  tral Mexico toward the power and wealth of Comanchería during the late Span-

  ish era, and the rise of the American-dominated Santa Fe trade after 1822 had accelerated that eastern reorientation. But it was not until after 1830 that New Mexico began to disentangle itself politically from the rest of Mexico. Terrified by the prospect of a full-scale raiding war, New Mexicans put self-interest first and continued to bestow gifts on and trade with Comanches, ignoring the fact that their actions fueled violence elsewhere in Mexico. Comanches took this

  as a license to raid Chihuahua and Coahuila for horses and mules and then

  trade the animals to New Mexicans, who seemed determined to keep their com-

  mercial lines to Comanchería open. In 1831, after a violent episode at a trade rendezvous on the Comanche border, Mexican officials in Santa Fe banned

  the comanchero trade as “detrimental to order,” but the embargo did little to suppress the institution that had become an integral part of New Mexico’s economic and social world. Indeed, only a year later Captain José María Ronquillo insisted that the purchase of horses from Comanchería should be made an official policy on the grounds that New Mexico needed more horses to defend itself against Navajo raiders on the province’s northwestern frontier. Ronquillo was fully aware that Comanches were engaged in livestock raiding in Chihuahua

  and that buying horses from them might further encourage those raids, but he promoted the commerce regardless. New Mexicans had resigned themselves to

  purchasing peace from the Comanches, even if it meant inflicting death and

  suffering for the rest of northern Mexico.⁵⁴

  This independent maneuvering ran up against Mexico City’s ambitious

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  nation-building project, which gathered momentum after 1830. In 1835 political power in Mexico City moved from liberal federalists to conservative centralists, a momentous shift that immediately sparked a secessionist revolt in Texas and a federalist revolt in California. New Mexico followed suit in August 1837 when an armed rebellion erupted in Río Arriba. Sparked in part by class inequalities, the Chimayó Rebellion was a full-fledged popular revolt against the centralists’

  plans to impose direct national taxation and introduce nationwide religious reforms. There was also a borderlands element to the revolt, for direct taxation would have interfered with the eastern villagers’ lifeblood, the Comanche trade.

  The rebels, mostly poor vecinos, mestizos, Creoles, and Pueblo Indians, captured and beheaded Governor Albino Pérez and named José Gonzalez, a cibolero

  hunter from Taos, as governor. They managed to take over most of northern New Mexico before being crushed by a “Liberating Army” led by Manuel Armijo.

  The repression of the Chimayó movement, together with Mexico’s loss of Texas a year before, resulted in an outpouring of patriotic rhetoric in New Mexico and launched a nationalist campaign to preserve Catholicism and the Mexican<
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  culture.⁵⁵ But that campaign did not draw the province any closer to the rest of Mexico politically or economically.

  If anything, in fact, the chasm only widened, for the 1830s also saw the escalation of the comanchero trade into a major economic institution that wedded New Mexico’s economy firmly to that of Comanchería and inexorably pulled the province further apart from the rest of Mexico. This expansion of the comanchero trade stemmed from changing geopolitics in Comanchería: western Comanches

  had temporarily lost their control of the lucrative upper Arkansas trade center to the invading Cheyenne-Arapaho-American bloc and turned to New Mexico as

  an alternative source of crucial imports. New Mexicans seized the opportunity, and the 1830s and early 1840s saw comancheros making regular annual trips into Comanchería, traveling along well-marked trails, and bringing in guns, powder, serapes, brown sugar, corn, wheat tortillas, and specially baked hard bread. In return for the all-important weapons and foodstuffs, Comanches offered bison robes, bear skins, and, above all, horses and mules, which were in high demand among the New Mexicans who had embarked on a large-scale overland trade

  with the United States. Comancheros, many of them genízaros with strong cultural ties to Comanchería, had few qualms with doing business in stolen animals with Mexican brands. By decade’s end, Comanches routinely used New Mexico

  as an outlet for war spoils taken elsewhere in northern Mexico. “Though at continual war with the south of the republic,” Josiah Gregg wrote, “for many years the Comanches have cultivated peace with the New Mexicans . . . because it is desirable . . . to retain some friendly point with which to keep amicable inter-

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  course and traffic. Parties of them have therefore sometimes entered the settlements of New Mexico for trading purposes; while every season numerous bands

  of New Mexicans, known as Comancheros, supplied with arms, ammunitions, trinkets, provisions and other necessities, launch upon the Prairies to barter for mules, and the different fruits of their ravages upon the South.”⁵⁶

  It was as if New Mexico had developed a certain immunity to Mexico City’s

  designs and decrees, a condition that in 1840 took on concrete political shape at the highest level. In that year federal officials ordered New Mexico Governor Manuel Armijo to cancel the livestock trade with the province’s bordering Indians, including the Comanches. Armijo summarily refused the order, condemning it as unreasonable. If trade was banned, he argued, Comanches would

  lose their interest in maintaining peace with New Mexico and launch open war, something the province could not endure. Moreover, he warned, the livestock

  trade was New Mexico’s prime outlet for cash crops and so crucial for the Pueblo Indians that canceling it would risk igniting a general revolt. The ban was quietly forgotten, but a year later General Mariano Arista ordered Armijo to join Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila in a united—and unprecedented—campaign

  against the Comanches. The ambitious plan involved taking the war into Co-

  manchería with two thousand troops while concurrently soliciting an armistice with Texas rebels. Again Armijo refused, insisting that New Mexico would not survive an all-out war against the Comanches, and once more the federal authorities capitulated.⁵⁷

  By now New Mexico had distanced itself from Mexico City to a point where

  its political ties to Comanchería began to seem tighter. In 1844 a Comanche

  delegation visited Santa Fe and told Mariano Martínez, now governor of New

  Mexico, that three hundred Comanche warriors were about to invade Chihua-

  hua. Instead of trying to pressure the chiefs to call off the raid, Martínez sent them away with presents and dispatched a letter warning his counterpart in Chihuahua of the imminent assault. A year later New Mexico’s administrators re-

  fused yet another call for a general campaign against the Comanches, making

  their disassociation from Mexico City and its Indian policy complete. In their efforts to protect the vulnerable province—and their own positions within it—

  New Mexican elites had been forced to choose between appeasing one of two

  imperial cores and, in more cases than not, they chose Comanchería.⁵⁸

  Viewed in context, the story of Mexican New Mexico becomes a dramatic

  counterpoint to that of Mexican Texas. Whereas Texas violently dismembered

  itself from Mexico starting in 1835, New Mexico remained within the Mexican

  fold until the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. The Chimayó Re-

  bellion tested the federal government’s mettle in New Mexico, and the Anglo-

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  dominated Santa Fe trade served as a vanguard for “the unconscious process

  of economic conquest,” yet neither development spawned a strong secession-

  ist movement. The divergent trajectories of Texas and New Mexico as Mexi-

  can provinces owed much to geography and demographics: New Mexico was

  shielded from the expansionist embrace of the United States by its relative isolation, which made it less attractive a destination for American immigrants, and by its larger Hispanic population, which ensured that the Americans who

  did immigrate remained a minority. Indeed, even if American entrepreneurs

  did serve as agents of capitalist expansion, anticipating the U.S. absorption of New Mexico, many of them married into the local gentry, integrating themselves into Mexican kinship networks and becoming something quite different

  from the color-conscious and isolationist “Texians,” who casually labeled Mexicans “a mongrel race, inferior even to negroes.” More broadly, New Mexico’s

  relative immunity against American influence reflected the enduring power of the Catholic Church, which maintained a strong position in the territory and emerged as a potent national agent that regulated foreign-born residents’ access to marriage, citizenship, and land.⁵⁹

  But while compelling, the dichotomy of wavering Texas and steadfast New

  Mexico is a simplification, for it neglects the penetrating, if often unspoken, influence of Comanches over New Mexicans. Intimate, violent, exploitative, and mutualistic all at once, New Mexicans’ ties with Comanches both forced and

  seduced them to act and organize themselves in ways that were often deplorable and at times disastrous to the rest of Mexico. Indeed, it seems justifiable to ask to what extent the New Mexicans who paid tribute to a Comanche nation at

  war with the rest of northern Mexico, who made profit by trafficking in goods Comanches had stolen from other Mexican departments, who openly defied

  federal orders to sever unsanctioned ties to Comanchería, and whose way of life was permeated by Comanche influences were still Mexican subjects?

  On March 2, 1836, at Washington-on-the-Brazos, delegates from more than

  forty Texas communities voted to separate from Mexico. Mexican officials had anticipated the rebellion, as official forces and Texas revolutionaries had clashed violently several times during the previous nine months, and at the time the declaration of independence occurred, General Antonio López de Santa Anna was

  besieging the San Antonio garrison with more than two thousand troops. A series of battles ensued—at the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto—but the Texan forces prevailed, and on May 14, Santa Anna signed the Treaty of Velasco, in which

  he recognized the independence of Texas and promised to withdraw Mexican

  troops below the Río Grande. The government of Mexico refused to ratify the

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  treaty and continued the war for nine more years, but Texas considered itself an independent republic. The future of the Southwest suddenly lay wide open.

  Could Mexico recapture Texas and restore its national unity? Could it hold on to New Mexico and fend off the Tex
ans who claimed that their republic’s western border extended to the Río Grande? Would Texas be annexed by the United

  States or would there be two Anglo nations west of the Mississippi? And how

  would the new republic solve what was perhaps its most pressing problem—the

  war against the Comanches that it had inherited from Mexico?

  The Republic of Texas was a political anomaly, an independent nation that

  did not expect—or much want—to remain as such. Anticipating fast annexa-

  tion by the United States, it kept its eastern border open and took in thousands of American immigrants each year. Its government, modeled after that of the

  United States, was strong only on paper and soon proved incapable of accom-

  modating the prodigious demographic and material growth. There was no

  treasury to speak of, no functioning taxation system, and no money economy.

  Geographically, the republic was a patchwork of disparate and in many ways

  incompatible parts. Its division into a flourishing Anglo cotton kingdom and a poor Tejano Texas clustered around San Antonio and Goliad prevailed, but in

  the late 1830s, as the immigrant flow from the United States swelled, yet another distinctive subsection emerged: a restless northern frontier of poor, land-hungry subsistence farmers. Texas, in short, was disjointed, expansionist, volatile, and potentially self-destructive. Those were also the attributes of its Indian policy.⁶⁰

  The relations between the Lone Star Republic and Comanches were erratic

  from the outset. Sam Houston, the first regularly elected president, believed that the republic’s fate hinged on the Indian question. He first tried to foment a general Indian war to bring the U.S. Army into Texas and to expedite annexation, but when that scheme fell through, he worked passionately to formalize the relations with Indians. Unlike most prominent Texan officials, Houston, who had married a mixed-blood Cherokee woman and lived for years in Indian Territory, believed that Texas could have peace only if the republic made concessions to Indian nations. He signed treaties with the Cherokees and Shawnees in fall 1836

  and in December of that year sent messengers into Comanchería. Well versed