The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  in Indian diplomacy, he promised Comanches the three perquisites of peaceful relations: gifts, trade, and face-to-face diplomacy. “You can let us have horses, mules and buffalo robes in change for our paints, tobacco, blankets and other things which will make you happy” his message promised. “When the grass rises in the Spring, you must come with your Chiefs to see me and I will make you

  and them presents.”⁶¹

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  But as Houston was trying to win over the Comanches through diplomacy,

  the Texas Congress opened all Indian lands to white settlement, overriding

  the president’s veto. The settler frontier leaped up the Brazos, Colorado, and Guadalupe rivers toward Comanche hunting ranges, and the relations between Texas and Comanches degenerated into violence. Comanches raided

  the new farms, killing settlers and taking horses, mules, and captives, and Texas militia units patrolled the frontier, killing Comanches. Attempting to restore peace, Houston dispatched commissioners into Comanchería in March 1838.

  Alarmed by the republic’s palpable zeal and capacity for expansion, Coman-

  ches now deviated from their traditional notion of fluid borders and demanded that the territories of the two nations should be separated by a fixed boundary line guaranteed by a treaty. “They claim,” the commissioners reported, “all the territory North and West of the Guadalupe mountains, extending from Red

  river to the Rio Grande, the area of which is nearly equal to one fourth of the domain of Texas.” Forbidden by Texas law to yield any lands claimed by the

  republic, the commissioners evaded the issue and the talks remained inconclusive. Yet trading parties from Texas visited Comanchería during the spring, and in May Comanches signed a “Treaty of Peace and Amity” in the newly established town of Houston.⁶²

  In late 1838, however, Houston lost the election for president to Mirabeau B.

  Lamar who summarily renounced his predecessor’s conciliatory Indian policy.

  Envisioning an independent empire that would eventually expand to the Pacific Ocean, he authorized the Texan Santa Fe Expedition to divert a portion of the U.S. overland trade from Santa Fe to Texas and, if possible, to occupy the eastern half of New Mexico. To solve the Indian problem, Lamar recruited nine companies of mounted volunteers and rangers, which routed the Cherokees, Shaw-

  nees, Delawares, and Kickapoos north of the Red River. On the northwestern

  front, Lamar sent surveyors into Indian lands and moved the capital to Waterloo (soon to be renamed Austin) at the fringes of Comanche territory. Driven in

  part by land-hunger and in part by virulent fears and hatred of all things Mexican and Indian, Texas launched a genocidal war against the Comanches. The

  first non-Indians to bring the war to Comanchería since Juan Bautista de Anza’s invasion in 1779, Lamar’s soldiers hunted down Comanche bands, often indiscriminately killing men, women, and children. Comanches retaliated by razing farms, slaughtering cattle, seizing captives, and killing settlers and mutilating their bodies. They raided deep into Texas and put San Antonio under siege.

  A wave of toxic racism washed over the Texas frontier, where Indians became

  branded as “red niggers” or “wild cannibals of the woods.”⁶³

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  In January 1840, after a destructive smallpox epidemic swept Comanchería,

  Comanches sued for peace and sent representatives to San Antonio. To evoke

  sympathy, they returned a white boy and explained that their nation had “re-

  jected the offers of the [Mexican] Centralists, who have emissaries among them, striving to stir up a general revolt.” Texas officials pressured Comanches to return all white captives and invited their principal chiefs to visit. Meanwhile, Texas Secretary of War Albert Sidney Johnston instructed the officials in San Antonio to impress on Comanches that they were to avoid all Texas settlements and

  allow Texas officials to “dictate the conditions” of their residence. He ordered the officials to take the Comanche delegates as hostages if they failed to deliver captives. In March, Muguara, a powerful eastern Comanche chief, led sixty-five men, women, and children to San Antonio, but they brought only one captive,

  a sixteen-year-old white girl. The chiefs and captains were taken to the local jail that had a council room. When Chief Muguara refused to deliver more captives on the grounds that they were held in the rancherías of other chiefs, soldiers opened fire at point-blank range and killed twelve. Twenty-three more Comanches were shot on the streets of San Antonio and thirty were taken captive.⁶⁴

  In the following weeks Comanches exchanged Anglo and Mexican captives

  for their own in San Antonio, but the massacre had left them distraught and

  enraged. Midsummer brought retaliation. Some five to seven hundred warriors, led by Potsanaquahip (Buffalo Hump) and possibly armed with guns obtained

  from Bent’s Fort, swept down the Guadalupe River, killing, plundering, and

  burning their way down to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, where they sacked and looted the towns of Victoria and Linnville. On their way back, the party was intercepted at Plum Creek by Texas Rangers and their Indian auxiliaries.

  Armed with Colt revolvers, the rangers gunned down several warriors. In October, Texas volunteers ambushed a Comanche ranchería north of the Colorado

  River, killed 140 men, women, and children, and seized 500 horses. By the winter, most Comanches had retreated north, leaving thousands of square miles

  open for settlers from Texas.⁶⁵

  But then the pendulum of Texas Indian policy swung again. The war had ex-

  hausted Texans as much as it had Comanches. Lamar’s three-year campaign had

  taken countless lives, drained the republic’s treasury, and ruined its credit. There were rumors that Mexican agents had instigated the Comanche march to the

  Gulf Coast and were trying to join forces with the Plains Indians to invade Texas.

  And although the Texas frontier had penetrated Comanchería, it was clear that the frontier would not be safe without a solid peace with the Comanches, who could tear through Texas and siege and sack its largest cities. Lamar, whose popularity had plummeted among the proannexation section as well as the

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  planter-merchant elite who carried the financial burden of Indian wars, lost the 1841 election to Houston. Houston embarked on restoring diplomatic ties with Comanches. He sent peace feelers into Comanchería and established several

  government-sponsored trading houses in Austin, San Antonio, and New Braun-

  fels, and near present-day Waco, where Comanches could obtain manufactured

  goods, ransom Anglo captives for handsome profits, and collect gifts that helped cover the dead and maintain peace. He moved the capital from Austin to Houston, farther away from Comanchería, and dismantled most ranger companies,

  which put the plans for frontier expansion on hold, allowing Comanches to reclaim lost territories. Out of the bloodshed, horror, and hate of the Lamar years a fragile compromise emerged, which saw both sides, for their particular strategic purposes, reaching toward accommodation.⁶⁶

  Forging a formal treaty proved more difficult, however, because the Council

  House massacre had left the Comanches guarded and cynical. They declined

  in early 1843 an invitation to talks by declaring that “the bones of their brothers that had been massacred at San Antonio had appeared on the Road and obstructed their passage,” and they were now adamant that a defined boundary

  line should separate Texas from Comanchería. But in the late fall Chief Mopechucope (Old Owl) dispatched a message detailing that any treaty would have

  to include a boundary line running from the Cross Timbers to the confluence of the Colorado and the San Sabá rivers and “from thence in a direct line to the
Río Grande.” It was a demand that no Texas official could concede, for Texas law did not recognize land titles to Indians, but Houston, skirting the law, responded that he was willing to discuss the proposed line. In fall 1844 Comanches finally met Houston and his representatives at Tehuacana Creek near the Torreys’ trading post. In attendance were also representatives from the Cherokees, Delawares, Shawnees, Caddos, Wacos, and Lipans, whom Houston wanted to include in

  treaty relations.⁶⁷

  When the talks began, Comanches set the course and tone. Potsanaquahip,

  the principal Comanche delegate, proclaimed his desire for peace, but, to Houston’s shock, he also wanted a new border line: the boundary Mopechucope had

  proposed earlier was “too far up the country.” Potsanaquahip demanded a new

  line that started at the southern tip of the Cross Timbers, a “good days ride”

  above Austin, then ran southwestward skirting San Antonio, and finally followed the San Antonio Road to the Río Grande. The chief, in other words, claimed all of Texas except for a 125-mile belt along the Gulf Coast, insisting that his people needed the land for their bison and wild horses. But Potsanaquahip also had a more imperial agenda. “I want my friends,” he stated, “these other Indians, to settle on the line and raise corn and I can often come down among them”—an

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  apparent attempt to create buffer villages that would shield Comanchería from Texas while simultaneously serving it as supply depots.⁶⁸

  Potsanaquahip’s expansive demands outraged Houston, forcing him to leave

  out the border clause from the final treaty, which mentions the border line only in the future tense: it was “to be marked and run.” But Potsanaquahip’s maximal-ist approach may have been a premeditated negotiating tactic aimed at securing what Comanches had for a long time considered theirs. The Treaty of Tehuacana Creek did not specify an exact boundary, but it implicitly states that the string of Indian trading houses at the Comanche Peak and on the middle Brazos and lower San Sabá rivers were to be considered a demarcation line separating the two nations. That line was farther north and west than Potsanaquahip’s proposed boundary, but it followed closely the historical southern border of Comanchería, securing Comanches their traditional plains core territory.⁶⁹

  The Treaty of Tehuacana Creek ushered in a delicate imperial détente be-

  tween the Comanche empire and Texas. Texas continued to sponsor licensed

  trading houses where Comanches could sell their surplus stock; purchase ironware, fabrics, and flour; and have their guns repaired by blacksmiths. The Texas government invested vast sums in gifting and obliged its merchants to obey

  Comanche protocols, and Comanches largely refrained from raiding in Texas.

  With Delawares serving as messengers, Comanches and Texans met in frequent

  councils to forge new geopolitical arrangements that would meet the needs of their nascent alliance. Mopechucope promised to exert his power to prevent the Wichitas from raiding in Texas and suggested a new policy toward the Lipans, whose presence around San Antonio drew Comanche war bands below the

  boundary line: all Lipans should be removed north into Comanchería, where

  they would live under Comanche control. Texas officials, in turn, issued passports that allowed Comanche war parties to travel undisturbed through Texas

  into Mexico. When the United States and Texas moved toward annexation in

  winter 1844–45, the Comanche question loomed large in the process: the west-

  ern counties of the republic voted for annexation largely out of hope that the U.S. Army would neutralize the Comanches and expell them from the state. Yet in May 1846, three months after a formal transfer of authority from the republic to the newly founded state, U.S. delegates signed a treaty with the Comanches, pledging to continue gift distributions in Texas. In June a Comanche commission led by Chief Santa Anna visited Washington, and the next year Texas Governor James Pinckney Henderson ratified the boundary by establishing a neutral zone thirty miles above the state’s northernmost settlements.⁷⁰

  In 1847, then, Comanchería’s southern border stood almost exactly where it

  had been ten years before. By enforcing a formal boundary line, Comanches

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  had drawn a major concession from the far richer and far more populous Texas: although official maps failed to show it, Texans had signed away nearly half of their claimed territory to the Comanche nation. But Comanches, too, had compromised. When they imposed a fixed border, they in effect gave up their ar-

  rogated privilege to raid Texas for livestock and slaves and extort it for tribute, privileges that had sustained their economic growth for nearly a century. Texas transformed, even if briefly, from a fluid tributary and raiding frontier into bordered land of international coexistence with well-demarcated lines. It was a concession from Comanches but one they could well afford to make, for they had

  already built a new and much larger raiding hinterland below the Río Grande.

  After their conquest of the southern plains in the eighteenth century, Comanches expanded their domain slowly and in small increments. Their systematic

  stock-and-captive raiding in Texas and New Mexico could be seen as a kind of territorial expansion, as it allowed them to control a good deal of the revenue-generating assets of the colonial Southwest, but the attacks never transformed into permanent occupation. Comanches did experiment in other fronts with extending their range beyond the grasslands, most notably in the 1770s when they pushed deep into Ute territory beyond the Rockies, but such campaigns did not have lasting success and were invariably abandoned. The Comanches, it seems, had reached the natural limits of expansion. All the things they had grown to need—hunting ranges, pasturelands, market outlets, raiding domains—were

  close at hand, making further expansion unnecessary and potentially counter-

  productive.

  But then, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Comanchería burst out of its plains confines. Through remote operations and measured mass violence, Comanches created a new raiding economy in northern Mexico below

  the Río Grande. They escalated the range and scope of their plundering operations until vast expanses of Mexico’s Far North had been turned into an ex-

  tractive raiding domain: their war bands harnessed the region’s transportable resources—horses, mules, cattle, and captives—so thoroughly and suppressed

  local resistance so completely that, in economic and military terms, much of northern Mexico became an extension of Greater Comanchería. By the 1830s

  contemporaries started to speak of northern Mexico as a Comanche colonial

  possession. “Comanches,” the Indian officials of the Republic of Texas con-

  cluded in 1837, “[are] the natural enemies of the Mexicans whom they con-

  temptuously discriminate their stockkeepers and out which nation they procure slaves.” “They declare,” another observer wrote, “that they only spare the whole nation [of Mexicans] from destruction because they answer to supply them with

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  horses. The assertion seems to be fully carried out in practice, for it is no uncommon occurrence for a party of Comanches to cross the Rio Grande and after

  spreading terror wherever they go to drive off large numbers of animals.”⁷¹

  Comanche war parties first pushed south of the Río Grande in the late 1770s

  and for the next four decades raided the region intermittently. Various motives drew them this far south. Some raids seem to have been destroy-and-kill operations aimed at weakening the Apache villages in southern New Mexico and

  Texas and preventing Lipan and Mescalero hunting and war parties from enter-

  ing the contested raiding and trading grounds around San Antonio. Comanches

  also seized
Apache captives, who fetched high prices in San Antonio, Santa Fe, and Nacogdoches, and whose enslavement underwrote the Comanche-Spanish

  alliance. Some Comanche war parties targeted Spanish outposts and extracted

  gifts from the Spanish presidios along the Río Grande, thereby extending their tributary hinterland far to the south of their borders. For western Comanches, who had kept an uninterrupted peace with New Mexico between 1786 and

  1821, the forays opened the possibility of forging a new raiding economy in the south.⁷²

  The raids increased markedly in 1816, when Comanches and Lipans formed

  a short-lived alliance. The truce gave Comanches virtually unrestricted access to the lower Río Grande valley and the Spanish settlements along and beyond

  it. For several years, Comanches and Lipans raided Laredo, Revilla, and other villages along the Río Grande for horses and captives, sometimes plunging

  south of the valley to attack the wealthy haciendas in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila. Texas became a thoroughfare for Comanche war parties. “The

  Comanches are obliged to cross this country to go to pillage the frontiers of the Provincias Internas,” one observer wrote in 1818, noting the established nature of the operations: “They have there some regular camping grounds at places where they find water and some pasturage for their horses. This trail is known under the name of Chemin de Guerre des Comanches. The war parties, which are rarely less than two hundred to three hundred men, leave it but little.” Then, however, the raids into Mexico slowed down. In 1822 Comanches signed a national treaty in Mexico City and a provincial treaty in San Antonio and for a while refrained from raiding Mexican settlements. The Comanche-Lipan alliance unraveled

  the same year when Lipans, for unknown reasons, killed several Comanche men

  who had married into Lipan villages. For the next few years Comanches were

  preoccupied with a “bitter warfare” against the Lipans.⁷³

  Large-scale raiding resumed in 1825 and 1826. Accompanied by Kiowas and

  apparently guided by Mexican captives, western and eastern Comanches sent

  several war parties to the south, lashing the Río Grande frontier from El Paso