dlers whose goods fomented Comanche raids in Mexico. It offered small land
grants and tax exemptions for citizen soldiers who showed bravery in battle, and it tried to recruit Lipans to fight the Comanches. In 1843 Santa Anna even invited Jesuits back to Mexico so that they would rebuild missions across the northern frontier and exert a civilizing influence over the marauding Indians.⁸⁴
Yet in the end, the Comanches’ avalanche-like expansion below the Río
Grande mirrored Mexico’s weakness. For all their creative countermeasures,
the Mexicans were often powerless against Comanche guerrilla tactics. Most
farms, ranches, and villages in northern Mexico were small, isolated, and poorly manned—sitting ducks for highly mobile, well-organized mounted raiders. The
large haciendas, too, were vulnerable, their sheer size making them difficult to defend against fast hit-and-run assaults. The Hacienda de la Encarnación in
southern Coahuila lost six hundred horses and mules between 1840 and 1845,
and the heavily fortified La Zarca rancho in northern Durango lost six hun-
dred horses in March 1844 alone. Frontier defenses across northern Mexico
were in pitiable condition. Volunteer militia units were ill-fed, ill-trained, and often undisciplined, and provincial troops suffered from chronic shortages of quality horses, guns, and munitions. The antiquated presidio system, a leftover from the Spanish era, was decaying, undermined by Mexico City’s preference
to reinforce the nation’s core at the expense of its perimeters. The popularity of army service collapsed in the far north, forcing the presidios to fill their ranks with convicts and vagabonds. Local officials pleaded with Mexico City to revive the presidial system and send more soldiers, horses, and weapons to the north, but the chronically bankrupt federal government was slow to react. The result of this federal neglect was pitiful scenes of fronterizos going against heavily armed Comanche war bands with bows and arrows and slings and stones.⁸⁵
From a military standpoint, then, much of the Mexican Far North remained
an open field for the Comanches. Josiah Gregg, who had a cuttingly low opinion of the Mexicans’ military prowess, remarked that Mexican troops were hesitant to engage with the more mobile and better-armed Comanches and that pursuits
were sometimes made only for appearances. “It has been credibly asserted,” he wrote, “that, during one of these ‘bold pursuits,’ a band of Comanches stopped in the suburbs of a village on Rio Conchos, turned their horses into the wheat-fields, and took a comfortable siesta—desirous, it seemed, to behold their pursuers face to face; yet, after remaining most of the day, they departed without enjoying that pleasure.” Contemporaries believed that Comanches spared northern Mexico from utter destruction only because it supplied them with horses.⁸⁶
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It was out of desperation, therefore, when Sonora, Chihuahua, and Durango
passed bills offering bounty prices for Indian scalps. The bills provided scaled bounty payments with prices ranging between twenty-five and one hundred
pesos, depending on the victim’s sex and age, and stated that the booty from slain Indians would be awarded to the vanquishers. State officials contracted foreigners residing in Mexican territory to kill Indian raiders with such frequency that by the late 1830s virtual bounty wars raged across northern Mexico. Mexico City condemned the scalp bounties as an excessive, unsavory measure but
was powerless—or perhaps unwilling—to the stop the practice. The scalp wars
devastated the Apaches who, unlike the Comanches, could not evade mercenary
scalping squads by escaping far to the north. James Kirker, the most notorious of the soldiers of fortune, focused his business-style operations almost solely on Apaches, delivering almost five hundred Apache scalps to Chihuahuan authorities by 1847, but he largely avoided the more mobile and better-armed Coman-
ches. In fact, as scalp payments became an established practice in Chihuahua in the late 1830s, Comanches, too, began to hunt Apaches for the standard bounty prize, a crown with an ear on each end.⁸⁷
The only viable way to fend off the Comanches, whose operations in north-
ern Mexico amounted to an imperial extension, would have been coordinated
interstate campaigns targeting Comanche rancherías in Mexico as well as in
Comanchería proper. But national policymakers, though swamped with bitter,
desperate reports from the north, refused to consider the Comanche invasion
a threat to the regime. Fearing that both the United States and Great Britain entertained plans of invading and capturing Mexico, they saw Indian attacks
as a local problem that required local solutions. Mexico City urged the fronterizos to provide their own defenses and made only sporadic attempts to confront Comanches with a more unified front. The most ambitious of these efforts, General Arista’s 1841 plan of a grand invasion into Comanchería, was also one of the most illuminating in its futility. The campaign never got off ground largely because New Mexico Governor Manuel Armijo, fearing Comanche retribution,
refused to take part in the campaign. Mexico City neither reprimanded nor removed Armijo.⁸⁸
In fact, the federal government not only relegated the escalating Indian problem to the local level but also obstructed, even if inadvertently, local attempts to organize effective defense. Many fronterizo communities tried to pool their meager resources by organizing joint defensive and punitive operations only to have federal policies undermine their efforts. The northern villages of Tamaulipas experimented with collective campaigns in the early 1830s, but such efforts became increasingly difficult after the Texas Revolution. In the late 1830s, for
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example, the officials of Matamoros complained bitterly that the town had supplied so many horses, steers, carts, and servants to the campaigns against the Texas rebels that its residents had difficulties in carrying out basic subsistence tasks, not to mention mounting effective defense against Indians. Such disputes over military priorities sometimes occurred within states. In 1841 the northern villages of Tamaulipas petitioned the state legislature for an exemption from military service on the grounds that they formed the front line against Comanche attacks. The state government denied their appeal and also refused all aid in fighting the Indians, causing deep resentment in the hard-pressed frontier communities.⁸⁹
As it became clear that the federal government could not or would not offer a comprehensive solution to the Indian problem, the northern departments began to follow independent policies. They tried to fend off Comanche aggression any way they could, which often meant adopting strategies that merely deflected
the violence. New Mexico set the precedent for this in the early 1820s, when it began to purchase peace from Comanches with commerce and gifts, and other
departments soon followed suit. In 1824 the Presidio del Río Grande in Coa-
huila began collecting foodstuffs from the surrounding settlements to placate the Comanche war parties that were just starting to invade northern Mexico.
This policy bought northern Coahuila a measure of protection, but it redirected Comanche raids into the neighboring Chihuahua, triggering a destructive chain reaction that eventually nearly obliterated that province.⁹⁰
By 1826, raiding had taken a hard toll in northern Chihuahua, prompting
Commanding General Gaspar Ochoa to invite Comanche chiefs Paruaquita
and Cordero to peace talks in Chihuahua City. Ochoa proposed an accord “to
end the horrors of war within the great expanse of our borders,” and Paruaquita and Cordero accepted it. Desperate to protect the tormented province, Ochoa
promised Comanches annual gifts in Santa Fe and San Antonio and asked them
to obtain passports before entering Chihuahua. But Ochoa’s efforts were undermined by Coahuila
and Texas, whose citizens continued to traffic in stolen Chihuahuan goods. Texas officials tried to smother the contraband trade by forbidding their subjects from purchasing branded livestock from Comanches; at times, however, they engaged in the illegal traffic themselves. To spin their actions, the officials asserted that Comanches did not sell but “returned” Chihuahuan booty and deserved to be rewarded with gifts for their “good faith.” Coahuila’s move to Comanche orbit became complete in 1830, when Saltillo began supplying
Comanche war bands with money, food, clothes, and tobacco. Like Santa Fe
and San Antonio before it, Saltillo acceded to pay tribute to Comanches to escape violence. In 1834, Chihuahua finally joined New Mexico, Texas, and Coa-
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huila in tributary collaboration. Its officials signed a treaty with the Comanches in El Paso and promised them military aid against the Apaches in the hope of diverting the violence. The attempt met with only partial success. Comanches launched a raiding war against the Mescalero and Coyotero Apaches in northwestern Chihuahua, giving the region’s Mexican settlers a respite, but they also moved to raid the Mexican settlements in central and southern Chihuahua.⁹¹
The independence of Texas in 1836 changed the geostrategic context in
which northern Mexicans operated, but it did not change their Comanche poli-
cies, which remained embedded in self-interest. In the aftermath of the Texas Revolution, Coahuilan officials signed two more treaties with the Comanches, hoping to harness their military might against the rebel republic. The first treaty, in 1838, designated the village of Nava as a trading outlet, and the second one, five years later, opened Aguaverde in Coahuila and Laredo in northern Tamaulipas to Comanche traders. Comanches also gained extensive hunting privileges in Coahuila. Contrary to Mexican designs, however, the treaties and concessions did not redirect Comanche warfare northward into Texas but southward
into central Mexico. Comanches extended their raids into southern Coahuila,
Durango, and Zacatecas and then disposed the plundered stock at Nava, Agua-
verde, and Laredo. By fall 1844, the raids had become so severe that General Arista decreed trading with the Comanches a capital offense. Some fronterizo communities obeyed the law, thus exposing themselves to Comanche reprisals:
in late 1845 Chief Santa Anna explained to Texas officials “that the cause of the
[recent] war with Mexico was the Spaniards breaking a treaty that was made
some years since.”⁹²
Comanches raided northern Mexico for nearly a century, but the early and
mid-1840s saw the climax. Not coincidentally, those years also marked the pinnacle of their plains-based trading empire. Eastern Comanches absorbed several removed nations of Indian Territory into their trade network, launched a lucrative commercial partnership with the Osages, and accepted Anglo-American
trading posts on their borders. Western Comanches made peace and opened
trade with Cheyennes and Arapahoes, embarked on large-scale exchange at
Bent’s Fort, and turned the comanchero trade into a major commercial insti-
tution. All these exchange circuits centered on horses and mules, creating an almost insatiable demand for stolen Mexican stock. “Nearly all these [traded]
animals are pilfered from the Mexicans,” Captain Marcy observed, “and as the number they traffic away must be replaced by new levies upon their victims, of course all that the traders obtain causes a corresponding increase in the amount of depredations.” The trading boom on the plains, moreover, coincided with the appeasement of Comanche-Texas relations, which prevented Comanches from
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rustling in the Lone Star Republic and liberated men and resources for long-
distance raiding south of the Río Grande.⁹³
The result was an “incessant and destructive war” in northern Mexico. Start-
ing in 1840 Comanches, together with their Kiowa allies, each year dispatched several major expeditions below the Río Grande. These campaigns were noticeably larger than in the previous years, typically involving between two hundred and one thousand fighting men. Massive war bands ranged wider than ever before, hitting Corpus Christi some 150 miles north of the Río Grande, then penetrating deep into southern Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Jalisco, where they entered a new world of jungles and high sierras. Perhaps to debilitate local defenses, the first excursions to the far south were unusually destructive; the fall of 1840 saw some three hundred Mexican deaths. After such spectacular demonstrations of power, a grinding routine set in. With their lines greatly elongated, Comanches lived off the enemy, slaughtering cattle and sheep and
attacking pack and merchant trains loaded with supplies and ore. Their deep, looping maneuvers cut off vital lines of communication and commerce; imper-iled the mining towns in Durango, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosí; and ravaged the countryside to the extent that tending fields became difficult. Communities from northern Nuevo León to southern Durango were reduced to operate near
or below subsistence level.⁹⁴
Comanches now treated northern Mexico and its fabulously wealthy ranches
as virtual warehouses. In 1846 James Josiah Webb, a Missouri trader, witnessed how they rounded up twenty-five thousand head of livestock in the city of Durango, “threatening and attacking the soldiers who remained behind their barricades on the defensive.” George Ruxton, an English explorer and travel writer who got much of his information from the Mexicans, reported that Comanche
war bands moved across seven Mexican states virtually unopposed. Having traveled unused roads “overgrown with grass” and flanked by endless “deserts of the frontier,” regions that were “annually laid waste by the Comanches,” he stopped to wonder: “It appears incredible that no steps are taken to protect the country from this invasion, which does not take its inhabitants on a sudden or unawares, but at certain and regular seasons and from known points. Troops are certainly employed nominally to check the Indians, but very rarely attack them, although the Comanches give every opportunity.”⁹⁵
If Ruxton lacked answers, it was because he could not see the big picture:
Comanches had turned a large section of Mexico into a semicolonized land-
scape of extraction from which they could mine resources with little cost. “Beyond the immediate purlieus of the towns,” Gregg reported, “the whole country from New Mexico to the borders of Durango is almost entirely depopulated.
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The haciendas and ranchos have been mostly abandoned, and the people
chiefly confined to the towns and cities.” Another report stated that Comanche war parties had invaded Durango “in all of its extremities,” reducing its citizens to a “most grave and deplorable condition.” Saltillo and its environs lost 1,149
horses, 1,062 head of cattle, and 46 people in 1841, and the Chihuahua legislature lamented that “we travel along the roads . . . at their whim; we cultivate the land where they wish and in amount that they wish, we use sparingly things that they have left to us until the moment that it strikes their appetite to take them for themselves, and we occupy the land while the savages permit us.” The all-important Chihuahua road had become an Indian plunder trail, commerce was
paralyzed, and mines languished unused. Writing in 1846, Ruxton reported that the Comanches “are now . . . overrunning the whole department of Durango
and Chihuahua, have cut off all communication, and defeated in two pitched
battles the regular troops sent against them. Upwards of ten thousand head of horses and mules have already been carried off [between fall 1845 and fall 1846], and scarcely has a hacienda or rancho on the frontier been unvisited, and everywhere the people have been killed or captured. The roads are impassable, all traffic is stopped, the ranchos barricaded, and the inhabitants afraid to vent
ure out of their doors. The posts and expresses travel at night, avoiding the roads, and the intelligence is brought in daily of massacres and harryings.”⁹⁶
When Comanche war parties finally returned home with trains of captives,
horses, and mules, the war trails that had carried them south served them as commercial highways. They could stop in Mexican towns, ranches, and presidios in northern Coahuila, Chihuahua, and New Mexico and peacefully trade
fresh Mexican booty for food, guns, and manufactured goods. All across Chihuahua, southern New Mexico, and southern Texas, they could also sell stolen livestock to American contraband traders and gunrunners, who pushed south from
Santa Fe, El Paso, San Antonio, and Goliad, hoping to tap into the enormous
northbound current of wealth from Mexico.⁹⁷
The decades of Comanche raiding in Texas and northern Mexico—which
from the late 1820s on coincided with increasing Apache pillaging in Sonora, Chihuahua, and Durango—had a lasting hemispheric legacy. The escalating
violence left Mexico dangerously weakened during critical years in its history, for it overlapped with mounting U.S. pressure on Mexico’s borders. The consequences were disastrous to the fledgling republic: between 1835 and 1848,
Mexico lost more than half of its territory to the United States. Historians have customarily attributed Mexico’s capitulation to the overt material and military superiority of the United States, but they have missed a crucial element: the
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Native American expansion that paved the way for the Anglo-American one.
The U.S. takeover of the Southwest was significantly assisted by the fact that Comanches and Apaches had already destabilized Mexico’s Far North. Apaches
had devastated vast stretches of northwestern Mexico, but Comanches left the deepest imprint. In each major stage of its expansion, the United States absorbed lands that had been made ripe for conquest by Comanches, who themselves
were not interested in direct political control over foreign territories.⁹⁸
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