which a trading empire could be built. During their imperial ascendancy and
dominance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Coman-
ches owned nearly four horses per capita, a number that attests to a flourishing herding economy. Basic hunting and transportation needs on the grasslands of the Great Plains required an average of one horse per person: a Comanche
household of ten needed two running horses for hunting, raiding, and warfare; three or four pack horses (or mules) to transport the tipi and household belongings; and four to six animals for the women and children. Although most plains societies faced constant difficulties in meeting the minimum requirement of one horse per capita, the Comanches possessed an average of nearly three extra animals per person, or some thirty surplus animals per family. In absolute numbers, this meant huge reservoirs of surplus livestock. Numbering between 30,000 and 40,000 in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Comanches
may have possessed between 90,000 and 120,000 excess animals.¹
Comanches needed these enormous numbers in part because horses were
such an uncertain form of wealth. They always lost animals during cold seasons, and the damages were especially severe if a harsh winter was followed by a dry spring, which prolonged the deficiency of water and vital nutrients over several months. Enemy raiders, wolves, and parasites preyed on their herds, and when hunting failed, Comanches routinely subsisted on horseflesh, making inroads
into their own herds.² But the principal purpose of large animal surpluses was commercial. For more than a century, Comanchería operated as a trade pump
that moved thousands of horses and mules each year to the central, northern, and eastern Great Plains and across the Mississippi valley into Louisiana, Missouri, and beyond. A large section of the midcontinent relied on Comanchería for animal imports, and the Comanches needed vast surpluses to satisfy that
demand.
The Comanches were almost perfectly positioned to generate such surpluses.
Their proximity and privileged access to the horse-raising districts in Texas, New Mexico, and northern Mexico allowed them to procure animals with relative
ease. There were also some two million feral horses roaming within and near
Comanchería’s borders, forming a nearly bottomless pool of exploitable animal
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wealth. Even more vitally, Comanchería’s southerly location and temperate
climates permitted Comanches to maintain their herds with less effort and far greater success than the more northern Plains Indian societies. It was not an accident that the Comanches built their empire on the southern plains below
the Arkansas valley, for that river marked an ecological and institutional fault line, north of which climatic conditions turned increasingly unfavorable for animal herding and equestrian cultures. With a long growing season, abundant grasses, and relatively mild winters, the southern plains formed an ideal setting for a trading culture that drew horses from the south and sent them north, and Comanches turned that ecological advantage into a spectacular commercial
success.
Yet Comanches’ commercial hegemony was not a simple matter of harvest-
ing nature’s gifts for economic gain. To build and maintain their prodigious animal wealth, Comanches had to implement far-reaching economic and social
changes that sometimes were drastically at odds with existing practices. Paradoxically, horses’ greatest advantage for human utilization—the fact that they are herbivores—was also their greatest disadvantage. By digesting grasses, horses transformed solar energy into easily exploitable muscle power, but this conversion took place only if Comanches met their horses’ extensive foraging needs.
Moreover, large horse herds represented something of an anomaly for hunters, who were used to arranging their movements, labor patterns, and annual cycle around the habits of the bison. Horses enhanced Comanches’ ability to exploit the buffalo herds, but their tending demanded adaptations that conflicted with the requirements of the hunt. All this amounted to a daunting challenge: to
keep their horse herds healthy and growing, Comanches had to transform their specialized foraging economy into a mixed economy of hunting and pastoralism.³
The shift toward pastoralism became perceptible in the mid-eighteenth
century. In 1750, Felipe de Sandoval, a French explorer-trader, noted how the Comanche rancherías along the Arkansas valley had embraced the essential
element of pastoralism: they orchestrated the timing and destinations of their movements to accommodate their horses’ foraging and watering needs. “There
were many rancherias in different places,” he wrote, “which, according to the seasons, are moved from time to time in search of pasturage, wood, water, and buffaloes.” Writing twenty-five years later, Pedro Vial explicitly linked Comanche nomadism with horse herding: “The Cumanche nation does not have fixed
rancherías because they have many horses, for which it is necessary to find pasture.” The need to protect the herds against enemy raiders further complicated the incessant search of pasture, as Anthony Glass noted in 1807. Comanches,
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he wrote, tied most of their horses with “Ropes made of Buffalo skins” within the camp circle, which made it “impossible to remain at the same place but a short time on account of the Grass being soon Eaten up.” Comanche rancherías seem to have shifted campsites every two to five days, frequently leaving behind exhausted pastures where “ground in every direction is cut up & the grass eaten close.” Perhaps to lessen the harmful effects of overgrazing, they began to experiment with transhumance and move their herds cyclically between cool moun-
tain pastures in summer and the warmer lowland valleys of the plains in winter.
In 1776 one Spanish observer learned that during the warm season the western Comanches regularly brought “a thousand or more animals” to the uplands of
the Sangre de Cristo Range and pastured them in a large swampy area near Taos where “there is no lack of fodder.”⁴
Intensive animal herding, with its never-ending search for pasture and its
nervous balancing between herd maximization and overgrazing, forced the
Comanches to modify their basic social organization. An average horse requires twenty pounds of grass a day in a normal year, which means that a Comanche
ranchería with one thousand horses would have exhausted an area of roughly
seven acres each day. In reality, the required area was even larger, because horses are selective grazers and tend to move to ungrazed areas rather than to eat less preferred grasses; it has been estimated that on the plains horses consumed less than half of the available grass before moving to an ungrazed area. And these estimates apply only in normal years. During droughts the average-acre yields collapsed, forcing the animals to graze over a wider radius. When precipitation fell from the annual average of twenty inches to ten, grass yield dropped to 15
percent of normal.⁵
Such ecological realities brought about a profound change in Comanche
social structure. As the pastoral side of their economy continued to expand, Comanches had to carefully control the size of their rancherías, for large human-animal concentrations would quickly exhaust fodder and water around camp-
sites. This led to an accelerating process of social fission, since the total Comanche population was growing rapidly. There were between 30,000 and 40,000
Comanches in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and a typical ranchería probably included around 250 people—or, more to the point, approximately one thousand horses and mules.⁶ As the Comanche population grew,
the number of Comanche rancherías multiplied. Athanase de Mézières noticed
this development in 1772. The Comanches, he wrote, “divide themselves into an infinite number
of little bands for the purpose of seeking better pastures for their horses, and cattle [bison] for their own food.”⁷ During the height of its power in the early nineteenth century, the Comanche nation consisted of roughly one
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hundred rancherías scattered widely throughout Comanchería to permit opti-
mal use of the available forage.
While readjusting their nomadic traditions and social organization to accom-
modate the pastoral shift, the Comanches also reconfigured their labor patterns to meet the new economic demands. The replacement of the pedestrian hunting methods with the mounted chase in the early eighteenth century had transformed bison hunting from a time-consuming and labor-intensive activity into a highly efficient, low-cost activity, freeing vast amounts of labor. Most of that liberated labor force was absorbed by horse herding, which, in terms of labor investments, became the Comanches’ principal economic activity by 1800. If
pastoralists are defined as people who consume a great share of their time and energy in such activities as protecting, pasturing, and training domestic herds, the nineteenth-century Comanches were typical pastoralists. In this respect, they did not differ much from such renowned pastoral people as the Huns or
Mongols.
Like many pastoral societies, the Comanches developed a strict gender- and
age-based division of labor. Adult men, usually headmen of extended families, made the strategic decisions concerning camp movements and grazing areas,
but the arduous daily herding was entrusted to teenage boys. These boys worked with the animals every day and formed the true pastoral core of the Comanche community. In 1849 Captain Randolph B. Marcy noted this labor division in a
ranchería of some 300 people and nearly 2,500 horses and mules. Family head-
men assigned 150 animals to each boy who performed the duty “with the strictest vigilance and attention.” Such diligence was in order since herding involved a demanding round of duties. Horses had to be protected from animal predators, moved between different pastures, and watered two or three times a day. They had to be treated for dehydration, wounds, sore feet, and saddle sores. The daily round usually ended with driving the most valuable horses into the camp area where they were placed under night watch. The romantic ethnographic view of
Comanche boys spending their days in joyful play and learning the skills and arts of a warrior had very little to do with the social realities of the market-oriented imperial Comanchería.⁸
Daily herding became even more burdensome during winters, when low
temperatures, freezing winds, and declining resources depleted horses’ strength.
Winter care was relatively easy as long as dormant grasses were available, but when this resource was exhausted considerable effort was needed to save the
herds from starvation. Each day the boys took the animals farther from the camp for fresh grass until the ranchería itself was moved. During harsher winters, when low temperatures and thick snow cover prevented horses from grazing, herders
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had to secure supplemental forage. Comanche herders cleared large patches for grazing and gathered cottonwood bark, the chief emergency food, feeding their horses with peeled limbs or pieces of trunk. When exploring the Red River valley in 1852, Marcy noted the extensive use of cottonwood by the Comanche and
Kiowa herders: “We found the stumps of the trees that they had cut from year to year in various stages of decay—some entirely rotten, and others that had been cut during the past winter. The fine mezquite and grama grass furnishes pasturage for their animals during a great part of the winter; and the cotton-wood is a never-failing resort when the grass is gone.”⁹
In tending the herds boys often received help from women, who added this
laborious task to their already extensive list of chores. In accordance with the extant gender roles, women were responsible for child rearing, meat processing, and a variety of household duties ranging from constructing the tipi to cooking.
They also dressed the thousands of buffalo skins that the Comanches brought
each year to the market. Yet, as the horse herds continued to grow, women became deeply involved in various pastoral activities as well. Domestic and pastoral chores, as John Sibley noted, consumed the days of Comanche women: “They
Appear to be Constantly and Laboriously employ’d In dressing Buffalo Skins
. . . Collecting feuel, Attending & guarding their Horses & Mules, in Cooking, Making Leather Halters & Ropes, Making & repairing their Tents, & making their riding & Pack Saddles &c. &c.”¹⁰
The combined labor input of boys and women allowed men to avoid daily
herding and concentrate on more specialized pastoral activities. They were responsible for the key nomadic task of orchestrating camp movements and selecting grazing sites. Jean Louis Berlandier, who in 1828 traveled with an eastern Comanche ranchería for a week, noted how the chief, “performing the role of
orator, began at least one hour before daybreak to address the entire tribe in a loud voice,” giving “orders about what was to be done, the hour of departure, and the place where we are going to camp.” Men also captured and tamed feral horses—an arduous, high-skill task that took weeks—and tended to special war and hunting horses, devoting vast amounts of time in brushing, grooming, rub-bing, and training these valuable animals whose qualities largely determined a household’s economic viability and a man’s success as a provider. Their most time-consuming responsibility, however, was livestock raiding. Preparations
were meticulous and involved strategic planning, the recruitment of partici-
pants, and performing the proper rituals. After reaching their targets, raiding parties often spent several days assessing the situation to ensure the greatest results with the fewest losses. The act of theft was usually a swift surprise attack, preferably carried out at midnight in moonlight, but the homeward journey
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could take days, even weeks, for successful parties might return with hundreds of animals, driving the unruly herd for hundreds of miles, often night and day to shake off pursuers.¹¹
Comanches developed a distinctively businesslike approach to raiding: they
saw it primarily as an act of production, a means to fuel their market-oriented pastoral economy with horses, mules, and donkeys. They controlled the intensity of their pillaging operations to ensure sustained yield and refrained from clearing entire areas in New Mexico and Texas of horses and mules, leaving
the ranches and farms enough animals to continue viable livestock production.
This strategy was apparent in Texas, where they conducted lucrative raids from the 1760s to the early 1830s, when declining returns forced them to shift their operations south of the Río Grande. Comanches, in short, saw the Spanish and Mexicans ranches, missions, and settlements as an economic resource that was to be exploited rather than destroyed. As ironic as it may have seemed to the contemporary Spaniards and Mexicans, Texas spent three-quarters of a century as a carefully managed livestock repository for Comanchería.
But emphasizing Comanches’ proficiency and prudence in raiding can ob-
scure a central facet of their pastoral economy: domestic production. Coman-
ches relied almost solely on raiding during the early stages of their horse acquisition, but in time they became skillful horse breeders who could generate a sustained domestic increase in herd sizes and manipulate the endurance, speed, size, and color of their animals. They produced animals with distinct qualities for warfare, hunting, and hauling and recognized at least seventeen different types of horses based on color alone. De Mézières observed in 1778 that the
Comanches had become “skillful in the management of the horse, to the raising of which they devote themselves,” and by the early nineteenth century Comanche horses and mules were g
enerally considered to be of better quality than
Spanish or Mexican stock. “Their wealth consisted of horses and mules; those raised by themselves are generally of superior order,” one observer wrote, noting that whereas Comanches willingly sold their stolen Mexican stock, their “fine horses they could scarcely be induced to sell.” Theodore Ayrault Dodge, a U.S.
Army officer who traveled widely in the West and visited Comanchería in the
mid-nineteenth century, wrote: “In one particular the Comanche is noteworthy.
He knows more about a horse and horse-breeding than any other Indian. He is
particularly wedded to and apt to ride a pinto (‘painted’ or piebald) horse, and never keeps any but a pinto stallion. He chooses his ponies well, and shows more good sense in breeding than one would give him credit for. The corollary to this is that the Comanche is far less cruel to his beasts, and though he begins to use them as yearlings, the ponies often last through many years.”¹²
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Comanche breeders employed a wide variety of techniques. They gelded
the best riding horses to improve their stamina and tractability and weeded out weaker animals by letting them perish during winters or simply by eating them.
They manipulated genetic changes through systematic breeding selection: they typically allowed only select stallions to mate with mares and castrated others.
The product of these techniques was the well-proportioned, even-tempered,
and agile Comanche horse, which excelled in bison hunting and warfare. Dur-
ing their wars with the Spaniards and the U.S. Army, the Comanches routinely evaded the cavalry columns, outpacing the bulkier Euro-American horses with
their swift-footed mounts.¹³
In the early nineteenth century, Comanches expanded their pastoral econ-
omy from horses to mules. When visiting a large eastern Comanche camp in
1834, George Catlin estimated that one-third of that group’s substantial herd consisted of mules, which suggests that Comanches not only raided the hybrids from colonial settlements but had acquired enough male donkeys to breed their own. Strong-backed, short-legged, and sure-footed even in rugged terrain, mules were better suited to hauling and carrying than the more delicate horses. Mules fetched high prices on the plains markets—the standard exchange rate was
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