The Comanche Empire
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two horses for one mule—and Comanches reaped handsome profits in trading
them. But the acquisition of mules can also be seen as a herding strategy that allowed Comanches to adapt to Comanchería’s drought-prone weather. Mules
withstand dehydration better, adjust to browsing more readily, and survive with fewer nutrients than horses, qualities that made them a desirable alternative for Comanche pastoralists, who wanted to minimize the effects of weather fluctuations on their livestock production. Through systematic herd diversification, they were able to reduce their overall losses and turn Comanchería into a pastoral success.¹⁴
The conversion to pastoralism turned Comanchería into a booming center
of production, but the shift was difficult, demanding, and risky. By gearing their movements and labor patterns around the grazing needs of domestic herds,
Comanches seemed to have seriously compromised their ability to follow and
harvest the bison, the mainstay of their subsistence economy. There was an inbuilt tension between horse pastoralism and bison hunting, which required
contrasting nomadic behavior: pastoralism rested on frequent, at times nearly constant movements, whereas hunting demanded more sweeping migrations
punctuated with relatively long periods of immobility. Horses and bison also competed for the same resources and microenvironments—grass, water, and
river valleys—which rendered any economic system that depended on both ani-
mals ecologically precarious.¹⁵
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But rather than binding themselves in an economic deadlock, Comanches
managed—undoubtedly through trial and error—to weave intensive herding
and full-time hunting into a smoothly running dual economy. By the time they committed to pastoralism, Comanches had perfected horse-mounted hunting to
such a level that it was reasonably easy for them to combine it with pastoral pursuits. Mobility was the key. The bison has a relatively small migratory radius, and the well-mounted Comanche hunters could quite easily reach the herds even
if they did not follow them as closely as specialized hunters would have done.
Horses also allowed Comanches to transport large quantities of dried meat and pemmican, lengthening the breaks they could take between hunts and lessening the need to stay within striking distance of the bison herds. An advantageous climate helped. Their location on the southern tip of the Great Plains provided Comanches with an exceptionally long hunting season, allowing them to spread their subsistence activities over several months. Their increased hunting efficiency combined with a favorable climate allowed Comanches to concentrate
their hunting operations on frequent but swift sprees that yielded enough food to last for most of the year. Not so much hunters who used horses as herders who also hunted, they lived most of the year by the terms of their horses.¹⁶
Comanches had turned their economy and society inside out to accommo-
date animal herding, but it was not enough. Intensive pastoralism allowed them to raise more livestock to fuel their expanding exchange networks, but it also absorbed vast amounts of time and energy, divesting labor from other sectors of the economy. As households continued to enlarge their herds, they inevitably faced labor shortages and risked compromising their capacity to produce food, robes, and other necessities. Some households failed or chose not to acquire more horses and mules than they could comfortably maintain, but others sought ways to increase their labor force, market production, and wealth. They found a solution in polygyny and slavery.
Polygyny, a marriage system in which men have several wives, was traditional among the Comanches, but the practice expanded dramatically under the pressures of escalating market production, which put a premium on women’s work.
Hunting, raiding, and horse breeding, the main production activities of men, stressed daring and risk-taking, whereas the female activities of robe dressing, meat processing, and horse herding emphasized manual labor. Since a man
could procure horses and robes faster and with less effort than a woman could feed, tend, and process them, men began to seek multiple wives to enlarge their labor pool. Polygyny became widespread by the turn of the eighteenth century and expanded steadily thereafter. Texas Governor Domingo Cabello y Robles
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wrote in 1786 that Comanche men sometimes had four wives, Pedro Bautista
Pino remarked in 1812 that “men of rank often have as many as seven wives,”
and Juan Antonio Padilla reported eight years later that some Comanche men
had eight wives. Josiah Gregg noted that prominent men in the 1830s and 1840s could have eight to ten wives, and Robert Neighbors wrote at midcentury that some wealthy men had more than ten wives.¹⁷
Polygyny was the primary means for mobilizing the female labor force for ex-
panding market and domestic production. Writing around 1804, Manuel Merino
y Moreno, the Spanish official, explicitly linked polygyny to the increased labor demands: “The practice of polygamy, or multiple wives, is common among the
Comanches. . . . [Extra wives] are employed . . . in the work of curing skins, herding horses, and loading the animals with their tents and possessions when they move their rancherías from one territory to another.” A few years later, David G.
Burnet made a similar remark. Women in polygynous marriages, he wrote, “are
literally ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water,’ to their dominate and supercili-ous husbands. Every description of domestic labour is imposed upon them to a degree not usual, even among savages.” Berlandier wrote that women were even employed as laborers during long-distance raiding expeditions: “the few women that they take with them are expected to accommodate their husbands’ relations and friends, not to mention guarding the horses and helping to carry off whatever the men have stolen.”¹⁸
By relegating women to horse herding, robe dressing, and meat curing, polyg-
yny seems to have produced a marked decline in their overall social status.
Comanche women worked exceedingly hard, but they received few material or
social rewards. José María Sánchez, the Mexican official, wrote in the late 1820s that Comanche women “are real slaves to the men, who occupy themselves with
war and hunting only. The wives bring in the animals that are killed, they cut and cure the meat, tan the hides, make the clothes and arms of the men, and care for the horses.” According to Burnet, the exploitation of female labor resulted in a broader social debasement: “Held in small estimation, [Comanche women]
pay much less attention to personal adornment than the men, and appear, in
the degradation of their social condition, to have retained but little self-respect.
They are disgustingly filthy in their persons, and seemingly as debased in their moral as in their physical constitution.” This social degradation resulted from the dynamic that has undermined women’s status in many strictly gendered
nonagricultural societies where men dominate the public sphere and women
the domestic one. In such societies, women often carry the burden of market
production, but the final products belong to men who can garner the prestige
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that flows from the control and redistribution of the critical wealth-generating goods.¹⁹
As polygynous marriages became more common, Comanche men began to
see their wives less as companions and more as laborers. The extra wives were responsible for the most onerous household chores, such as hide tanning, meat curing, and winter care of horses, and they often toiled under the supervision of first wives, the respected matrons of households. The expansion of polygyny also enhanced men’s control over the marriage institution itself. In the early nineteenth century, many marriages were arranged b
y the father or brother of the bride, who often could not refuse the selected husband. Berlandier may have
exaggerated the contractual nature of marriages, but he captured the essence of the change: “Marriage among the Comanches is a purchase which the man
makes, rather than a contract between two individuals. Polygamy is the rule, and a man marries only in order to increase the number of his servants.” Besides altering marriage from an emotional bond more toward an economic in-
vestment, polygyny had several adverse practical effects on the female popu-
lation. As the demand for female labor increased, girls were married younger, frequently before they reached puberty. Many Comanche parents tried to marry several of their daughters to the same man, thereby hoping to pressure the sonin-law to treat them better, but the downside of the practice was that marriage contracts were often made when the girls were still in their early teens.²⁰
In writing about Native American women, Euro-American observers often
projected their own cultural expectations on societies that operated by vastly different principles, and their conclusions were often distorted by the Western ideal that women were to be cloistered and protected. Moreover, since they typically recorded only what was visible to the naked eye, white observers rarely wrote about the more veiled domestic sphere where women exerted considerable moral authority. In the lodge, beyond Euro-American gaze, women were the principal decision makers. Paraibooʔs, senior first wives, controlled the distribution of food and commanded secondary wives and slaves, enjoying the privileges of wealth.
“It is perhaps this alleviation of their labor by slaves,” Gregg wrote, “that has contributed to elevate the Comanche women above those of many of the northern tribes.” Women directed child rearing, owned packhorses, and could trade a small portion of the robes and meat they produced for the market. Women in sororal polygynous marriages found emotional support among their sisters, and women who were married to abusive or underachieving husbands frequently
ran off with lovers or neglected household duties until their husbands divorced them.²¹ And yet the overarching theme of contemporary observations—that the
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escalation of polygyny had a negative effect on women’s status—is unquestionably true. The countless secondary wives of polygynous marriages formed a new exploited underclass of servile laborers in the Comanche society that was gearing its very foundation around market-driven surplus production.
The escalation of polygyny went hand in hand with the escalation of slavery.
The two institutions had a common genesis—both developed to offset chronic
labor shortages arising from market production—and they were functionally
linked: many female slaves were eventually incorporated into Comanche fami-
lies as wife-laborers. Most elementally, polygyny and slavery sprang from common cultural and ideological foundations: both reflected a larger patriarchal system that rested on male control and subordination of women and children
and tended to reduce women and children to the objects of male honor, rivalry, and militarism.²²
Comanches had raided other Native societies for captives long before Euro-
pean contact, and they became in the early eighteenth century the dominant
slave traffickers of the lower midcontinent. It was not until after 1800, however, that human bondage became a large-scale institution in Comanchería itself.
Comanches conducted frequent slave raids into Texas and northern Mexico
during the second and third decades of the new century and soon emerged as
the paramount slaveholders in the Southwest.
José Francisco Ruíz, who spent several years in asylum in eastern Coman-
chería in the 1810s, reported that his hosts possessed more than nine hundred
“prisoners of both sexes.” A Mexican report from 1823 states that eastern Comanches “held as captives in their power” more than “two thousand, five hundred of all classes, sexes, and ages,” and Berlandier, writing in the early 1830s, noted that they held “five to six hundred” Creole captives, a figure that did not include the hundreds of slaves seized from the Osages and other enemy Indian nations. The estimates thus vary wildly, but they do indicate that eastern Comanchería’s slave population had grown rapidly. Since the total eastern Comanche population
in the early nineteenth century was around ten thousand, the slave component seems to have ranged between 10 and 25 percent. Information on western Comanchería is scantier, but the existing sources suggest that slavery was widespread there as well. In 1850, for example, a New Mexican from San Miguel del Vado reported of his visit to a western Comanche ranchería where “there were almost as many Mexican slaves, women and children, as Indians.” That report
was echoed by George Bent, who knew Plains Indian cultures intimately and
who recalled that “nearly every family” among the Comanches “had one or two
Mexican captives.” Bent’s conjecture would put the entire nation’s slave population at several thousand, which is what Waddy Thompson, a Texas envoy to
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Mexico in the early 1840s, believed to be the case: “there are not less than five thousand Mexicans at this moment slaves of the Comanches.”²³
Several forces converged to produce this escalation of captivity and slavery.
One was the traditional but still-potent notion of captives as ritual conduits or symbolic currency. Comanches ritually tortured and killed some captives to
avenge the deaths of slain members of their community, seeking consolation
for grieving relatives and reassurance of their superiority over enemies. Ruíz reported how old women asked “the warrior for the slain enemy’s hair (the scalp of the victim is exhibited in a high place in the warrior’s home).” The women then “parade[d] the scalp through the village” while men, mounted on horses, sang, shouted, and fired their guns. Women cried for “those who have died recently, particularly the mothers who [had] lost a son.” But captives were not only symbolic vehicles for revenge; they could also become symbolic conduits for
peace. Exchanges of captives often marked diplomatic negotiations between the Comanches and colonial powers, helping resolve grievances and heal emotional wounds.²⁴
Another persisting motive behind Comanche slavery was the captives’ value
as marketable human capital or investments for rescate. The vast slave markets in New Mexico and French Louisiana had declined or disappeared with the collapse of the old empires, but Comanches continued to seize captives in Texas, New Mexico, and interior Mexico with the intention of selling them back to
their natal societies or, alternatively, to U.S. government agents in Indian Territory. Most ransomed captives were Spanish and Mexican women—the con-
trol of women still loomed large in the honor-laden masculine social milieu
of the Southwest—but Comanches also ransomed Spanish and Mexican men
“of certain age who have somehow escaped the fury of their masters.” When
Comanches took such captives to border villages for rescate, one contemporary noted, “the settlers hasten[ed] to contribute to the ransom and help free one of their kind, offering some trinket, or perhaps a mule or a gun, or whatever other object the owner thinks worth the trifling value of a Christian prisoner among the savages.” As prospective high-value commodities, Spanish and Mexican captives were treated especially well. “Creole prisoners taken by the Indians in war against the villages and garrisons of the frontier receive fair treatment, as compared with that meted out to members of enemy peoples.”²⁵
Although traditional commercial and cultural motives continued to shape
and stimulate slavery in Comanchería, the institution underwent a fundamen-
tal change in the early nineteenth century when the Comanches expe
rienced
a rapid economic and commercial growth. Their new exchange-oriented dual
economy of hunting and pastoralism had an immense need for labor, which
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could be satisfied only through slavery and which fostered a new conception of bondage: Comanches began to see captives less as instruments of exchange and retribution and more as laborers who could be employed to produce livestock
and robes for the market. Under mounting market pressures, then, Comanches
gave the indigenous slave systems of the Southwest a new face: they practiced slavery for distinctively economic purposes.
The disease epidemics that ravaged Comanchería in the early nineteenth
century gave the shift toward economically driven slavery particular urgency by creating an acute need to replace dead members and replenish devastated kinship networks with captured peoples. Comanches put special value on female
captives, who could be employed, alongside with the Comanche women of
polygynous marriages, in tending horses, tanning hides, curing meat, cooking meals, and packing possessions when moving camp. Comanches put women to
work almost immediately after capture and used various methods, from physical abuse to monthly quotas of finished robes, to increase their productivity. Captive women were also forced to provide domestic and sexual services, and female captives of European ancestry added to Comanches’ reproductive power as poten-
tial mothers of children who may have carried greater resistance to European microbes. Adolescent males, too, were highly valued because, as one observer put it, they could be made to “perform such menial service as usually pertains to squaws.” “They have several Mexicans (slaves) among them,” another contemporary remarked, and “make use of the boys to herd their animals.” Mostly Mexican, captive women and boys became a central element of the Comanche labor