Comanches entered that war starved, weakened, and fanatical. The urgency
to protect homes and kin combined with the need to patch a collapsing econ-
omy with stolen stock, igniting a deadly raiding war. Comanches attacked
settlers across the encroaching Texas frontier while also raiding deep into northern Mexico. Denying having “consented not to war on Mexicans,” they made
mockery of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo by crossing the Río Grande in such numbers that the border region seemed “infested” with war parties. They struck Mexican villages all the way to Durango and seized livestock and captives from the newly established Kickapoo, Seminole, and maroon settlements in northern Coahuila. Nuevo León alone suffered more than eight hundred Indian raids
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between 1848 and 1870. The one potentially positive outcome of the Mexican-
American War for Mexico—a hard, policed international boundary that would
have thwarted Comanche incursions below the Río Grande— evaporated into
violence.³¹
As before, the Mexican-bound raids were often large-scale efforts that drew
members from several Comanche divisions. Comanche rancherías, agent
Neighbors reported, “keep up continual intercourse with each other, and are
equally engaged in their depredations and war parties. Whenever a chief from one of the upper bands starts for Mexico or to any point on our frontier, they send runners to the lower bands, and all their warriors join him, so they are in fact but one people.” Hunger, Neighbors wrote, fueled the raids: “they cannot subsist by any other means.” In fact, several Comanche bands now lived permanently in northern Mexico, eking out a living by plundering livestock and hunting Apache scalps, which brought two hundred pesos in Chihuahua and Du-
rango. In 1851 the Comanche leadership, an old woman named Tave Peté, the
“generaless and prophetess” of the Comanches, and her grandsons Bajo el Sol
and Magüe, signed a peace treaty in Chihuahua. They promised to stop raiding in the province and agreed to deliver Apache scalps. In Nuevo León and Coahuila, meanwhile, Comanche raids contributed to the outbreak of a widespread separatist revolt against the central government that still seemed inattentive to northern needs.³²
Comanches had mounted a forceful military response that resembled their
imperial actions of old, but Texas, too, organized itself for war. The state created new ranger companies and dispatched them against the Penatekas, while the
federal government continued its efforts to pacify Texas. With several top officials now demanding that the Comanches be either isolated or exterminated, the army constructed by 1852 seven new frontier garrisons to keep the Comanches
out of Texas. The new cordon lay roughly one hundred miles northwestward
from the previous garrison line, and five of the forts—Belknap, Chadbourne,
McKavett, Phantom Hill, and Mason—were well within Comanchería’s bor-
ders, situated at key watering places where infantry troops could intercept raiding parties heading to Texas and Mexico. By fall 1853, the Texas frontier had engulfed Comanchería all the way to the Comanche Peak, and Comanche raiding
in Texas dwindled to sporadic actions along the Río Grande.³³
The Penatekas’ strength was also undermined by growing factionalism within
their ranks. Starvation fueled competition over shrinking resources, corroding internal solidarity and fracturing existing political arrangements. Penateka politics, one observer noted, became an opportunistic competition for resources
and followers: “Ketumsee is an ambitious and astute leader, pursuing a discreet
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and complacent policy in the government of his followers calculated to enhance his popularity, and he has already alienated several of Sanaco’s band, who have transferred their allegiance to him. This has engendered a feeling of ill will and jealousy between them which causes each to be suspicious of the motives of
the other.” Gradually, the Penatekas broke into three factions that settled in opposing parts of southern Comanchería. Sanaco took his followers to the middle Colorado River, while Potsanaquahip settled farther north of the Brazos River, where his bands blended with Pahayuko’s Tenewas. Only Ketumsee, who had
risen to power after the 1849 cholera epidemic carried away chiefs Mopechu-
cope and Santa Anna, stayed in the south, trying to negotiate food and resources from Texas for his dwindling ranchería.³⁴
Overt dispute among the Penatekas had broken out in 1851 when Ketumsee
met with Texas Indian agents on the San Sabá River and asked the United States to “set apart a Section or peice [ sic] of Country” for his people “to settle on and cultivate.” The next year Ketumsee received rations at Fort Graham, met again with federal agents, released twenty-seven Mexican captives, and renewed his request for a reservation. These actions shocked and infuriated the other chiefs, who took them as an admission that the United States had the right to hand over Comanche lands and prevent their traditional stock-and-slave raids into Mexico, and they pledged to kill Ketumsee “for having given up the Mexican prisoners.”
By year’s end, the southern Comanche political organization had disintegrated.
“There is evidently a great want of a proper governmental organization amongst these bands of Comanches,” Texas Indian agent Horace Capron remarked: “although originally from the same tribe (the Honey Eaters) they are now divided into small parties under different leaders, each one considering himself entitled to equal respect, and requiring a separate audience.”³⁵
Ketumsee’s request for a sanctuary received little interest among Texas policymakers, who had resisted the federal government’s repeated demands to set
aside lands for Indian reservations. Texas had retained full control of its public domain under the exceptional terms of its admission into the United States,
and its politicians intended to preserve these lands for their own constituents, who were each entitled to 640 acres for free. In 1853, however, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis used his considerable political clout in Texas to convince the state to adopt a reservation policy, and in the following year the legislature al-lotted some 53,000 acres for the three largest Indian tribes residing within the state’s claimed borders. The Wichitas and Caddos were allocated a 30,000-acre reservation on the upper Brazos River, and 23,000 acres on the Clear Fork of the Brazos were reserved for the Penatekas.³⁶
Robert Neighbors, the supervising Texas Indian agent, and Captain Marcy
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were sent to coax the three groups to move to these areas. In a meeting with Penateka chiefs, Marcy exploited the Comanches’ economic distress, warning
that the bison were disappearing so rapidly that “in a few years they and their children would have to resort to some other means than the chase for subsistence. . . . They must learn to cultivate the soil.” Both Sanaco and Ketumsee agreed to move to the Clear Fork, where the latter settled in a wooden house and received a monthly salary so he would not have to hunt. Sanaco soon left the reservation, but hunger drove other bands in, and within a year more than five hundred Comanches were collecting annuities of beef, flour, and corn meal on the Clear Fork. By 1856, two hundred acres of the reservation had been plowed and fenced for cultivation, although much of the tilling had been done by the Comanches’ Mexican captives.³⁷
The reservations marked a turning point in Texas Indian policy, but they
failed to resolve the larger issues. There were still thousands of Comanches on the plains, who were growing increasingly desperate. When large-scale raiding began anew in 1854, all seemed chaos. Some Comanche rancherías fragmented
into small parties that struck settlements across Texas, while others raided into Mexico, skirting Fort Clark on the Nueces. War parties so
metimes moved on
foot, hoping to return with stolen horses, and sometimes overran newly established farmsteads and ranches with mounted hit-and-run assaults. Comanches
raided the Delawares, Choctaws, and Cherokees in Indian Territory and were
in turn raided by them. They dispatched war parties into Navajo country and attacked the Wichitas and Caddos in the Brazos reservation at harvest time. They were said to have “declared War upon all people south of Red River, White and Red,” and yet they traded with itinerant Texas traders, such as the famed Jesse Chisholm, for guns. They raided the Kickapoos and Seminoles but at times
also teamed up with them to form multiethnic raiding gangs. They plundered
Apache rancherías along the Río Grande but used Mescalero rancherías as way
stations to Mexico. They sometimes allowed a small number of Lipans to re-
side on the plains and join their war parties. Some of the attacks that Texans blamed on Comanches were probably the work of Wacos, Tawakonis, Mexicans,
or whites dressed as Indians.³⁸
Lacking a clear target amidst the chaos, Texans and the U.S. Army struck randomly. Ranger companies and spontaneously organized Texas militias killed all Indians they could find, and U.S. troops were ordered to “search out and attack all parties or bands . . . whether these [depredations] be notoriously attributable to the whole band, or only chargeable apparently to a few individuals.” Only gradually did Texans begin to see what they thought was a pattern. Accumulating evidence suggested that most Indian raids originated in northern Comanchería,
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which served as a haven for such renowned southern Comanche war chiefs as
Potsanaquahip. “The strangest feature of this state of affairs,” agent Neighbors wrote in 1857, “is the fact that, at the same time that those bands of Camanches
. . . are depredating on our citizens, waylaying our roads, destroying our mails to El Paso, &c., an agent of your department is distributing to them a large annuity of goods, arms, and ammunition on the Arkansas river.” That, Neighbors seethed, “is arming them, and giving them the means more effectually to carry on their hostile forays.”³⁹
The objective of those forays, Neighbors learned from northern Comanche
chiefs, was nothing less than the extermination of white settlements in Texas.
But Neighbors’s own reservation bands were also implicated in those forays. War bands from the north were reported to be using the Clear Fork reservation as a way station, a place where they recruited additional warriors, ate, and rested before striking into Texas or Mexico. Neighbors himself admitted that he could not
“resist the influence of the outside band of Camanches, or to prevent the young men from quitting the reserve to join in the continued forays made by them
both upon our frontier and that of Mexico.” Comanche raiding, then, appeared to be a seasonally organized enterprise that revolved around Anglo-American
sanctuaries on the upper Arkansas and Clear Fork. By 1858, the raids had taken a heavy toll on Texas. Numerous ranches and farms were abandoned in the western part of the state, and, as one observer put it, fear and uncertainty “paralyzed business almost entirely.”⁴⁰
For U.S. and Texas officials, a discernable pattern meant targets. Indian agents cancelled annuity distributions along the Arkansas, hoping to pressure Comanches to acknowledge that Texas was part of the United States and that war with one meant war with both. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army and Texas Rangers began
to act offensively. Until 1858 neither had ventured far from the line of settlements, but now they carried war deep into the heart of Comanchería, turning it into a battleground for the first time since the late eighteenth century. In May an outfit of 100 Texas Rangers and 113 Caddo, Wichita, and Tonkawa scouts surprised a Kotsoteka camp of seventy lodges on Little Robe Creek, a few miles to the north of the Canadian River. Using the Indian auxiliaries as skirmishers, the rangers charged into the village. Comanches fled and scattered, and the rangers killed seventy-four warriors and two principal chiefs and took eighteen captives,
“mostly women and children.” Among those killed was a renowned Tenewa
chief, Pooheve Quasoo, also known as Iron Jacket for the coat of mail he wore in battle. The rangers cut up the dead chief ’s armor for souvenirs and later sent a piece to the newly elected Texas Governor Hardin R. Runnels, who had pledged to pacify the frontier.⁴¹
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In late September 1858 the Second Cavalry, which had been policing the Texas frontier for three years, duplicated the rangers’ maneuver by riding into northern Comanchería with 135 Tawakoni, Waco, Caddo, Tonkawa, and Delaware scouts.
After a long night march, the troops made contact with a large Comanche camp spread along the bottom of Horse Creek in western Oklahoma. Feeling secure
deep in their home territory, Comanches had assigned no sentinels and left their horse herd unguarded. When they awoke to gunshots, their horses were already gone, stampeded by the charging cavalry. Immobilized, the men dug behind
rocks and trees, fighting bullets and sabers with bows and arrows and knives as the women and children crawled up the riverbank. Brevet Major Earl Van Dorn
reported that his troops killed fifty-six men and two women and burned 120
lodges with their contents. It was later learned that the Comanches—mainly
Kotsotekas together with a band of Potsanaquahip’s Penatekas—had been on
their way to a peace council with federal agents in Indian Territory. Van Dorn denied any knowledge of the planned council and next spring led the Second
Cavalry to another attack on Potsanaquahip’s camp, now near the Arkansas
River, killing forty-nine and capturing thirty-seven people.⁴²
Demoralized by repeated defeats deep in their home territory, the Coman-
ches withdrew from the open plains and retreated north and westward to the
high plains and canyonlands of southwestern Kansas and the Oklahoma and
Texas panhandles. By late fall 1859, nearly all Comanches and Kiowas, some
ten thousand people, had clustered on a strip between the Arkansas and Cana-
dian rivers, where they faced new, grim realities. The retreat deprived them of prime wintering grounds in the south, which had sustained a flourishing pastoral economy, and confined them to the colder northern latitudes, where life with horses was more precarious. The spatial compression, coupled with the deaths of several prominent paraibos, undercut existing social and political systems.
Living in close proximity, the Yamparikas, Kotsotekas, Tenewas, and Penatekas began to reorganize themselves around new leaders whose authority stemmed
primarily from military prowess and who drew followers across the fraying divisional lines. The old configuration of cohesive, geographically distinct divisions began to fade, giving way to more transient, hybrid formations.⁴³
In Texas, meanwhile, the Penatekas’ position in the Clear Fork reservation
had become insufferable. Popular opinion tagged the reservation as a launch
station for Comanche raids in Texas and demanded that it be removed from the state. Roused by frenzied newspaper articles—many of them penned by John R.
Baylor, a dismissed Comanche agent turned Indian fighter turned political agi-tator—frontier Texans organized vigilante gangs that camped around the Clear Fork and Brazos reservations, launching night raids into Indian settlements. The
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gangs declared Cedar Creek, a tributary of the Brazos, a “dead line” and threatened to shoot all Indians south of it. By spring 1859, Baylor and his followers were demanding that the reservation Indians be exterminated rather than removed,
insisting that the Indians would never stop raiding Texas. Army officers, many of whom privately shared Baylor’s views, refused to restrain the rampant violence, thus paving the
way for the Texas racial order in which there was no place for landed Indians. In late July 1859, amidst indiscriminate killings, agent Neighbors hastily led nearly four hundred Comanches from the Clear Fork reservation
and more than a thousand Wichitas and Caddos from the Brazos reservation
across the Red River to the southwestern Indian Territory. They were resettled in the Leased District, which had been secured from the Choctaws a few years earlier.⁴⁴
By late 1859, Comanches had all but vanished from Texas. Their departure
left a vacuum that was rapidly filled by settlers, who flocked into a wide zone between the Colorado and Trinity rivers. The farmer-settler frontier was trailed by the ranching frontier, which soon emerged as the primary dynamo of Texas
expansion. In the course of the 1850s, sustained by a growing domestic demand for beef and ignoring the drought conditions, Texas ranchers had gradually extended their operations northward from the overcrowded and overgrazed early
nucleus on the coastal plains. Skirting the steep cliffs of the Balcones Escarpment, the ranching frontier inched its way northward, reaching the northern
tip of the Balcones by the end of the decade. There the expansion turned westward to the open plains of central Texas, where the removal of Comanche and
Wichita reservations had opened thousands of square miles of prime grazing
land for cattle ranching. By 1860, Palo Pinto, Erath, and Comanche counties, all within the historical Comanche range, had emerged as the core area of Texas ranching.⁴⁵
The Comanches in 1860 were in desperate straits. Almost four hundred
Penatekas were confined to a reservation in Indian Territory, cut off from their kinspeople and living as refugees, and Comanchería itself had been torn asun-der. New Mexican ranchers had engulfed wide stretches of its western flank,
and tribes from Indian Territory had colonized the bison hunting grounds of
eastern Comanchería. Overland immigration was turning the Arkansas valley
and northern Comanchería into a wasteland, and the Texas settler-ranching
economy had swallowed up much of southern Comanchería. The Comanches
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