had suffered a sickening collapse from hegemonic dominance to poverty and
starvation in a mere decade. The two great foundations of their international power—long-distance raiding into Mexico and long-distance trading across the Great Plains—had crumbled, and their empire lay in ruins. The future seemed
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even bleaker. In 1860 the dry spell was in its fifteenth year, and the grass burned brown and dead in what was left of Comanchería. The bison herds were evaporating, as were Comanches’ hopes of survival on the plains.
The outbreak of the Civil War eased the pressure on Comanchería’s borders,
but it did not halt the decline. Caught between Union New Mexico and Con-
federate Texas and Indian Territory, Comanches played the two sides off against each other, trying to draw concessions from both. During the four years of war, they negotiated with Confederate and Union agents but maintained an appearance of neutrality that allowed them to collect provisions at the Confederate Fort Cobb as well as the Union Fort Wise. The year 1863 seemed to bring new hope
to the Comanches. They raided the exposed Texas frontier for large quantities of horses and cattle, which they sold to Union beef contractors in New Mexico.
Two of their chiefs, Prick in the Forehead and Paruasemena (Ten Bears), visited Washington to sign a treaty. But these were small solaces in a deepening crisis.
Smallpox had carried away uncounted numbers in the previous year, and the
dry spell continued unabated. And when the Senate failed to ratify the treaty, a vicious war broke out on the Comanche–New Mexico border. As many as four
thousand Comanches may have perished during the early 1860s, leaving a total population of only five thousand in 1865.⁴⁶
But then two things happened. First, in the mid-1860s, the rains returned.
The catastrophic, generation-long drought passed, rainfall bounced back to the normal level, and the grasses began to heal. The precipitous decline of the bison populations slowed down, giving Comanches a new lease on survival. Sec-
ond, in 1865, the Confederacy collapsed, and Comanches’ struggle for survival turned into military expansion and economic growth. The North treated the
vanquished South essentially as an imperial holding that was to be demilita-
rized, transformed, and harnessed for profit. The inadvertent consequence of this was that west Texas became once more a setting for Comanche power politics.⁴⁷
This development was set in motion in mid-October 1865—six months after
Appomattox—when eleven Comanche chiefs met with a U.S. peace commission
on the Little Arkansas River in present-day southern Kansas. The commissioners came with a dramatic proposal: if the Comanches agreed to live in peace, return all captives, and allow military forts on their lands, the United States would recognize their claim to a territory that included western Oklahoma, the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas, and a triangle-shaped slice of northwestern
Texas below the panhandle. Although the proposal obliged the Comanches to
stay within that reservation, Chief Eagle Drinking urged other chiefs to accept
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it. But he also refused to cede any lands. “I am fond of the land I was born on,”
he told the commissioners. “The white man has land enough. I don’t want to
divide.”
The final treaty, known as the Treaty of Little Arkansas, reflected this vision of undivided Comanchería. Of the eleven chiefs who signed the treaty, nine were Yamparikas, Kotsotekas, Tenewas, or Nokonis (Wanderers, a small new division with close ties to the Tenewas), whose territory fell within the limits of the proposed reservation. The supposedly ceded lands that fell outside of the reservation belonged to an emerging faction called Kwahadas (Antelope Eaters), who
resided far in the south on the Llano Estacado and were not present at the Little Arkansas talks. The treaty was contested on the American side as well, for a large portion of the reservation fell within the claimed borders of the state of Texas, which had never explicitly recognized Indian claims on its lands. Yet, on October 18, the two sides signed a final treaty, in which the United States reaffirmed Comanches’ claim on some forty thousand square miles of Texas territory.⁴⁸
Texas was the great loser in the Comanche–U.S. rapprochement. The fed-
eral government not only had used its lands to buy peace from the Comanches, but reconstruction politics left the state utterly vulnerable to Comanche exploitation. Considering Texas a conquered territory, Washington sent thousands of troops to the state but assigned most of them to the eastern population centers to reassert federal authority and to the Mexican border to contain possible ramifications of the French invasion of Mexico. The frontier posts of the interior plains were not regarrisoned until the late 1860s. The government also kept large numbers of Texans imprisoned after the Civil War, depriving farms and ranches of a workforce. The upshot was that in 1865 there were several million head of un-protected cattle wandering in Texas, free of fences and free for the taking. In 1866 the army assigned two cavalry regiments to the Comanche border, a pitiful deterrent in a situation that was structurally primed for violence.⁴⁹
That was the setting for an extended Comanche raiding spree that lasted into the early 1870s, devastating not only Texas but large parts of New Mexico, Indian Territory, and the central plains. These raids represented a departure for Comanches. Consummate horse raiders, they now focused increasingly on cattle, which earlier they had either ignored or killed on the spot for food or revenge. By 1867, after two years of raiding, Texas had lost almost four thousand horses and more than thirty thousand head of cattle. Human casualties mounted as well: 162
people were killed and 43 carried into captivity during the same period. And once again Comanche war bands began crossing the Río Grande into Mexico.
Comanches also pushed northward to the Smoky Hill River and eastward deep
into Indian Territory, where the Civil War had left the Indian nations divided
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and weakened. They marched to eastern New Mexico to raid and attack the
eight thousand Navajos whom the U.S. Army had forcibly removed to Bosque
Redondo, which Comanches considered part of Comanchería. Pillaging horses,
mules, cattle, and captives, Comanche war bands covered a range that extended more than eight hundred miles from north to south and five hundred miles east to west.⁵⁰
Comanche herds burgeoned. Most early nineteenth-century estimates placed
the horse-to-person ratio at between three and four animals per person, but after midcentury many bands possessed from five to ten animals per capita. The numbers signaled a momentous change: Comanches were becoming full-fledged pas-
toralists who relied on domesticated animals for their material well-being. This transformation was most visible among the Kwahadas, the new cross-divisional faction that emerged from the political turmoil of the 1850s. When Lorenzo Labadi, an Indian agent from New Mexico, inspected the eastern Llano Estacado
in 1867, he found there a mixed Kwahada-Kotsoteka camp of seven hundred
lodges with some fifteen thousand horses and three to four hundred mules. They raised “much of their own stock” and had more than one thousand cows. “They
also have Texas cattle without number,” Labadi reported, “and almost every day bring in more.” Eighteen war parties were in Texas plundering for horses, mules, and cattle, and a large party led by the head chiefs had left to attack Bosque Redondo.⁵¹
The growing domestic herds served a double function. Most immediately,
they helped patch up the drought-ravaged subsistence economy. The decline
of the bison herds slowed after 1865, but the herds had settled at such a low plateau that Comanches were forced to search for alternative sources of subsistence. They slaughtered cattle
on the homebound legs of long raiding expeditions and, as Labadi noted, raised cows for food and hides. Horses, too, were turned into sources of food and hides. George Bent recalled how Comanches
used “horse hides in the way other plains tribes used buffalo hides, in making clothing, lodge covers, etc.” and even argued that they grew to prefer horseflesh to buffalo meat.⁵²
The other purpose of the massive Comanche herds was commercial. The ani-
mals that were not eaten were channeled into the comanchero trade, which ex-
perienced a dramatic revival, recovering fully from its midcentury hiatus. Texas longhorns, the result of random mixing of Spanish retinto (criollo) and English cattle, were an ideal commodity for the comanchero trade. The very qualities that would make them so suitable for the great cattle drives of the late 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s made them easy to move from Texas to the comanchero rendezvous on the Llano Estacado. The longhorns were efficient browsers, reason-
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ably simple to handle, and, with long legs and hard hoofs, could move enormous distances on little water without losing weight—all important considerations for Comanches, who had been horse herders for generations but had had no experience with domesticated bovines.⁵³
The easily transportable longhorns found ready markets in New Mexico,
where U.S. Army officers quietly invested their own funds in the comanchero
commerce, carrying on the shadowy practice that had began during the Civil
War. In 1866 and 1867, in fact, a cartel of army officers and cattle barons assumed control over a large section of the comanchero business. For a share of the profits, they furnished comanchero parties with supplies and merchandise and protected them against government intervention. But the increasing profits also drew ricos, wealthy New Mexican elites, who began sponsoring comanchero parties with horses, goods, and laborers, both peons and slaves. For a while, Americans and ricos competed and coexisted as the patrons of the comanchero trade, which had become a nexus of a covert transnational scheme where New Mexicans, American merchants, U.S. officials, and the Comanches came
together to profit from exploiting the Anglo-Texas cattle industry.⁵⁴
Shielded from federal control and backed by wealthy patrons, the coman-
cheros flocked onto the Llano Estacado in unforeseen numbers. In 1866 they
were reported to be “constantly” among the Kwahadas, their main suppliers,
“furnishing them goods, arms . . . in fact anything . . . they want.” “This trade,”
another observer reported, “has been immense of late. I know of one man here in Santa Fe who took about one hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of goods there
[the Llano Estacado], and came back with one hundred head of Texas cattle for his goods.”⁵⁵
The eighty-year-old trade transformed into a structured enterprise with fixed centers, an elaborate transportation system, and a secure financial base. The chance meetings of the old were replaced by fixed rendezvous points, where
irrigation ditches and semi-subterranean adobe shelters provided the infrastructure for seasonal occupation. The canyonlands in the central and eastern Llano Estacado were dotted with such sites, three of which served as the nerve centers for the entire system: Las Tecovas by perennial springs near present-day Ama-rillo; Las Lenguas on the upper Pease River; and Cañón del Rescate (Ransom
Canyon) near present-day Lubbock. Linked to New Mexico by a web of well-
established cart roads and smaller pack trails, those sites could attract hundreds of comancheros. An estimated seven hundred New Mexicans left for the plains
during the 1867 season, which culminated in a massive rendezvous where four
hundred comancheros sold twenty thousand dollars’ worth of merchandise to
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Comanches; one official reported that New Mexico was full of Texas cattle by the season’s end.
Such mass gatherings lasted for several days, during which huge amounts of
commodities exchanged hands. The involvement of wealthy Americans and ricos had expanded the depth and range of comanchero wares, which now included
traditional goods—salt, hard bread, flour, sugar, tobacco, blankets, and knives—
and such novelties as whisky, tea, candy, army caps, Colt revolvers, and ten-shot, lever-action rifles. Comanches paid for the goods mostly with stolen Texas cattle and horses, but they also offered Mexican and Indian captives, who remained
“very much in demand
among the ‘ricos’ and prospective bride-grooms” in New
Mexico even though the territory had prohibited all forms of involuntary servitude and slavery in accordance with the Thirteenth Amendment of the United
States Constitution.⁵⁶
The silent investors, fixed rendezvous, varied merchandise, and sheer volume of the exchange point to a fundamental change in the comanchero commerce:
the ancient borderland institution of face-to-face transactions was becoming integrated into a capitalist system of formal market relations. Yet despite the new elements, the comanchero commerce remained embedded in tradition. As they
had done for generations, Comanches and comancheros enveloped the mun-
dane exchange of material goods in social rituals, which renewed and elaborated the sense of solidarity and kinship between their communities. The actual trading was preceded by wrestling and archery matches, horse races, gambling, and feasts, practices that brought participants into closer personal contact and alleviated the tensions of the bartering that followed. Although some contemporaries claimed that the introduction of alcohol and the involvement of American and rico financers inflated prices to the Comanches’ disadvantage, the traditional norms of reciprocity and interdependence persisted; one captive later recalled how Comanches especially valued Pueblo Indian comancheros who “would pay
good price for cattle” and “were faithful to their promises.” The comanchero middlemen, through their commitment to customary forms, thus functioned
as a buffer that shielded the Comanches from the corrupting and alienating
influences of the market. And finally, while one end of the comanchero trade was now anchored to the expanding capitalist economy of regularized market
exchanges, the other end remained firmly planted in the borderland tradition of violent economic action and redistribution. It was an open secret that the livestock and laborers that fueled New Mexico’s economic growth during and after the Civil War years were looted from Texas and northern Mexico.⁵⁷
The contraband cattle and captive trade and the violence it fueled in Texas
were a stinging embarrassment for the federal agents in New Mexico, Kansas,
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and Indian Territory. They had failed to restrain the Comanches, who ignored the reservation boundaries as defined in the Treaty of Little Arkansas, refused to relinquish slave traffic, and yet frequented Fort Larned, their assigned agency near the Big Bend of the Arkansas, to collect government supplies. Shameful
reports of “lives taken and property stolen by Indians . . . fed and clothed and armed by the representatives of the U.S. Gov” poured out of Texas, putting
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