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press consent. In practice, the army patrols could detain Indian raiders only if they managed to catch one of the highly mobile trading parties with stolen livestock before the animals were sold to the comancheros, eaten, or rebranded and absorbed into the vast Comanche herds.⁹
Comanches took the new approach as a mandate to continue their traditional
ways and policies. They hunted, raided, and traded on the plains and in Texas for most of the year, but in winters they moved in large numbers near the agency to live on rations. In a sense, Comanches incorporated the reservation into their traditional yearly cycle as a different kind of river valley: like river bottoms, the reservation provided food and shelter during the cold months, and like the river valleys, it never held the appeal of the open grasslands. Essentially a new resource domain, the reservation helped Comanches preserve their nomadic way
of life on the plains rather than easing them into sedentary existence.
To facilitate this maneuvering between the reservation and the open plains,
the Comanches splintered into two geographically distinct but politically linked factions. Most Penatekas and some Tenewas had settled permanently in the
reservation, where they cultivated close ties with the agency officials, but the majority of Kwahadas, Yamparikas, and Kotsotekas lived on the Llano Estacado and Texas plains, visiting the reservation only seasonally. Although the reservation and nonreservation chiefs occasionally clashed over the frequency and legitimacy of raiding, individual bands and families could move fluidly between the agency and the plains, exploiting the resources of both.¹⁰
Kiowas, Naishans, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes adopted a similar strategy, and
many of their nonreservation bands joined, and partially blended into, the Kwahadas, Yamparikas, and Kotsotekas in northern Comanchería. By doing so, they both carried on and intensified the long tradition of ethnic mixing in Comanchería. By the late 1860s, the Llano Estacado had become a hub for numerous
intertribal rancherías whose driving force was their members’ shared antagonism toward the restrictive modernizing policies of the United States. These new
units were led by men like Satanta, Pacer, Quanah Parker, Mowway (Shaking
Hand), Paruacoom (He-Bear), and Tebenanaka (Sun’s Noise), men who have
entered the frontier mythology as iconic, unyielding tribal leaders who fervently protected their people against the rising American tide. But the primary role of these chiefs may well have been their shared role as co-leaders of new multitribal communities of interests that both transcended and obscured ethnic boundaries.¹¹
The Comanche strategy of using the reservation as a seasonal supply base put enormous strain on Agent Tatum and the Quaker experiment. Tatum pressured
the Indian Bureau to increase the annuities to make the reservation more appeal-
To view this image, please refer to
the print version of this book.
19. Quanah Parker, chief of the Comanche Indians.
Quanah Parker was one of the most powerful
Comanche leaders of the early reservation period
and arguably the most famous Comanche. He was
also the embodiment of the dynamics of ethnic
incorporation that defined the Comanches’ imperial
experience. Son of Peta Nocona, a Comanche chief,
and Ann Cynthia Parker, an Anglo-Texan captive
woman, Quanah Parker became a prominent leader
in the early 1870s. His rise to power illustrates
the opportunities the multiethnic Comanche
society offered to people who were not full-blood
Comanches. From J. E. Irwin, Photographs of Kiowa
and Comanche Indians (Chickasha, I.T.: Irwin,
ca. 1898), folder 19. Courtesy of Yale Collection
of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library.
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ing, and he struggled to identify the raiders in order to withhold their rations.
Comanches, however, annulled such controlling attempts by the simple mea-
sure of insisting that all rations be issued through their chiefs. After receiving the rations at the Fort Sill agency, the chiefs redistributed them among the women, who then took the food and other items to their camps, which were often located at the reservation outskirts, as far from the agency as possible. The effect was that Tatum dealt with only a few headmen; the rest of the Comanches appeared to
him as one undifferentiated mass. Shielded by anonymity, individual warriors remained beyond the official gaze and could enter and leave the reservation
untracked and unopposed. Instead of the Comanches becoming immersed into
reservation life, the reservation became immersed into the Comanche political economy. In fall 1870, for example, as Tosawa, Paruasemena, and other reservation chiefs came to listen a conciliatory message from Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ely S. Parker, Comanche and Kiowa war parties brought a large number of captives, mostly women and children, to the agency for ransoming. Although scandalized, Tatum felt morally obliged to rescue the captives from what he
deemed as savagery and abject Comanche womanhood. He redeemed fourteen
Americans and twelve Mexicans, paying as much as a hundred dollars per per-
son.¹²
The U.S. military elite observed such incidents with growing frustration,
which triggered an impassioned verbal exchange between the army and the
Indian Bureau. General Sheridan, now the commander of the Department of
the Missouri, ridiculed the Peace Policy: “If a white man commits murder or
robs, we hang him or send him to the penitentiary; if an Indian does the same, we have been in the habit of giving him more blankets.” Exacerbating the army’s frustration, many Comanche and Kiowa raiders used the reservation not only
as a supply depot but as an asylum. The Peace Policy stipulated that reservations were demilitarized zones under the Indian Office’s exclusive control and that army patrols could not pursue Indian raiders into reservations. Comanches and Kiowas exploited that loophole systematically, turning Fort Sill into a protective enclave for their raiding parties. The army’s impotence reached a symbolic nadir in 1870 when Comanches stole seventy-three mules from Fort Sill’s quartermaster corral. When the fort commander reported the incident to Commissioner Parker, he was ordered to take no action.¹³
Agent Tatum received intense criticism for his actions, but unwilling to concede the failure of Quaker policies, he put the blame on the shortcomings of the annuity system—corrupt contractors, delayed shipments, and substandard
goods. His argument was not groundless. The Indian Office used a large part
of the annuity funds to settle depredation claims filed against the Comanches,
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creating serious shortages of supplies at Fort Sill. But the biggest problem was rampant corruption, which led to numerous distortions: funds disappeared,
flour was infested with worms, bacon sacks contained stones, and annuity goods ended up with agency traders who made Indians pay for the goods they were
supposed to get for free. “What are we to do for food?” Tatum asked in summer 1869. “Their rations are not sufficient. They are licked up like the morning dew.
Seven days rations are gone in four.”¹⁴ Yet blaming the annuity system missed the fundamental point: most Comanches refused to stay on the reservation
simply because they could still support their families out of it. Although federal agents repeatedly proclaimed it obsolete, Comanches’ off-reservation economy remained viable, generating a strong pull to the plains.
By the turn of the 1860s and 1870s, the bison ecology had stabilized, thanks to steady rains and Comanches’ systematic search for alternative sources of sustenance. Indeed, there
is tantalizing evidence suggesting that Comanches had found a way to regulate the ebb and flow of bison numbers through cattle raiding and beef consumption. In 1872 federal agents brought a Cherokee, Creek, and
Seminole delegation to Fort Sill to meet with the Comanches, Kiowas, Nai-
shans, Cheyennes, and Arapahos in an attempt to convince the nomads to be-
come farmers. When told that the bison would soon die off, a Yamparika speaker retorted that “there were yet millions of Buffalo, and there was no danger on that hand.” But if the herds “might fail,” he continued, “the Comanches had
determined to hunt buffalo only next winter, then they would allow them to
breed a year or two without molestation, and they would rely on Texas cattle for subsistence meantime.” Confident in the viability and validity of their way of life, Yamparikas labeled the Cherokees, Creeks, and Seminoles as “an old dirty inefficient looking set, hardly capable of managing their own affairs.” “We don’t take much stock in them,” they concluded.¹⁵
If hunting remained viable, raiding thrived. In the late 1860s, the Texas cattle industry entered its first boom phase, creating new opportunities for Comanche poachers. Texas ranches became bigger, but their size made them harder
to defend against Comanche raiders, who could enter and exit the open range
pastures undetected. The first northbound cattle drives from 1867 on provided another target for Comanches. Managed by a small number of cowboys and va-queros, the early trail trains were vulnerable to guerrilla attacks, and Comanche raiders drove off whole herds along the Goodnight-Loving Trail, which skirted Comanchería along the Pecos valley. According to one report, Texas lost 6,255
horses and 11,395 head of cattle to Indian pillaging between 1866 and 1873, but these data were incomplete and the real losses may have been several times
higher. In 1869 the citizens of Jack County in central Texas claimed a loss of
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fifty thousand dollars’ worth of horses to pillaging in the month of April alone, and in 1871, in the space of three months, Comanches brought more than thirty thousand head of Texas cattle to New Mexico. Comanches also raided in southwestern Indian Territory, whose western portion lay on their main war trail into Texas. Most attacks fell on immigrant Indians—the Chickasaws filed 123 separate depredation claims to agent Tatum between 1869 and 1873—but not even
Fort Sill agency was safe from Comanche raiders.¹⁶
As before, the Comanche cattle raiding remained closely linked to New Mexi-
can markets through the comanchero commerce, although the United States
had begun to take more resolute steps to curb the trade. In 1869, realizing that the comanchero commerce was one of the key resources supporting the off-reservation Comanche rancherías, General Sheridan ordered all New Mexicans
found on the plains with cattle to be seized and their stock killed. Within two years, the army had established a patrol line on New Mexico’s eastern flank, arrested several trading convoys, and recovered more than one thousand head of livestock. But although the pressure strained the Comanche-comanchero trade, it did not suppress it. Comanches and comancheros pooled their resources in
new ways and began to transform their enterprise into a paramilitary under-
ground activity in which the division between producers and buyers became
increasingly blurred. Avoiding army patrols along the large cart trails, comancheros, sometimes disguised as bison hunters, took smaller unmarked paths to the hidden trading canyons of the Llano Estacado, where they often accompanied Comanches on raids into Texas. Herman Lehmann, a Texan who was cap-
tured and adopted by Comanches, remembered how 60 New Mexicans joined
140 Comanches to stampede and seize “a big herd being driven to Kansas.”
Comanches, in turn, provided military escorts for comanchero caravans returning to New Mexico with packs of cattle. Thus, even as their space to maneuver was shrinking, Comanches and comancheros preserved their age-old relationship. One arrested comanchero described the commerce in the early 1870s as a
“regular business.” The key sites, Muchoque and Quitaque, were still operative, drawing hundreds of Comanches to trade in “arms, ammunition, cloth, flour,
bread, sugar, coffee, etc.”¹⁷
Few of the American dignitaries at the Medicine Lodge treaty talks in 1867
expected the Comanches to last on the plains for long. American representatives believed that the Plains Indian way of life was already disintegrating and that the United States could therefore afford to be generous. The U.S. government granted the Comanches the right to reside on their former lands as long as there were enough bison for successful hunts, but the concession stemmed from the
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conviction that both the buffalo and the Comanche culture were mere years
away from extinction. In fact, even Paruasemena, who so fiercely defied the
commissioners’ demands, seemed to have abandoned hopes for long-term sur-
vival on the plains. He had visited Washington four years earlier and witnessed the immense infrastructure—the cities, factories, railroads, telegrams, infinite farms—that was propelling so many settlers and soldiers to the West. “It is too late,” he said. “The white man has the country which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die.”¹⁸
Yet as the new decade dawned, there were no signs of capitulation. Coman-
chería, in American minds a defunct political unit since 1867, still existed in fact. Most Comanches continued to live on the open plains, chasing and hunting the bison, stealing and trading horses and cattle, raiding and ransoming captives. The U.S. government insisted that those Comanches were reservation Indians who visited the plains seasonally, but in reality Comanches visited the reservation seasonally and then only to seek annuities and asylum. The imperfectly agreed-on stipulations of the Medicine Lodge Treaty stated that Comanches should limit their off-reservation activities to hunting and stay within the confines of the bison range, but Comanches were militarily and commercially
active from Indian Territory to New Mexico and from Kansas to central Texas.
Although they now numbered less than five thousand, they had buttressed their political and military strength by forming close bonds with New Mexicans,
Kiowas, Naishans, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes. Some Comanches believed that
they had established a new equilibrium between their needs and those of the
environment, and given their extraordinary haul of stolen livestock from Texas in 1871, they may well have believed they would be hunting, raiding, and trading in the Southwest forever.¹⁹
The continued existence of Comanches and their allies on the southern
plains collided with the United States’ desire to make the Great Plains and the Southwest safe for agrarianism, industrialism, and free-labor capitalism. Americans dreamt of a new empire of rails, ranches, farms, and firm borders, which was diametrically at odds with the Comanche political economy of hunting,
raiding, ransoming, and fluid borders. American boosters proclaimed the rise of the cattle kingdom in Texas, and sheepherding was on the verge of becoming big business in New Mexico, but both enterprises were circumscribed by an
inability to expand onto the rangelands of the Llano Estacado and the Texas
Panhandle. In Texas, moreover, long stretches of the settlement frontier were again collapsing under Comanche pressure, and in Kansas tens of thousands of homesteaders were crammed in the eastern part of the state, demanding that the upper Arkansas valley and its environs be cleared of all Indians.²⁰
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For federal Indian officials, the Comanche situation was a stinging embarrassment: half a decade after the Civil War had eradicated institutionalized slavery, Comanches were trafficking in human merchandise on U.S. soil and with U.S.
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agents. The distressed settlers, sheep and cattle magnates, and government officials directed their frustration at the Peace Policy, which in their view had weakened rather than strengthened the United States’ hold on the Indians. They
found a powerful ally in the military elite, who had opposed the Peace Policy from the beginning for strategic and personal reasons: the end of the Civil War and the subsequent reduction of the army had closed avenues for promotion,
which only another war could reopen.²¹
The opponents of the Peace Policy found their opportunity in May 1871,
when a Comanche and Kiowa raiding party attacked a supply train near Fort
Richardson, killing and mutilating seven teamsters. The raiders narrowly missed General Sherman, who was on an inspection tour in Texas. Hearing of the attack, Sherman improvised a policy change, ordering four cavalry companies to pursue the raiders and, if necessary, to continue the chase into the Fort Sill reservation. He then stormed to Fort Sill to confront agent Tatum. The flustered
agent conceded that the Quaker experiment was failing. On the next ration day, Tatum authorized the soldiers to arrest three Kiowa chiefs—Satanta, Satank,
and Big Tree—and send them to Texas for civil trial. His Quaker ideology crumbling, Tatum asked the army to pursue the Kwahadas and Kotsotekas into Texas, confiscate their stolen stock, and force them to enter the reservation “as kindly as the circumstances will admit.” Although the Peace Policy remained the official policy, by fall 1871 it had become a dead letter on the southern plains. Tatum was replaced in early 1873 by an agent more committed to Quaker principles, but by that time hard action had become the norm.²²
When planning Comanche campaigns, the U.S. Army was able to draw on
its rapidly accumulating experience in fighting the Plains Indians. The Lakota wars had revealed that regular soldiers, although armed with Colt revolvers and Winchester repeating rifles, were a poor match for the highly motivated and
mobile Indian warriors, convincing the military leadership that the army needed a decisive numerical advantage to defeat Plains Indians on the battlefield. But numbers were exactly what the army lacked. The eastern public, weary of war
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