The Comanche Empire
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and eager for normalcy, was unwilling to finance Indian wars in the West. Young men were equally unenthused: the prospect of fighting Indians for meager pay and under vigorous discipline on the distant Great Plains drew few volunteers.
The army’s main instrument in Indian wars was therefore the light cavalry, composed of ten regiments, approximately five thousand men in total.
Short of troops and wary of open battles, the army set out to deprive the
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Comanches of shelter and sustenance by destroying their winter camps, food
supplies, and horse herds. By the early 1870s this kind of total warfare against entire populations was an established practice in the U.S. Army. Sherman had pioneered it against the Confederacy in his “March to the Sea,” and Sheridan had introduced a stripped-down version of it to the plains in his 1868–69 winter campaign against the Cheyennes. Culminating on the Washita River where
the Seventh Cavalry killed nearly a hundred noncombatants and eight hundred
horses and mules, Sheridan’s campaign broke Cheyenne resistance on the cen-
tral plains. This success convinced the army that targeting civilians and economic resources was the most efficient—and since it shortened the conflict, the most humane—way to subdue the Indians. But the army could not simply duplicate
Sheridan’s straightforward offensive against the Comanches, who ranged over a vast territory and had a more diverse subsistence base than the Cheyennes. To subdue the Comanches, the army was forced to launch the largest and most
concentrated campaign of total war in the West.²³
It was only now, twenty-three years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,
that Comanches came to feel the depth of the United States’ expansionist power.
They had been exposed to that power before—most tangibly through Texas,
whose territorial expansion into Comanchería was a corollary of the South’s
economic expansion into Texas—but its full force had been curbed by several
factors: relative American disinterest toward the Great Plains, the Civil War, and finally the Peace Policy. It was therefore all the more shocking when the United States unleashed its military might on Comanchería in 1871. Whatever
difficulties the army may have faced in mobilizing soldiers for Indian wars, the troops that were mustered could draw on their nation’s enormous resources—
superior technology; bottomless supply lines; an elaborate communication system; and a strong, tested central state apparatus. More important perhaps, the troops formed the vanguard of an ascending nation-state driven by a civilizing mission and bent on expanding its frontiers through conquest and exclusionary borders. The U.S. Army that moved into Comanchería was an adversary unlike
any Comanches had encountered.²⁴
The invasion began from Texas, the state with the longest list of grievances against the Comanches. Comanche raids had taken a heavy toll in Texan lives
and livestock since the late 1850s, stunting the state’s projected economic
growth. Blocked by a wall of Comanche violence, the expanding Texas cattle
kingdom had bypassed the Great Plains, extending instead toward less desired regions in New Mexico and the Rocky Mountains. By 1871, Texans considered
the situation intolerable. Thriving postwar northern cities like Chicago and New York had a seemingly unquenchable hunger for western beef, Texas bustled with
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some five million head of readily marketable cattle, and the Kansas Pacific rail-head at Abilene linked the northern demand to Texas supply. The only element missing from a true cattle boom in Texas was unhindered access to the prime
pasturelands and the natural highways of the southern plains, much of which
still lay under Comanche control.
But if Texans felt victimized by the Comanches, they also possessed the
power and the determination to subdue them. There were several U.S. Army
detachments in the state, urged into action by ambitious and aggressive entrepreneurs and thousands of frontier settlers who were eager to see the Coman-
ches defeated. In fall 1871, under intense pressure from Texas officials, General Sherman ordered the Fourth Cavalry and two companies of the Eleventh Infantry, a total of some six hundred troops, to rein in the Comanches. Colonel Ranald Mackenzie took his troops through the Blanco Canyon into the eastern
Llano Estacado, where his Tonkawa scouts located a large Kwahada band led
by Quanah Parker. Brushing occasionally with small Indian squads, the cavalry pushed the Kwahadas deep into the llano until cold weather forced them to
pull back. The next spring Mackenzie tried again. He first instituted an effective border patrol system that was anchored in newly established Forts Richardson, Griffin, and Concho and then embarked on another long-range expedition on
the Llano Estacado, this time with some three hundred soldiers and Tonkawa
scouts. Supported with heavy supply columns, the troops spent several months tracking Comanche rancherías, charting war trails, and mapping comanchero
sites. Avoiding direct engagements, Mackenzie wore down the Comanches by
disrupting their seasonal cycle of activities. Constantly on the move, Comanches did not have the time to pasture and tend their horses, hunt buffalo, dry the meat, and prepare hides for winter lodges.
In September 1872 the Fourth Cavalry ambushed a Kwahada-Kotsoteka camp
of 262 lodges on the North Fork of the Red River and attacked. In a brief and brutal engagement, the soldiers killed twenty-four warriors, captured more than one hundred women and children, seized “a very large number of horses and
mules,” and burned all the lodges, robes, and food. Pursuing Comanche parties managed to recapture most of the animals in night raids, but the battle had left the Comanches destitute. They had lost all their winter supplies, and the capture of women prevented the families from performing the necessary winter preparations. Mackenzie took the captives to Fort Concho in Texas and sent out word that they would not be returned unless Comanches stopped raiding. Most of the Comanches complied and, unable to alleviate their hunger with stolen stock,
moved onto the reservation. Among the arrivals were Tebenanaka, Paruacoom,
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and other prominent Comanche chiefs who had visited the agency only fleet-
ingly before.²⁵
As Mackenzie closed in on the Comanches on the southern and central Llano
Estacado, the army opened a second front on the western Llano Estacado. Here the objective was to demolish the comanchero trade and cut off Comanches
from their source of weapons and imported food. Mirroring Mackenzie’s ac-
tions, Colonel Gordon Granger, the commander of New Mexico District, kept
his troops in the field through 1872. Ranging across the llano from the Canadian to the Río Hondo, the troops arrested comancheros, broke up trading camps,
and slaughtered stolen livestock. Short of men, Granger ordered surplus arms to be distributed to a group of more than ninety Texas cattlemen who set out in the summer of 1872 to recover stolen stock; the Texans spent three months on the Llano Estacado and in eastern New Mexico intimidating livestock buyers and
terrorizing ranches and villages that owned comanchero cattle. These actions all but destroyed the comanchero trade. In 1873 only a few comancheros headed
out to the plains, where they unsuccessfully tried to find the Comanches, who had either withdrawn to the reservation or scattered across the Llano Estacado to evade Mackenzie’s troops.²⁶
The year 1873 saw the Comanches and Americans moving simultaneously
toward both a tenuous accommodation and a massive, violent clash. With un-
precedented numbers of Comanches wintering at Fort Sill, the level of violence dropped sharply along the T
exas frontier. The Comanche bands in the reservation showed increased interest in farming, and the agents spoke about a new
spirit of compliance. By spring, Comanches had erected fifty houses near Fort Sill. They released several Anglo-American and Mexican captives, hoping to retrieve their relatives held at Fort Concho, and in April the army released all the detained Comanches. When the captives arrived at Fort Sill in June, American agents were able to observe firsthand the power of captivity to induce both conflict and conciliation. In a meeting with the officer who had brought the captives in, Comanche men, their families and honor now restored, “came forward, and
took him by the hand. Some of them, embracing him, expressed their gratitude and thankfulness for his care, attention, and uniform kindness to their women and children. . . . One of them told him that he should always respect a white soldier for his sake.”²⁷
That goodwill was put to a severe test in the fall of 1873. Earlier that year, at the request of the secretary of the interior, Texas Governor Edmund Davis agreed to release the Kiowa chiefs Satanta and Big Tree (Satank had died in an escape attempt), and in October the governor brought the two men to Fort Sill.
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Meeting with Kiowa and Comanche chiefs in a grand council at the fort, Davis demanded complete submission from both nations. They were to take up full-time farming, give up their weapons and horses, and withdraw from the Texas
plains at once. This ultimatum, which in effect would have annulled the Medicine Lodge Treaty, outraged the Indians, who insisted that the transition into reservation life was to be gradual. Federal Indian agents dissociated themselves from Davis’s demands and sided with Comanches and Kiowas, defending the
Medicine Lodge agreement, which granted the Indians the right to dwell on the southern plains as long as the bison herds yielded sufficient subsistence.²⁸
But even before Comanches and federal agents joined together to defy Gov-
ernor Davis at Fort Sill, an American onslaught on the southern plains bison had begun. Rooted in the industrial East, this assault had been set in motion three years earlier. In 1870 tanners in Philadelphia perfected a chemical process for turning bison hides into elastic industrial leather suitable for making machine belts, an innovation that unlocked the plains bison for industrial exploitation. The price of bison hides skyrocketed, and in 1871 hundreds of hide hunters swarmed onto the Great Plains to cash in on the latest western boom. Calling themselves buffalo runners, these professional hunters centered their operations on the central plains, which had been recently cleared of Cheyennes and were connected to the eastern markets by the Kansas Pacific Railroad. The slaughter was immense and wasteful, and by the end of 1872 the central plains were almost devoid of buffalo. By spring 1873, the hide hunters were eager to open new killing fields on the southern plains, even if it meant violating the Medicine Lodge Treaty, which reserved the bison herds below the Arkansas valley for Comanches’ and Kiowas’ exclusive use.²⁹
The U.S. Army, which occupied three forts along the Arkansas valley, now
stood to protect the Comanches and the bison from industrial absorption and
annihilation. But when buffalo hunters began pouring south of the river in spring 1873, the army units at Forts Lyon, Dodge, and Larned took no action to enforce the treaty line. By the summer, hundreds of runners roamed the high plains of southern Kansas and the Oklahoma Panhandle, operating out of base camps
on the Cimarron and North Canadian rivers. By now the army had adopted a
proactive role in the bison’s destruction, providing protection for hunting squads and supplying them with equipment and ammunition—“all you could use, all
you wanted, more than you needed,” as one runner marveled.
By year’s end, the hunters had reached the Canadian River, one of the key
winter habitats of the bison. In March 1874 a coalition of merchants built a settlement complex called Adobe Walls near the ruins of the Bents’ upper Canadian
River fort to serve as base for the hunting outfits. Other outfits operated west-
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ward out of Fort Griffin, which was transformed almost overnight into a thriving shipping town. Comanches, short of guns and ammunition and spread across
the canyons and river bottoms of the Llano Estacado in their winter camps,
mounted only sporadic resistance. When they returned to the open plains in
late spring, they entered an alien landscape, an industrial wasteland. Where the ground was not littered with skinned, rotting carcasses, the buffalo runners were annihilating the last isolated herds. The spring hunts, performed amidst American hunting squads, failed. Already weak from the winter’s hardships, Coman-
ches collapsed into starvation.³⁰
The devastation the Comanches faced that spring was more than material.
The buffalo was the foundation of their economy and the centerpiece of their cosmology, and the wholesale slaughter shook their existence at its core. Facing immediate economic, societal, and cultural collapse, Comanches looked both
backward and outward. Paralleling a dynamic that had already played itself out numerous times in the course of the United States’ westward expansion, they
embraced eschatological visions and pan-Indian resistance to keep their world from dying.
The catalyst was Isatai, a young Kwahada medicine man. His message, de-
livered to him through a powerful vision, was at once symbolic and pragmatic, blending a religious prophecy with a political agenda, and it bore a striking resemblance to the Ghost Dance movement that would sweep the Great Plains
fifteen years later. Isatai sought to beget the restoration of Comanche power through ritual invocation. If Comanches came together to share his puha (medicine power) and performed the Sun Dance, he preached, they could liquidate
the whites and pave the way for the buffalo’s return. He said he could raise the dead, stop bullets in midflight, and vomit all the cartridges the Comanches
would need. Like the Ghost Dance religion, Isatai’s message was at its core nativistic. Nations like the Wichitas, he said, had grown weaker on the reservation, suffering from disease, poverty, and cultural declension. Preservation of old ways and unified resistance were the only ways to survival.³¹
Isatai’s apocalyptic prophecy found a fertile ground among the anguished
Comanches. As word of his message spread across the southern plains, bands
began to gravitate toward a designated meeting place on Elk Creek near the
North Fork of the Red River, the center of what was left of Comanchería. Isatai’s preaching also drew Comanche bands from the reservation, where things had
gone from bad to worse during the winter of 1873–74. The troubles began when the superintendent of the Indian Office, pressured by Texas Governor Davis,
decided to withhold annuity distributions until Comanches turned over indi-
viduals who had raided Texas settlements. The chiefs considered this a decla-
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ration of war, and although the embargo was soon revoked, the incident left
relations strained. Worse still, when the agents resumed distributions, the rations proved utterly inadequate. In May, with famine spreading in the reservation, the majority of Comanches and some Kiowas moved to Elk Creek. In early June
the Indians performed the Sun Dance, and within days, the revival movement
reached the Cheyennes and Arapahoes at the Darlington agency. By mid-June,
some seven hundred warriors and their families had gathered on Elk Creek to
eradicate the whites and reclaim their lives.³²
The Elk Creek medicine camp was the closest the southern plains Indi-
ans came to forming a collective front against the United States, but like most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century attempts of pan-Indian resistance, it was underm
ined by internal disputes and divisions. Although Comanches, Kiowas,
Cheyennes, and Arapahoes had hunted, raided, and lived in multiethnic com-
munities since the 1860s, tribal lines were still visible. Those lines, moreover, were becoming harder rather than softer under the desperate circumstances,
and the incipient coalition nearly foundered in its Elk Creek cradle. The various factions, each facing its own set of ordeals, struggled to find a common course of action. Some, including Quanah Parker, demanded that the coalition attack the Tonkawa villages at Fort Griffin to punish the Tonkawas for serving the U.S.
Army as scouts. Others, most likely Yamparikas, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes,
wanted to strike the Anglo hunters in the Texas Panhandle. Still others, most of them probably Kwahadas, insisted on launching a concerted attack against
Texans to avenge the relatives who had been slain by Mackenzie’s troops. A few Penateka, Yamparika, and Nokoni chiefs refused to commit to any violence and returned to the agency to alert the agents.³³
The coalition that finally moved against the buffalo hunters was severely fractured. At dawn on June 27, 1874, Isatai and Quanah Parker led a massive frontal charge at the Adobe Walls. Although facing only twenty-eight hunters and one woman, the Indians soon lost their momentum against the complex’s thick log-and-sod walls and the hunters’ long-range, rapid-fire buffalo rifles. Several warriors died, and when Isatai’s horse was killed by a stray shot, the medicine man’s support evaporated. The Indians maintained a desultory siege for several days and then split up.³⁴
If the battle itself was inconclusive, its aftermath was a disaster for the allied Indians. Immediately after the battle, Kwahadas launched a raid into Texas, while Cheyennes, together with some Comanches, attacked the farmers, overlanders,
and army detachments across southern Kansas and Colorado. This dispersal of
the coalition relived the pressure on the buffalo hunters, allowing them to continue their slaughter for another season. Fort Griffin on the Clear Fork of the
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Brazos River emerged as a major hide depot from which buffalo runners opened new killing ranges on the Texas plains. The military fort was soon supplemented with a thriving “Buffalo Town,” which served as a supply base for west- and northbound hunting squads and a shipping center to eastern markets. The southern