plains bison were now under assault from both the north and the south. Aggravating the damage, 1874 was a drought year, which further narrowed the bison’s chances of survival.³⁵
The battle of Adobe Walls hardened the federal government’s resolution to
break Indian resistance. President Grant and the Interior Department abolished the last remnants of the Peace Policy on the southern plains and assigned hundreds of troops for a massive field operation. All Comanches and Kiowas were ordered to return to the agency by August 3 or they would be denounced as hostiles and hunted down. When the deadline passed, some two thousand Coman-
ches and Kiowas were still on the plains. Generals Sheridan and Sherman sent in five columns, some fourteen hundred soldiers from Kansas, Indian Territory, Texas, and New Mexico, coordinating them to converge at Comanche and
Kiowa sanctuaries in the canyons along the Caprock of the Texas Panhandle.
The advancing troops engaged the Comanches only once, but their looming
presence prevented fleeing Comanche bands from searching for the few remain-
ing bison and making preparations for the winter.³⁶
On September 28, 1874, Tonkawa scouts led Mackenzie’s Fourth Cavalry to
the upper end of the Palo Duro Canyon, a wide, forty-five-mile-long crevasse at the north end of Comanches’ panhandle refuge. At the bottom of the canyon
Mackenzie saw a serpentine village of several hundred Kwahadas, Kiowas, and
Cheyennes, apparently unaware of his approach. He ordered a surprise attack.
Scattered across the canyon floor, the Indians failed to organize a united defense. They fled onto the open plains, leaving their possessions behind. Mackenzie called off a chase and had the camp and the supplies destroyed. The soldiers piled the covers and poles of more than two hundred tipis, hundreds of robes and blankets, and thousands of pounds of dried meat, flour, and sugar in a huge mound and set it on fire. They rounded up more than 1,400 horses. Mackenzie
gave 350 animals to the Tonkawas and ordered the rest shot.³⁷
The body count after the battle of the Palo Duro Canyon revealed only three
dead Comanches. But it is precisely that paucity of killing that makes the battle such a poignant symbol of Comanches’ collapse, for it underscores the fact that their defeat was not a military but an economic one. In their battles with the U.S.
Army in the early 1870s, the Comanches suffered only a few hundred casualties, yet their population plummeted from four or five thousand in 1870 to around
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WHITE
BISON
Fort Lyon
HUNTERS
Ar
Fort Larned
kansa
Fort Dodge
s R.
N
5th Infantry &
COLORADO
6th Cavalry
NEW MEXICO
KANSAS
TERRITORY
INDIAN TERRITORY
Camp Supply
TEXAS
Fort Union
8th Cavalry
Canadian R.
Adobe
Canad
Walls
ian R.
Palo Duro Canyon
10th Cavalry &
11th Infantry
Kiowa and
Fort Sill
Comanche
Reservation
rock
Red R.
ap
C
6 cavalry troops &
HUNTERS
N
2 infantry companies
O
ISB
4th Cavalry
ETI
B
H
Fort Griffin
raz
W
os R.
PecosR
Fort Concho
.
Colorado R.
Río Grande
Military fort
0
50
100
150
200 miles
Battle site
U.S. Army movements
20. Invasion of Comanchería, 1874. Map by Bill Nelson.
fifteen hundred in 1875.³⁸ The cause was a systematic assault on the Comanches’
economy, which after the midcentury drought crisis had become untenable. The Comanches trapped on the floor of the Palo Duro Canyon had not suffered decisive defeats in the hands of U.S. troops, but they were a society fatally crippled by poverty, malnutrition, and a loss of cultural order. With their raiding-trading economy extinguished and the bison herds vanishing, their subsistence was reduced to the few supplies they had carried with them. As they fled the Palo Duro for the plains, they could see a thick smoke rising from the canyon, and with it their last tie to independence dissolving in the air.
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341
After Palo Duro, most Comanche bands headed toward the reservation, this
time to stay. A few small bands refused to surrender, and they scattered across the canyonlands of the Texas Panhandle, where they lived through the winter on roots and rodents. Facing starvation, they yielded. During the winter and spring, small groups of Comanches trudged to Fort Sill, where they were processed for a new life. They were stripped of their horses, weapons, and remaining possessions. Women and children were removed from their husbands and fathers and
placed in separate camps. Men accused of particular crimes were put in irons to await trial and expulsion to Florida. The rest of the warriors, many of whom had never been in the reservation, were locked in a roofless and windowless icehouse. They slept on a stone floor, huddled in U.S. army blankets. In the morning, they received their first rations when the soldiers threw chunks of raw meat over the wall.³⁹
CONCLUSION
The Shape of Power
The icehouse at the Fort Sill agency was not a burial place of a people—
the Comanche nation would endure and, in time, flourish again—but it was a
burial place of an era. Past and present fell abruptly apart as new peoples, new economic regimes, and new ways of life descended onto the Great Plains, now
eerily devoid of any material or geopolitical marks of Comanche presence.
Comanches had ruled the Southwest for well over a century, but they left be-
hind no marks of their dominance. There were no deserted fortresses or decaying monuments to remind the newcomers of the complex imperial history they
were displacing. Envisioning a new kind of empire, one of cities, railroads, agricultural hinterlands, and real estate, Americans set out to tame, commodify, and carve up the land. Buffalo runners all but eradicated the southern plains bison in the space of a few years, and Texas ranchers laid down a maze of cattle trails that crisscrossed the region. Settlers turned the open steppes into irrigated fields and fenced farms, and boosters conjured towns, highways, and railroad tracks on old Comanche camping sites. With each new layer of American progress, the memory of the Comanches and their former power grew dimmer.¹
For Americans in the East, the Comanche nation faded even more quickly.
In summer 1875, as the last Comanche bands drifted to Fort Sill to surrender, the United States was preparing elaborate centennial celebrations to display its industrial might, continental reach, and hard-won national unity. But a few days before the July Fourth grand finale, disquieting news arrived from the northern Great Plains: the Lakotas and their Cheyenne and Arapahoe allies had annihilated Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, more than two hundred soldiers, in the Little Bighorn valley in Montana. From then on, America’s attention was absorbed by the campaigns against the Lakotas, which did not end until 1890 at the horror of 342
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Wounded Knee. By that time, Lakotas were fixed in the national consciousness as the “noble and doomed savages” of Buffalo Bill’s hugely successful Wild West Show. They became mu
ltipurpose icons, immensely useful and marketable as
the sounding board of America’s shifting feelings of awe, terror, and remorse toward Native Americans and their fate. Fictionalized beyond recognition, Sitting Bull’s ever-malleable stage Lakotas came to symbolize all Indians of the Great Plains, then of the West, and then of all North America, while the other Indian nations were pushed to the margins of collective memory. Already deprived of their traditional lands and lifestyle, Comanches were now deprived of their place in history.
The waning popular interest stifled potential scholarly interest. During the sixty years that followed their confinement to reservation, the Comanches drew little scholarly attention and inspired few academic studies. Scholars did not rediscover them until the 1930s, when two prominent Texas historians, Walter Prescott Webb and Rupert Norval Richardson, gave them a key role in their
renowned studies of the Great Plains. The Comanches presented by Webb and
Richardson were, however, startlingly different from the Comanches European
colonists had known in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Where the Spaniards and French had viewed Comanches variously as diplomats, raiders,
allies, foes, traders, spouses, and kinspeople, Webb and Richardson, drawing heavily on the records of mid-nineteenth-century American settlers and soldiers, portrayed them simply as warriors. And whereas Spanish and Mexican sources
spoke of the overwhelming economic, political, and cultural power of Coman-
ches, Webb and Richardson depicted them as a military obstacle to America’s
preordained expansion across the continent.²
Thus emerged the idea of the Comanche barrier to the westward-expanding
American frontier, a metaphor that recast Comanches as savages who resisted
conquest with raw military prowess but were devoid of other qualities that
make human societies strong and resilient. Reconceived in the minds of early twentieth-century Americans, Comanches were equated with other natural obstacles—aridity, deserts, and distance—that encumbered the colonization of the American West. Aggressive and impulsive, powerful yet passive, they blended
into the natural environment to form a potent, essentially nonhuman impedi-
ment to the U.S. empire.
This tendency to simultaneously naturalize and demonize the Comanches—
and, arguably, to rationalize their subjugation—is apparent in Webb’s 1958 presi-dential address to the American Historical Association, in which he nostalgically contemplated the forces that shaped his writing in his Texas home. “In the hard-packed yard and on the encircling red-stone hills was the geology, in the pasture
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the desert botany and all the wild animals of the plains save the buffalo,” he mused. “The Indians, the fierce Comanches, had so recently departed, leaving memories so vivid and tales so harrowing that their red ghosts, lurking in every mott and hollow, drove me home all prickly with fear when I ventured too far.”
A generation later, novelist Cormac McCarthy offered in Blood Meridian what was perhaps the most troubling reenvisioning of the Comanches. He describes
the destruction of a crew of Anglo-American filibusters at the hands of beastlike Comanches who, without provocation or hesitation, abandon themselves on the
other side of humanity, “ripping off limbs, heads, gutting the strange white torsos and holding up great handfuls of viscera, genitals, some of the savages so slath-ered up with gore they might have rolled in it like dogs and some who fell upon the dying and sodomized them with loud cries to their fellows.”³
The unanthropocentric barrier metaphor trivialized the Comanches as a so-
ciety and, by extension, abridged their role as historical actors. By reducing them to a primal warrior society, Webb, Richardson, and the scores of historians and nonhistorians influenced by them created a caricature of Comanches’ culture
and their place in history. The Comanches who appeared in historical studies from the 1930s on terrorized the Spanish and Mexican frontier with relentless raids, but beyond that they merely occupied space. Weak in organization and
warlike by nature, they lacked the complex diplomatic, economic, and cultural arrangements that fasten peoples to their environments and instead relied on brutal, almost pathological raiding to defend their homelands. The narratives that spoke of different kinds of Comanches were marginalized. “Los Comanches,” the New Mexican conquest romance that captures Comanches’ penetrat-
ing influence on the political, economic, and cultural milieu of the early Southwest, was dismissed as local folklore and ignored by mainstream historians.
Thus, bit by bit, the nature and scope of Comanche power became distorted.
Memories of Comanches stirred horror and awe in twentieth-century Ameri-
cans like Webb—not because they conjured up impressions of imperial-scale
power but because they evoked images of nativistic resistance and mindless,
primitive violence. In 1974, a century after the battle of the Palo Duro Canyon, T. R. Fehrenbach, another renowned Texas historian, depicted Comanches as
“scattered bands of wanderers, never a nation,” and their system of power as a
“barrier [that] had stopped European penetration of these plains for almost two centuries. It did not show on maps; it had no shape or form. The Comanche
barrier was a wisp of smoke on the horizon, riders appearing suddenly on the ridges, shots and screams at sunset, horror under the summer moons.” Comanches, he concluded, “remained proud, savage, and aloof, determined to deal
with Europeans on their own terms. . . . Whether the stance was conscious or
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instinctive, the People had become a powerful barrier to all future movement across the plains.”⁴ Fehrenbach’s portrayal of a phantasmal Comanche barrier was a product of its time, and it represented how historians understood colonialism and Indian-white relations into the closing years of the twentieth century: European imperialism moves history; Native resistance is raw, violent savagery; and frontiers, if indigenous peoples have a hand in their making, are confusing, unsophisticated places.
My task in this book has been to recover Comanches as full-fledged humans
and undiminished historical actors underneath the distorting layers of historical memory and, in doing so, to provide a new vision of a key chapter of early American history. In these pages I have traced the evolution of a Comanche power
complex that was neither shapeless nor formless, a Comanche foreign policy that involved much more than plundering and killing, and Comanche people who
were neither savage nor nationless. Instead of merely defying white expansion through aggressive resistance, I have argued, Comanches inverted the projected colonial trajectory through multifaceted power politics that brought much of the colonial Southwest under their political, economic, and cultural sway.
How did this happen? How did a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers that
numbered only a few thousand in the early eighteenth century manage to chal-
lenge and eventually eclipse the ambitions of some of the world’s greatest empires? What gave Comanches their edge in the collision of cultures? And con-
versely, why was it that only the Comanches—among the hundreds of Native
American nations—managed to build an empire that eclipsed and subsumed
Euro-American colonial realms? In the preceding chapters I have emphasized
various mental and cultural traits, ranging from Comanches’ strategic flexibility to their willingness to embrace new ideas and innovations, but those are traits shared by most Native American societies. What was it that made Comanches
exceptional?
The historian’s instinct suggests that the Comanches’ extraordinary ascen-
dancy must have intersected with parallel Euro-American weakness
and dis-
interest, but in reality Comanches operated in one of the most fiercely contested imperial arenas in North America. The period from the early eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century was a time of intense struggle among Spain, France, Britain, the United States, and Mexico over the control of the southern Great Plains and the Southwest. In the minds of metropolitan strategists, the territory west of the lower Mississippi valley, north of the Río Grande, and east of the Rocky Mountains was an imperial borderland where the empires and emerging nation-states of North America were bound to collide and where
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their fates would be determined. Euro-American interest in that borderland was particularly intense from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, the period that also witnessed the zenith of Comanche power.
Rather than a reflection of Euro-American indifference, Comanches’ rise to
dominance stemmed from their own adaptive culture, their ability to harness
Euro-American resources—both material and nonmaterial—to their own ad-
vantage. Like the powerful Iroquois in the Northeast, Comanches were geo-
graphically fortunate: their homeland was both centrally and peripherally situated. Lying deep in the continental grasslands, Comanchería was distant from the major seaboard colonies and away from the main disease corridors along the heavily trafficked waterways. The inland location also meant that Comanches
were always situated between two rival colonial spheres: Spanish and Mexican settlements in New Mexico and Texas lay to the west and south, and French and American outposts on the lower Mississippi valley extended their spheres toward Comanchería from the east. This geopolitical setting permitted Comanches to
use one imperial regime as a counterweight when negotiating with another to
enforce political and commercial agreements or to compel Euro-Americans
to modify their aggressive policies. Their central location also gave them an access to multiple colonial and indigenous markets, each of which offered a distinctive combination of commodities and services.⁵
The Comanche Empire Page 54
