The Comanche Empire
Page 57
Conclusion
359
be understood. Recent debates over the roots and realities of the American empire have revealed a disconcerting tendency in the national historiography. Resuscitating once more the enduring fallacy of American exceptionalism, many
prominent historians have insisted that the nineteenth-century United States was not an imperial power. The arguments for the position are many, but they all rest on the dogged belief that the United States expanded across a continent so sparsely populated that the land was essentially free for the taking. Westering Americans, the argument goes, did not face densely populated and highly
organized indigenous societies, which in turn meant that their expansion was not a case of imperialism; it was an occupation of a semi-virgin land. America’s westward expansion was punctuated by instances of overt imperialism—the
Mexican-American War being the most blatant one—but those instances did
not involve Native Americans.¹⁸ This mainstream interpretation is diametri-
cally at odds with the vision of this book. When Americans invaded the Mexi-
can North with such brutal efficiency in 1846, they did not just clash with the Mexican nation: they plunged into an old, complex, and still evolving history of indigenous imperialism.
The legacy of the Comanche empire is imprinted on the modern-day politi-
cal map of North America, but it has also left its mark on North America’s ethnic landscape. The Comanche slave complex—the capture, assimilation, commodification, and ransoming of thousands of northern Mexicans in the nine-
teenth century—profoundly shaped the process of mestizaje, the mixing and reconfiguration of racial identities, in what now is the U.S. Southwest. Comanche captivity, it has been argued, had a decisive impact on the articulations of race, nation, and citizenship in the Southwest by generating transnational networks of adoption and affiliation, by moving captives between supposedly fixed racial categories, and by creating fragmented and conflicting ethnic identifica-tions. Comanches’ cross-border captive traffic, which continued into the 1870s, framed official norteamericano discourses about the place that Mexicans would occupy in the U.S. Southwest, promoting the idea of a distinctive transborder Mexican identity. In the minds of U.S. policymakers who came in direct contact with the human products of Comanche captivity—Mexicans who appeared indistinguishable from Comanches, Mexicans who were neither white nor Indian,
Mexicans who refused to leave their Indian masters and seemed to conspire
with Comanches against U.S. authority—Mexicanness became entwined with
Indianness and thus incompatible with Anglo-Americanness and U.S. citizen-
ship. Comanchería and its slave system, in other words, formed a crucible which forged Anglo-American understandings of Mexicans as a mixed, stigmatized,
and subordinated class.
360
Conclusion
To subvert such Anglo-American constructions of racial mixing and impurity,
many Chicanas and Chicanos in the U.S. Southwest have attempted to reclaim
for themselves a Spanish identity, but some, mostly working-class New Mexi-
can mestizos, have actively embraced Comanchería-derived models of identity.
They have memorialized their historical connections to Comanchería in art-
work, clothing, and oral traditions, and they reenact those linkages in popular local performances of “Los Comanches.” In doing so, they disassociate themselves from the privileged coalition of Anglo- and Spanish Americans, under-
mine the hegemonic pretensions of that coalition, and promote a distinct brand Chicana/o consciousness that traces its roots to the ethnic melting pot that was Comanchería.¹⁹ Their struggle for identity evokes the multilayered, often painful history of the North American Southwest and northern Mexico, a history
that hangs suspended between the Comanche empire of the past and the Anglo-
American empire of the present.
Beyond illuminating colonial dynamics and Indian-white relations in a par-
ticular place, in this book I have attempted to expand our understanding of the role of indigenous peoples in the making, and unmaking, of colonial worlds. As such it is fundamentally a study of indigenous agency—its character, contours, and capacity to influence large-scale historical processes. But human agency works in two directions, for the very achievements that make societies wealthy and powerful often lead or contribute to their downfall. Accordingly, while I set out to show in this book how the interplay between the Comanches’ actions and external conditions made them the dominant people in the colonial Southwest, in the end it had to become an examination of how that interplay contributed to the collapse of the Comanche empire. To acknowledge that Comanches
were complicit in their own demise is not to downplay the destructiveness of the United States’ political, economic, and military expansion into the Southwest after 1850, but rather to recognize the full potential of indigenous agency, its positive, negative, predictable, and unpredictable dimensions. To paraphrase one prominent historian, recognizing human fallibility in the actions of Native peoples is the basis for writing compassionate Indian history.²⁰
Comanches spent their tenure on the southern plains and in the Southwest as
an imperial power, and they also fell like one. Like most empires, the Comanche empire carried within itself the seeds of its destruction; its collapse, at least at the beginning, came from within. In their drive to maintain a large population base and control commerce in the midcontinent, Comanches fashioned a prodigious production system that eventually collapsed under its own bloated size.
What had begun as a self-sustaining, ecologically stable economy evolved into
Conclusion
361
a surplus-generating market economy that was chronically off balance with its ecological base. The prolonged dry spell between 1845 and 1865 brought on a
full-scale crisis, but that crisis was rooted in a classic Malthusian squeeze. There had simply been too many Comanches (and their allies) raising too many horses and hunting too many bison on too small a land base.
In the 1850s, with the bison herds declining sharply, the center caved in. In the space of a few years Comanches lost the bases of their power. Their population plummeted, their trading empire collapsed, and they stopped collecting tribute.
They surrendered large tracts of Comanchería to Texas and splintered into local factions that no longer operated as a cohesive confederacy. The decline was remarkably rapid, and it tells a great deal about the nature of the power system the Comanches had built. The Comanche empire was not a tightly structured,
self-sustaining entity but rather a continually transmuting set of intersecting networks of power, and when those networks began to crumble, so did the system
itself. There was no imperial substructure or ideology to support a slow, gradual decline whereby subjugated peripheries uphold a decaying center. There could be no imperial afterlife.
The outbreak of the Civil War and the onset of a wetter climatic cycle in the mid-1860s allowed Comanches to experience a brief but intense regeneration,
which saw them reclaiming parts of their territory and building a new economy on large-scale cattle raiding and full-blown horse pastoralism. But this revival only made the final, inevitable defeat all the more shocking and harrowing. The end of the Civil War heralded the extinction of all sovereign and separatist political systems in the regions the United States claimed as its own—whether
those systems existed in the South or in the West. The years between 1865 and 1877 were a period of massive national consolidation, which saw the reduction of the South to a conquered captive territory, the wholesale dispossession of some twenty indigenous nations on the Great Plains, an explosive takeoff of free-labor corporate capitalism, and the introduction of new racial policies that went far beyond the old black-and-white dichotomy.²¹ The final
subjugation of the Comanches was but a small chapter in this sweeping imperial reorganization.
Unleashing its overwhelming economic and technological might, the United
States pushed the remains of Comanche power aside with a brief, concentrated scorched-earth campaign. Less an elimination of a military threat than an eradication of a way of life, it was hardly the stuff of which national myths are made.
The campaign, along with the Comanche civilization it demolished, was widely ignored and easily forgotten.
This page intentionally left blank
Abbreviations
AC
Alfred Barnaby Thomas, ed. and trans., After Coronado: Spanish
Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696–1727 (Norman: Univer-
sity of Oklahoma Press, 1935)
ADM
Herbert Eugene Bolton, ed., Athanase de Mézières and the
Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1768–1780, 2 vols. (Cleveland: Arthur H.
Clark, 1914)
AGN:CA
Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Ramo de Californias,
Photostatic copy, Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque
AGN:HI
Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Ramo de Historias,
Photostatic copy, Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico,
Albuquerque
AGN:PI
Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Ramo de Provincias
Internas, Photostatic copy, Zimmerman Library, University of New
Mexico, Albuquerque
ARCIA
U.S. Office of Indian Affairs, Annual Report of the Commissioner of
Indian Affairs
BA
Béxar Archives, General Manuscript Series, 1717–1836, University
of Texas at Austin, Microfilm copy, Zimmerman Library, University
of New Mexico, Albuquerque
CO
Chronicles of Oklahoma
FF
Alfred Barnaby Thomas, ed. and trans., Forgotten Frontiers: A Study
of the Spanish Indian Policy of Don Juan Bautista de Anza, Gover-
nor of New Mexico, 1777–1787 (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, 1942)
363
364
Abbreviations
GPO
Government Printing Office
HD
Charles Wilson Hackett, ed., Historical Documents Relating to New
Mexico, Nueva Vizcaya, and Approaches Thereto, to 1773, 3 vols.
(Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1923–37)
IPTS
Dorman H. Winfrey and James M. Day, eds., The Indian Papers
of Texas and the Southwest, 1825–1916, 5 vols. (Austin: Pemberton,
1966)
JAH
Journal of American History
LR
Letters Received
LR:OIA
Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, Record Group 75,
Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, M234, National Archives
Microfilm Publication
MANM
Mexican Archives of New Mexico, New Mexico State Records
Center and Archives, Santa Fe
NAMP
National Archives Microfilm Publication
NMA
New Mexico State Archives, Center for Southwest Research, Uni-
versity of New Mexico, Albuquerque
NMHR
New Mexico Historical Review
PINM
Alfred Barnaby Thomas, ed., The Plains Indians and New Mexico,
1751–1778: A Collection of Documents Illustrative of the History of
the Eastern Frontier of New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of
New Mexico Press, 1940)
PT
Charles Wilson Hackett, ed., Pichardo’s Treatise on the Limits of
Texas and Louisiana, 4 vols. (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1931–46)
PV
Noel M. Loomis and Abraham P. Nasatir, Pedro Vial and the Roads
to Santa Fe (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967)
SANM I
Spanish Archives of New Mexico, New Mexico State Records Cen-
ter and Archives, Santa Fe, series I, land grant records
SANM II
Spanish Archives of New Mexico, New Mexico State Records Cen-
ter and Archives, Santa Fe, series II, provincial records
SHQ
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
RCS
Records of the Central Superintendency, Record Group 75, Records
of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, M856, National Archives Microfilm
Publication
TSA:RR
Texas State Archives, Austin, Texas Governor Hardin Richard Run-
nels Records
Notes
I N T R O D U C T I O N . R E V E R S E D C O L O N I A L I S M
1. The term Lords of the South Plains was coined by Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel in their classic ethnography The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954).
2. For the genesis and persistence of this view, see Rupert Norval Richardson, The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement: A Century and a Half of Savage Resistance to the Advancing Frontier (Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1933); Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches; W. W. Newcomb, Jr., The Indians of Texas: From Prehistoric to Modern Times (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), 155–56; T. R. Fehrenbach, Comanches: The Destruction of a People (New York: Da Capo, 1974); and Martha McCollough, Three Nations, One Place: A Comparative Ethnohistory of Social Change among the Comanches and Hasinais during Spain’s Colonial Era, 1689–1821 (New York: Routledge, 2004). Despite their differing approaches and emphases, all of these works depict Comanche actions as reactive, defensive strategies of containment, attempts to resist European expansion and establish some measure of control over the process of colonial incorporation.
3. For Powhatans, see James Axtell, The Rise and Fall of the Powhatan Empire: Indians in the Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1995). The idea of the Iroquois as empire-builders was replaced in the 1980s by the idea of a “Phantom Iroquois Empire,” a deliberate fiction aimed at advancing Britain’s imperial ambitions. By exaggerating Iroquois’ sway over other indigenous groups while also insisting that the Iroquois be subordinate to the British empire, British officials claimed control over vast stretches of the American interior. See Richard Aquila, The Iroquois Restoration: Iroquois Diplomacy, 1701–1754 (1983; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); and Francis Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984). More recently, historians have recast the Iroquois as a nation of diplomats, traders, and warriors struggling to survive in a world dislocated by European colonialism. See Daniel K. Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1992); and Matthew Dennis, Cultivating a 365
366
Notes to Pages 3–5
Landscape of Peace: Iroquois-European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). The Osages, too, should be mentioned here. Willard H. Rollings has used the term hegemony to describe the Osages’ relationships with their Native neighbors on the southern prairies along and around the lower Arkansas valley in the eighteenth century. More recently, Kathleen DuVal has used the metaphor of empire to describe these regional relationships.
See Willard H. Rollings, The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992); and Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Phila
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
For Lakotas as expansionist, imperial people, see Richard White, “The Winning of the West: The Expansion of the Western Sioux in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” JAH 65 (Sep.
1978): 319–43; James O. Gump, The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); and Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” JAH 90 (Dec. 2003): 859–62.
4. Several recent works have shown how Native cultural forms and social controls—the ways in which cross-cultural matters were negotiated and agreed on—prevailed in Indian-white contact zones outside European colonies. Faced with overwhelming multitudes of Native peoples on their frontiers, European newcomers were able to protect their territorial holdings and imperial interests only if they respected and adapted to indigenous cultural conventions. In this book, in contrast, I show how a single Native American power, the Comanches, achieved broad-spectrum dominance—military, political, economic, commercial, social, as well as cultural—within its expanding sphere of influence that came to include several European colonial outposts. Rather than being sites of European imperial presence in the midst of indigenous domains, I argue, colonial New Mexico, Texas, and northern Mexico were incorporated into the Comanche empire as tributary client states; exploited raiding hinterlands; and sources of trade, military allies, technology, and slaves. For significant works emphasizing the persistence of Native cultural forms and mores in the face of European colonizing efforts, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1998); Juliana Barr, “Beyond Their Control: Spaniards in Native Texas,” in Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control on Spain’s North American Frontiers, ed. Jesús F. de la Teja and Ross Frank (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 149–77; and DuVal, Native Ground.
5. The Comanche case bears resemblance to many other historical cases across the world in which nomadic societies have dominated and exploited sedentary urban societies. For an argument of Mongols as a parasitical “shadow empire” presiding over China, see Thomas J. Barfield, “The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier,” in Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, ed. Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D’Altroy, Kathleen D.