The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  53. Quote is from Marcy, Adventure, 159. For tekwʉ̲niwapi̲s, see Robinson and Armagost, Comanche Dictionary, 107.

  54. Cabello, Responses, BA 17:418. For Comanche coup system, see Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 246–50.

  55. Ruíz, Report, 10–11.

  56. Quotes are from, Ruíz, Report, 11; and Berlandier, Indians, 71.

  57. Marcy, Adventure, 156.

  58. For marital residence, see Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 140.

  59. Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 210–12; Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 36–38; and Morris W. Foster, Being Comanche: A Social History of an American Indian Community (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 58–59. Quote is from Neighbors, “Na-Ü-Ni,” 357.

  60. Quotes are from Burnet to Schoolcraft, Sep. 29, 1847, IPTS, 3:87; Marcy, Adventure, 158–59; and Report of G. W. Bonnell, 42. See also Berlandier, Indians, 39; Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 212–13; Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 38–39; and Robinson and Armagost, Comanche Dictionary, 107.

  61. Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 213–15. Quote is from José Francisco Ruíz, “‘Comanches’: Customs and Characteristics,” in The Papers of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, ed. Charles Adams Gulick, Jr., et al., 6 vols. (1920–27; reprint, Austin: Pemberton, 1968), 4:223.

  62. Quotes are from Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 213, 215; Marcy, Adventure, 157; and L. H.

  Williams to Thomas G. Western, Nov. 23, 1845, IPTS, 2:415. See also Neighbors, “Na-Ü-Ni,” 353.

  63. M. C. Fisher, “On the Arapahoe, Kiowa, and Comanche,” Journal of the Ethnological Society of London 1 (1869): 284; and Gregg, Commerce, 250–51.

  64. For Comanche abstinence, see Sánchez, “Trip to Texas,” 262; Burnet to Schoolcraft, Sep. 29, 1847, IPTS, 3:90; and Gregg, Commerce, 432. For Pawnees, see Richard White, The Roots of

  426

  Notes to Pages 273–276

  Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 191–92, 204. For connections between alcohol use and loss of economic and political autonomy among various Native North American groups, see Peter C. Mancall, Deadly Medicine: Indians and Alcohol in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

  65. James, Three Years, 243–44. For paraibo control, see also José Cortés, Views from the Apache Frontier: Report on the Northern Provinces of New Spain, ed. Elizabeth A. H. John, trans. John Wheat (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 82; and Eldredge to Houston, Dec. 8, 1843, IPTS, 1:268.

  66. For the organization of Comanche war parties, see Ruíz, Report, 9–10; Berlandier, Indians, 70; and Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 216, 223–24, 250.

  67. Quotes are from Tomás Vélez de Cachupín to Don Juan Francisco de Güemes y Horcasitas, Mar.

  8, 1750, PT, 3:328; Burnet to Schoolcraft, Sep. 29, 1847, IPTS, 3:87; Report of G. W. Bonnell, 43; and H. G. Catlett to W. Medill, May 12, 1849, ARCIA, 1849, 967. See also Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 151; 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), 102–3.

  68. This challenges the traditional—and still prevailing—view that the Comanches never managed to offset the deepening fragmentation on a local level. Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel, for example, wrote in 1952 that the Comanches “consisted of a people who had a common way of life. But that way of life did not include political institutions or social mechanisms by which they could act as a tribal unit.” Mirroring Wallace and Hoebel, William C. Meadows has recently concluded that division was “the highest level of consistent sociopolitical integration” among the nineteenth-century Comanches: “the Comanche of the nineteenth century were exhibiting an evolutionary stage of pandivisional tribal sodality . . . which was prematurely inhibited prior to reaching fruition due to the collapse of the Comanche and larger Plains economy.” Meadows’s interpretation is influenced by his simplified notion of the Comanches as a one-dimensional warrior society whose political existence was conditioned by martial matters: “Territorial divisions developed incipient ‘tribelike’ structures which did not encompass the entire pan-Comanche ethnic or linguistic population, but remained division-based, perhaps owing to an increasing reliance on warfare and raiding, which was generally division-based.” Quotes are from Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 22; and William C. Meadows, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies: Enduring Veterans, 1800 to the Present (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 332–33, 336.

  69. Burnet, “Letters,” 122–24.

  70. See Vial and Chaves, Diary, 36; Pedro de Nava to Fernando de la Concha, Dec. 31, 1793, in Border Comanches: Seven Spanish Colonial Documents, 1785–1819, ed. and trans. Marc Simmons (Santa Fe: Stagecoach, 1967), 31; Manuel de Salcedo, Questioning of a Comanche Indian, 1810 [n.d.], BA 47:701–2; Josef Manrique to Nemesio Salcedo, Mar. 27, 1810, SANM II 17:61–63 (T-2308); Pike, Prose Sketches, 48; Neighbors to Medill, Jan. 20, 1848, 30th Cong., 1st sess., H. Ex. Doc. 1, 574; Neighbors to Medill, Mar. 2, 1848, 30th Cong., 1st sess., S. Rpt. 171, 17; Berlandier, Indians, 121; Marcy, Adventure, 141–42; Catlett to Medill, May 12, 1849, ARCIA, 1849, 967; Robert S.

  Neighbors, “Texas Indians in 1849,” IPTS, 3:109; Daniel J. Gelo, “‘Comanche Land and Ever Has Been’: A Native Geography of the Nineteenth-Century Comanchería,” SHQ 103 (Jan. 2000): 285;

  Notes to Pages 276–280

  427

  Nancy A. Kenmotsu, Timothy K. Perttula, Patricia Mercado-Allinger, Thomas R. Hester, James E.

  Bruseth, Sergio Iruegas, and Curtis Tunnell, “Medicine Mounds Ranch: The Identification of a Possible Comanche Traditional Cultural Property in the Rolling Plains of Texas,” Plains Anthropologist 40 (1995): 240–48; Meadows, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies, 310–11, 336–37; Anderson, Indian Southwest, 229; and Gerald Betty, Comanche Society: Before the Reservation (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002), 21–23.

  71. For elections, see, e.g., Cabello, Responses, BA 17:419; Fernando Chacón, Report on the Election of a Comanche General, Nov. 18, 1797, SANM II 14:233 (T-1404); and Report of G. W. Bonnell, 42. For the controlling function of divisional councils, see Foster, Being Comanche, 67.

  72. Vial and Chaves, Diary, 38–44; Neighbors, “Na-Ü-Ni,” 353; and Grant Foreman, “The Texas Comanche Treaty of 1846,” SHQ 51 (Apr. 1948): 323–24. Quote is from J. Cameron, “Comanche Indians; the Country West of the Colorado,” in Lamar Papers, ed. Gulick et al., 1:475.

  73. Eldredge to Houston, Dec. 8, 1843, IPTS, 1:272.

  74. Burnet, “Letters,” 125.

  75. For religion and ritual life as integrative forces, see Daniel Joseph Gelo, “Comanche Belief and Ritual” (Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1986). For societies, see Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 48–49; Meadows, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies, 276–82, 318; and 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), 161. Quote is from E. Adamson Hoebel, The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 129.

  76. Quote is from Ruíz, Report, 15. For sun worship, see also Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 195.

  For the Comanche Sun Dance, see Meadows, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies, 318–23.

  77. Merino, Report, 170; Burnet to Schoolcraft, Sep. 29, 1847; and Neighbors, “Na-Ü-Ni,” IPTS, 3:85, 88, 349. For contrasting, more symbolic meaning of national gatherings among the Cheyennes, see Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 85.

  78. Berlandier, Indians, 67; and Ruíz, Report, 10.

  79. Berlandier, Indians, 69–70. For national wars and multidivisional armie
s, see Fernando de la Concha, Instructions drawn up by Colonel Don Fernando de la Concha, former governor of the Province of New Mexico, so that his successor, the Lieutenant Colonel Don Fernando Chacón, may adapt what part of it that may seem to him suitable for the advantage, tranquility, and development of the aforesaid province, in “Notes and Documents: Advice on Governing New Mexico, 1794,” ed. and trans. Donald E. Worcester, NMHR 24 (July 1949): 238; Nava to Concha, July 26, 1791, and Joaquín del Real Alencaster to commanding general, June 13, 1807, SANM II 12:617, 16:347–48 (T-1137, 2056); Gregg, Commerce, 246; Ruíz, Report, 9; John Sibley to William Eustice, May 10, 1809, in “Dr. John Sibley and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1803–1814,” ed. Julia Kathryn Garrett, SHQ 47 (Jan. 1944): 323; and Berlandier, Indians, 73, 117. This is not how historians have seen Comanche warfare. In a typical—and influential—passage, E. Adamson Hoebel wrote that “so far as it [war] was a national policy, it was not explicitly directed by a governing or political body. It was a matter of individual motivation.” See Hoebel, Law of Primitive Man, 132.

  428

  Notes to Pages 281–289

  See, too, Ralph Linton’s view of the Comanches as overly “individualistic, too reliant on visions and dreams, to take concerted action for long,” and of their society as one of “low in content but high in efficiency.” See Linton, Study of Man, 89.

  80. Berlandier, Indians, 72–73, 80. See also Ruíz, Report, 11–12; and Meadows, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies, 295, 303, 312–17, 332.

  81. “Delegation from the Comanche Nation,” 428. The report is partly based on Ruíz’s eyewitness account. See also ch. 5, above. For Big Horses, see Meadows, Kiowa, Apache, and Comanche Military Societies, 280–81.

  82. 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), 40–41.

  83. For a long-term historical view of the Comanche political organization that emphasizes the flexibility and change of divisional configurations, see Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, esp.

  292–93, 478–91.

  84. Concha, Instructions, 238.

  85. For the evolution of nomadic empires, see Nikolay N. Kradin, “Nomadism, Evolution, and World-Systems: Pastoral Societies in Theories of Historical Development,” Journal of World-Systems Research 8 (Fall 2002): 373; and Thomas J. Barfield, The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989).

  86. Berlandier, Indians, 45–46, 67n67; Fowler, Journal, 59, 62; James Hobbs, Wild Life in the Far West: Personal Adventures of a Border Mountain Man (1873; reprint, Glorieta, N. Mex.: Rio Grande, 1969), 37–38; and Pedro Vial, “Diary, Bexar to Santa Fe, October 4, 1786, to May 26, 1787,” and Amangual, “Diary,” PV, 279–81, 466–67.

  87. Amangual, “Diary,” 467 (quote is from p. 501); Ortiz to Anza, May 29, 1786, FF, 322–23; Marcy, Adventure, 141–42, 175; Berlandier, Indians, 37, 43; and Gelo, “Comanche Land,” 279–82, 297, 302–3.

  88. Francisco Amangual, the Spanish officer, stayed among the Comanches as they made a transition from riverine winter camp to more mobile existence on the open plains. See Amangual, “Diary,”

  467–508. See also Cabello, Responses, BA 17:419; Juan de Dios Peña, Diary, June 12–Aug. 8, 1790, SANM II 12:263 (T-1089); and Houston to Henry Ellsworth, Dec. 1, 1832, in The Writings of Sam Houston, ed. Amelia W. Williams and Eugene C. Barker, 8 vols. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1938–43), 1:269.

  89. For war and the extension of hunting ranges, see Peña, Diary, SANM II 12:263; Berlandier, Indians, 67–69; and Marcy, Adventure, 172. For sentinels, see Jefferson Morgenthaler, The River Has Never Divided Us: A Border History of La Junta de los Rios (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 31–32.

  90. See, e.g., John Miller Morris, El Llano Estacado: Exploration and Imagination on the High Plains of Texas and New Mexico, 1536–1860 (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1997), 188.

  91. Catlin, Letters, 2:61.

  92. Ibid., 2:60–61, 64–66. For large summer villages, see also Santiago Fernández, “Diary of Santiago Fernández from Santa Fe to the Taovayas and Return to Santa Fe, June 24–July 21, 1788, and July 24–December (August?) 17, 1788,” and Francisco Xavier Fragoso, “Diary of Francisco Xavier Fragoso, Santa Fe to Natchitoches to San Antonio to Santa Fe, June 24, 1788–August 20, 1789,”

  PV, 321, 332, 337; and James, Three Years, 127.

  Notes to Pages 290–295

  429

  93. Hobbs, Wild Life, 35–36; Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 55–62; and Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 59–60. Berlandier traveled in fall 1828 with a Comanche ranchería that was on its way to a large fall village near the abandoned presidio of San Sabá. See Berlandier, Journey to Mexico, 2:351. For bear hunting, see Berlandier, Indians, 46n23.

  94. There is another way to put this: empires tend to replicate their hierarchical structures in both their internal and external dynamics. For this kind of dual stratification, see, e.g., Charles S.

  Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), esp. 10–11.

  C H A P T E R 7 . H U N G E R

  1. For Marcy’s comments, see Randolph B. Marcy, Adventure on Red River: Report on the Exploration of the Headwaters of the Red River by Captain Randolph B. Marcy and Captain G. B.

  McClellan, ed. Grant Foreman (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937), 162–64 (quote is from p. 162). For Comanche population, see Pierce M. Butler and M. G. Lewis to William Medill, Aug. 8, 1846, Documents Relating to the Negotiation of Ratified and Unratified Treaties with Various Tribes of Indians, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, T494, NAMP, 4:270–

  71; and Robert S. Neighbors to W. J. Worth, Mar. 7, 1849, ARCIA, 1849, 963. In 1854 William B.

  Parker reported that the Comanches and Kiowas combined numbered 20,000. See William B.

  Parker, Notes Taken during the Expedition Commanded by Capt. R. B. Marcy, U.S.A., Through Unexplored Texas, in the Summer and Fall of 1854 (Philadelphia: Hayes and Zell, 1856), 231. For Mexican slaves, see W. Gilpin to R. Jones, Aug. 1, 1848, 30th Cong., 2d sess., H. Ex. Doc. 1, 139; and Neighbors to Medill, Nov. 21, 1853, LR:OIA, Texas Agency, 859:303.

  2. For carrying capacity, see Tom McHugh, The Time of the Buffalo (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972), 16–17; William R. Brown, Jr., “Comancheria Demography,” Panhandle-Plains Historical Review 59 (1986): 9–10; and Dan Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” JAH 78 (Sep. 1991): 470–71. McHugh’s figures suggest that the Comanchería could have supported 6.2 million bison, Brown puts the figure at 7 million, and Flores at 8 million. For annual reproduction rates, see Flores, “Bison Ecology,” 476–77; and Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 27–28. Flores’s figures suggest that modern protected herds have a 6 percent natural mortality rate. In early nineteenth-century Comanchería, however, two factors—wolf predation and accidental deaths caused by uncontrolled fires and floods—

  upped this percentage considerably. According to Isenberg, the annual toll of wolf predation was between 30 and 40 percent of the calf crop, which for Comanchería’s bison population would have meant an average annual loss of nearly 7 percent of total numbers. According to William R.

  Brown, Jr., the historic bison herds’ annual losses to fires, floods, and other calamities can be estimated at 2.5 percent of herd totals. See Isenberg, Destruction, 28; and Brown, “Comancheria Demography,” 10.

  3. For minimum requirements, see Brown, “Comancheria Demography,” 10–11. For hunting practices, see William A. Dobak, “Killing the Canadian Buffalo: 1821–1881,” Western Historical Quarterly 27 (Spring 1996): 46; Flores, “Bison Ecology,” 479–80; and Douglas B. Bamforth, Ecology and Human Adaptation
on the Great Plains (New York: Plenum, 1988), 81.

  4. For the hunting activities of Osages and immigrant tribes in Comanchería in the late 1830s and

  430

  Notes to Pages 295–297

  1840s, see W. M. Armstrong to T. Heartley Crawford, Sep. 30, 1841, 27th Cong., 2d sess., S. Ex.

  Doc. 1, 338; Willard H. Rollings, The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 20–21, 257–85; Dianna Everett, The Texas Cherokees: A People between Two Fires, 1819–1840 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 114; and David LaVere, Contrary Neighbors: Southern Plains and Removed Indians in Indian Territory (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), 79–118. Some Comanches complained soon after the Treaty of Camp Holmes that the removed Indians killed too many buffalos, and one Comanche chief reportedly tore up his copy of the treaty agreement in disgust. See C. C.

  Rister, “Federal Experiment in Southern Plains Indian Relations, 1835–1845,” CO 14 (Dec. 1936): 451–52.

  5. For the growth of cibolero hunting activities on the Llano Estacado, see H. Bailey Carroll and J. Villasana Haggard, trans., Three New Mexico Chronicles: The Exposición of Don Pedro Bautista Pino 1812; the Ojeada of Lic. Antonio Barreiro 1832; and the additions by Don José Agustín de Escudero, 1849 (Albuquerque: Quivira Society, 1942), 101–2. For the cataclysmic impact of the 1840

  peace on the bison ecology, see Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 61–63. For Cheyenne and Arapaho bison harvest, see John W. Whitfield to Charles E. Mix, Jan. 5, 1856, LR:OIA, Upper Arkansas Agency, 878:104.