by S. C. Gwynne
This shift in the balance of power changed the history of the American West and the fate of the North American continent. The Spanish conquest of the Americas had begun in the early sixteenth century with sweeping, and startlingly easy, victories over the powerful Aztecs (Mexico) and Incas (modern-day Peru). Much of the aboriginal population of Latin America had been subsequently defeated by arms, or disease, or both. The price, in Native American terms, was ghastly. In Central Mexico the Indian population in 1520, the year after Hern´n Cortés arrived in his galleons, was eleven million; by 1650 that number had plummeted to one million. The Indians who survived were enslaved under an economic system known as encomienda in which the conquistadors were authorized to occupy Indian lands, tax the inhabitants, and force them to perform labor. In return, the encomenderos provided the teaching and ministrations of Catholicism, instruction in the Spanish language, food, and defense. It was, in short, imported feudalism, in which the indios played the role of serfs. The same pattern had been followed in the vast Spanish holdings in South America. As a premise for colonization, subjugation, and forced assimilation, this system had worked with cruel precision.
But as the Spanish pushed their frontier northward from Mexico City, toward what they believed would be the conquest of all of North America, their carefully calibrated system began to break down. Their style of colonialism worked best on sophisticated, centrally ruled tribes like the Aztecs and Incas. It did not work at all on the low-barbarian, precivilized, and nonagrarian tribes of northern Mexico. Long, bloody wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries against the Chichimec and Tarahumare tribes proved the somewhat distasteful point that in order to fully assimilate such Indians they had to virtually exterminate them. In the late sixteenth century, after fifty years of intermittent warfare, the Chichimecs disappeared from the face of the earth.1 Other less violent tribes proved uninterested in and ill adapted to what the brown-robed padres promised, which was food and shelter in exchange for labor in the fields and a strict adherence to Catholic morality.
The latter included what the Indians saw as bizarre and inexplicable changes in their sexual habits. (Monogamy was generally not an Indian notion.) The poor indios would often run away. They would be caught and punished, sometimes by a priest wielding a lash, and this in turn sometimes led to revolt. The days of easy conquest were over, and even harder days lay ahead. As savagely tough as the Chichimecs were, they were nothing compared to what the Spanish would come up against north of the Rio Grande. The Indians there were also low-barbarian, precivilized, mostly nonagrarian, and similarly uninterested in bowing submissively to the Most Catholic King. But these indios had a lethal new technology. None of the conquistadors had ever fought mounted Indians.
When that small band of Comanches showed up in Taos in July of 1706, New Mexico was the seat of the Spanish empire in the north. Its biggest town and territorial capital was Santa Fe, established in 1610 when the Spanish had, in effect, leapfrogged over several thousand miles of unconquered terrain to plant their flag in the far north. (It took a long time for the actual frontier to catch up with it.) The rest of the population—a few thousand white Spaniards, mestizos (people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood), and the Pueblo Indians they had subjugated—lived in settlements that were strung like beads along various streams and the narrow valleys of the Rio Grande. The Spanish had learned a few things from their unpleasant conquest of northern Mexico: The forts now would be built with high, palisaded walls; the encomienda was abandoned. Their imperial system here consisted of presidios packed with well-armed soldiers, missions tended by Catholic priests bent on the conversion of heathen Indians, and ranchos tended by the colonists who came north—mostly mestizos. Its success depended ultimately upon its ability to make Indian converts and attract colonists; forts in the middle of nowhere staffed by demoralized soldiers meant nothing at all.
This plan may have looked good on paper, even more so since Spain had no real rivals in the continent’s yawningly empty midsection. But in the plains and mesalands of the American West it failed miserably. The trouble started around 1650. That was when various bands of the Apache tribe, newly mounted on Spanish horses and bristling with hostility, began raiding the New Mexican settlements. Nothing the Spanish had seen or experienced in Mexico prepared them for these attacks. That was not because they were defenseless. Their soldiery consisted of heavily mounted dragoons equipped with steel-plated armor; large-caliber, muzzle-loading harquebuses and miquelets, pikes, and gleaming sabers. Though to our modern eyes they may have looked a bit comical, they were in fact perfectly equipped to fight European wars against similarly equipped European combatants. In pitched battle, they could be quite deadly.
But the Indians did not fight that way—not by choice, anyway. They did not advance in regimental ranks across open fields. They never took a direct charge, scattering and disappearing whenever one was made. They never attacked an armed fort. They relished surprise, insisted on tactical advantage. They would attack whole villages and burn them, raping, torturing, and killing their inhabitants, leaving young women with their entrails carved out, men burned alive; they skewered infants and took young boys and girls as captives. Then they used the speed of their Spanish mustangs to get away, leaving the elaborately equipped dragoons to rumble ponderously after them. It was a style of fighting later perfected by even more aggressive plains tribes, who were far better horsemen. For fifty years the raiding continued, and while the Spanish had certainly killed their share of Apaches, nothing really changed. The settlements were as vulnerable as ever to Indian attack.
Then something remarkable happened. Starting around 1706, the Spanish authorities in Santa Fe began to notice a striking change in the behavior of their hated adversaries.2 They were, it seemed, disappearing, or at least moving off, generally to the south and west. Raiding had virtually stopped. It was as though a treaty of peace had been signed, but nothing of the sort had happened. The Spanish civil and military establishments began to realize that some sort of catastrophe had befallen the Apaches, though the extent of it would not be clear for years to come. In 1719 a military expedition to the northeast of Santa Fe had found several populous and formerly dangerous bands of the Apaches—the Jicarillas, Carlanes, and Cuartelejo—in what appeared to be full retreat from their old grounds.3
What was happening? The Spanish were not entirely unaware of geopolitical realities. They understood that the Comanches and Apaches were at war. But they had difficulty enough telling one Indian from another, let alone figuring out the status of a war between tribes that fought unseen battles with unknown outcomes over hundreds of square miles of land. All they were sure of was that their enemies were vanishing.
What they were sensing from afar, however, amounted to the wholesale destruction of the Apache nation. This was no small undertaking. Apacheria was, in the human and geographical terms of the era, a vast entity. It consisted of perhaps half a dozen major bands and stretched from the mountains of New Mexico to the plains of present-day Kansas and Oklahoma, and clear down to the Nueces River in southern Texas.4 It was the product of another sweeping southward migration—this one by Athapaskan tribes starting in the 1400s, who moved from Canada down the front range of the Rockies, destroying or assimilating other hunter-gatherer tribes.5 While this was most likely not an attempt to kill off the entire tribe, neither was it a simple question of moving the Apaches off their hunting grounds. The Comanches had a deep and abiding hatred of Apaches, and what they did to them also had a good deal to do with blood vengeance. Either way, the Comanches were in the middle of a relentless southward migration, and the Apaches were in their way.
Almost all of this violence is lost to history. It generally took the form of raids on the villages of the Athapaskans, whose fondness for agriculture—ironically a higher form of civilization than the Comanches ever attained—doomed them. Crops meant fixed locations and semipermanent villages, which meant that the Apache bands could be hunted down and slaughtered.
The fully nomadic Comanches had no such weakness. The details of these raids must have been horrific. The Apaches, who fought on foot, became easy marks for the mounted, thundering Comanches in their breechclouts and black war paint. (They wore black because it was the color of death and because it was in keeping with their minimalist wardrobe. Later they would adopt feathered headdresses, colorful war paint, and tattoos from others, especially the northern plains tribes; in these years they were unadorned and elemental; a stripped-down war machine.)6 Prisoners were rarely taken. Whole villages were routinely burned. Children were taken captive. Torture of survivors was the norm, as it was all across the plains.
The Spanish saw this only in flashes. In 1723 they recorded a bloody attack against an Apache rancheria. In 1724 the Comanches made a raid so brutally effective against the Jicarilla band that they ended up carrying off half of the women and killed all but sixty-nine members of the band.7 The Jicarillas were soon begging for, and received, Spanish protection. Other Apaches, including the Mescaleros, were similarly retreating westward from the Comanche onslaught. In 1724, according to Texas governor Domingo Cabello, the Lipan Apaches were completely vanquished from the southern plains in a bloody nine-day battle at a place the Spanish called El Gran Cierro de La Ferro (“Great Mountain of Iron”), thought to be on the Wichita River in what is now southwestern Oklahoma.8 By the end of the 1720s, the savagery of the attacks on the Apaches had become so pronounced, and so widespread, that some Apaches even sought the shelter of the Spanish pueblo at Pecos, not far from Santa Fe. The Comanche response was to attack the pueblo.
The Spanish actually tried to save what was left of the Apaches—a policy not entirely out of keeping with their self-interest. In 1726 they gave the tribe lands near Taos, hoping that this would amount to a barrier against the Comanches. In 1733 a mission for the Jicarilla Apaches was founded on the Rio Trampas. None of these strategies really worked. The action was all rearguard. By 1748 the sweep was complete. The Jicarillas had been driven from their native lands, as had the other bands who had occupied the buffalo grounds in West Texas, and the present-day western Kansas, western Oklahoma, and eastern Colorado; they had even fled from the protection of the mission at Taos. Almost all the Apache bands had by then been cleared from the southern plains, and all of the bands that the Spanish kept records of moved southwest into what would become their new homeland: the deserts and mesas of Arizona and New Mexico and the Mexican borderlands. (These included the Chiricahua, the bands of Geronimo and Cochise; the two chiefs would become famous fighting in these marginal lands in the latter nineteenth century.) Those bands who were not driven westward, including the Lipans, ended up in the bone-dry scrublands of the Texas Trans-Pecos. Many Apache bands simply vanished from history, including the plains-dwelling Faraones, Carlanes, and Palomas.9 By the 1760s the Comanches were driving the Apaches before them across the Rio Grande into Mexico.
The Apaches were not their only victims. As the Comanches streamed south across the Arkansas River, flush with their astonishing mastery of the horse and their rapidly evolving understanding of mounted warfare, they discovered something else about themselves: Their war parties could navigate enormous distances using only natural landmarks. They could also do it at night. They were better at this, too, than anyone else. Before leaving, a war party would assemble and receive navigational instruction from elders, which included drawing maps in the sand showing hills, valleys, water holes, rivers. Each day of the journey was planned, and the novices would commit this to memory. Dodge reported that one such group of raiders, none older than nineteen, and none of whom had ever been to Mexico, was able to travel from Brady’s Creek, Texas, near modern San Angelo, to Monterrey, Mexico—three hundred fifty–plus miles—without making a wrong turn and with nothing more than the instructions they had received.10
Thus the various Comanche bands could launch strikes in any direction, at any time, anywhere on the plains or their hinterlands. They attacked the Pawnees in Kansas, the Utes in eastern Colorado and eastern New Mexico, the Osages in Oklahoma, the Blackfeet in Wyoming, the Kiowas and Kiowa Apaches in Kansas and Colorado, the Tonkawas in Texas. By 1750 few tribes dared to set foot on the southern plains unless the Comanches permitted them to. The powerful northern tribes, including the Cheyenne, stayed north of the Arkansas. (This boundary would be fiercely contested again in the late 1830s.) As always with the Comanches, diplomacy was mixed with war: A key peace treaty was made in 1790 with the Kiowas that gave the Comanches a powerful ally with whom they shared their hunting grounds. Peace with the Wichitas opened huge trading opportunities linked to the French in Louisiana. There were some tribes, such as the Wacos and Tawakonis from central Texas, who simply managed to exist in harmony with the Comanches, and in any case did not make war on them. And then, of course, some enmities—like those with the Tonkawas, Apaches, and Utes—never seemed to die. Such muscular migrations had happened before in North America—one thinks of the powerful Iroquois league moving inexorably west in the seventeenth century, destroying the Huron and Erie tribes, and driving the Algonquian peoples before them as they occupied the Ohio River valley.11
It was not at all clear to anyone in the middle and later eighteenth century that these important shifts in military power were taking place. (Nor was it completely clear a century later.) The Spanish, virtually the only chroniclers of the Comanche nation prior to the nineteenth century, usually saw only its effects,12 and in any case could not then have pieced together a coherent military map of their northern provinces. But by 1750 the Comanches had in fact carved out a militarily and diplomatically unified nation with remarkably precise boundaries that were patrolled and ruthlessly enforced. They had done it with extreme violence, and that violence had changed their culture forever. In the decades that followed, the Comanches would never again be satisfied with hunting buffalo. They had quickly evolved, like the ancient Spartans, into a society entirely organized around war, in which tribal status would be conveyed exclusively by prowess in battle, which in turn was invariably measured in scalps, captives, and captured horses. The Comanche character, as perceived by the Spanish, was neatly summarized in the following report from Brigadier Pedro de Rivera y Villalón’s 1726 inspection tour of the northern provinces of New Spain.
Each year at a certain time, there comes to this province a nation of Indians very barbarous and warlike. Their name is Comanche. They never number less than 1,500. Their origin is unknown, because they are always wandering in battle formation, for they make war on all the Nations. . . . After they finish the commerce which brought them here, which consists of tanned skins, buffalo hides, and those young Indians which they capture (because they kill the older ones), they retire, continuing their wandering until another time.13
Thus did Comancheria—a land long known to the Spanish only as Apacheria—announce itself. And thus did the Comanches, in the scope of a few decades, become the new chief enemies of the Spanish regimes in New Mexico and Texas. (Apaches continued to prove a nuisance in the borderlands, but were never again a major threat.) It proved to be a far more complex relationship than the one with the Apaches. For one thing, the Spanish authorities were the first to recognize both the existence of the “Comanche barrier” and its usefulness to them. The Spanish still had large territorial ambitions and greatly feared French expansion west from Louisiana as well as the unremitting westward flow of the English settlements.
In that sense the Comanche country, already a huge expanse of the American plains, became more valuable to Spain than all of her troops north of the Rio Grande.14 If the Comanches stood as a seemingly impenetrable obstacle to Spanish expansion, they also offered a guarantee that the French and English would not pass, either. The French had pursued an entirely different colonial policy, eschewing outright conquest in favor of influence-peddling, alliance-making, and a sort of mercantile diplomacy—most importantly involving weapons but other commodities, too—by state-sponsored traders, often with great effect. The French w
ere behind the 1720 massacre of an entire Spanish expedition at the hands of the Pawnees, even though no Frenchman fired a weapon.15 Now they longed to open markets up to Louisiana trading companies, and their traders had pushed westward along the Red River as early as 1718. Unfortunately, they made the mistake of arming the enemies of the Comanches, the Apaches and the Jumanos, in effect betting on the wrong horses.16 They thus soon became unwelcome in Comanche lands. That meant the virtual cessation of French intrigue in Texas. English settlements would not arrive in Texas until 1820 or so; yet even then it would take them half a century to break the Comanche barrier. The other component of the new Comanche relationship was trade. In addition to their prowess in war, the Comanches were great merchants and traders. They had more raw wealth in the form of horses, skins, meats, and captives than any tribe on the plains. Bartering and selling went on for years unofficially; so strong was this current that in 1748 the tribe was officially admitted to the Taos trade fair.
