The Comanche Empire
Page 10
Besides pacifying the Comanche–New Mexican border, the 1762 accord
also sealed the outcome of the decade-long Comanche-Ute war. With Span-
iards and Comanches now united, Utes could no longer rely on Spanish support in their struggle to maintain a foothold on the plains-mountain ecotone. The Muaches, the most plains-oriented band of the Utes, withdrew west and shifted their trading operations from Taos to Abiquiu and Ojo Caliente, both of which had been resettled in the 1750s. Abiquiu and Ojo Caliente were separated from Taos by the Río Grande and Chama River, which meant that the Muaches were
now removed from Comanche range of interest. Muaches retreated deep into
the mountain parks to join the other Ute bands, leaving New Mexico’s eastern borderland for the Comanches, their former allies and kin who had grown out
of their union.⁸¹
Contrary to Spanish hopes, the 1762 treaty did not stop Comanche expan-
sion. At the time Comanches solidified their dominance over the grasslands east of New Mexico in the 1762 accord, the next—the third—distinctive phase of
their expansion was already well on its way. In the early 1750s, with the wars of the previous expansionist phase still raging on the Llano Estacado, several Kotsoteka bands plunged south, crossing the vast table of the Edwards Plateau to the Balcones Escarpment, where the high plains dissolve into the lowlands of Texas.
It was one of the most explosive territorial conquests in North American history.
In less than a decade, the entire Texas plains—a huge spread of undulating hill country and plains stretching from the Pecos River in the west to the Cross Timbers in the east and from the Red River in the north to the Balcones Escarpment in the south—became a Comanche dominion. This expansionist burst turned
the Comanches into a territorial superpower. The Comanchería that emerged
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1. Comanche migrations and expansion. Map by Bill Nelson.
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covered some quarter of a million square miles, casting a long shadow on European imperial designs in the continent’s center.
The Comanche conquest of the Texas plains was fueled by several factors. In
part, it was a repeat of the familiar dynamic. A need to expand their horse-and-bison economy had driven the Comanches to grasslands around 1700 and now,
half a century later, the same need pushed them into the Texas plains. By the 1750s Comanches had completed their shift to mounted hunting and nomadism
and in the process drastically simplified their economy. The mounted chase became the foundation of their economy, overshadowing other subsistence strategies. Gathering decreased, eating fish became a taboo, and fowl was reduced to an emergency food eaten only when other provisions failed. But now everything hinged on their ability to keep their horse herds large and growing, and it was this imperative that drew them south. Spanish Texas was dotted with horse-rich but often poorly manned missions, presidios, and civilian ranches, which were a reasonably easy prey for mounted guerrilla attacks. An even greater incentive were innumerable wild horses roaming in the hill country just north of the Texas frontier, perhaps more than one million in all, ready to be seized and tamed.⁸²
The invasion may have also been motivated by changing geopolitics. The late
1740s witnessed the emergence of yet another anti-Comanche coalition—this
time between Spanish Texas and Lipan Apaches. Since the founding of first permanent Spanish colonial settlements in San Antonio and Los Adaes in the late 1710s, Spaniards had been struggling with the Lipans who raided Texas for the European technology they could no longer acquire from New Mexican markets. It was a consuming on-and-off raiding war, characterized by Lipan livestock poaching, Spanish reprisals, and mutual captive seizing. But in 1749, after several aborted efforts, the two si
des made peace in San Antonio in a three-day ceremony, which climaxed in a ritual burial of weapons, a live horse, and the war itself. The accord was prompted by the rising Comanche threat. Lipans, who
had recently incorporated large numbers of Jicarilla refugees from the north, stated during the peace talks that they wanted Spanish support and weapons to fend off the Comanche war bands that had started to infringe upon their lands.
Equally alarmed by Comanche expansion, Spanish officials seized the opportu-
nity. By arming the Lipans, they reasoned, it would be possible to create a barrier between their young colony and the expansionist Comanches. Comanches,
whose hunting and scouting parties had frequented the Texas plains since the early 1740s, were probably aware of the new threat from the outset.⁸³
Finally, the Comanche sweep into the Texas plains may have been a response
to a changing commercial geography. The expulsion of their Taovaya allies from the Arkansas to the Red River in the 1750s under Osage pressure prompted
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Conquest
French traders to refocus their operations from the Arkansas channel to the
lower Red River, where an important trading satellite, Fort St. Jean Baptiste aux Natchitoches, had been established in 1716. This sudden shift in commercial
gravity must have been a strong incentive for Comanches to relocate south as well, for they had grown heavily dependent on the French-Taovaya trade axis, their principal source of maize, guns, and metal.⁸⁴
The Comanche invasion of the Texas plains unfolded on two levels—diplo-
matic and military. When they arrived in the Red River valley, Comanches first integrated themselves into the region’s alliance network. They reestablished their trade relationship with the Taovayas, who then brought them in touch with the Tonkawas, a multiethnic group of nomadic hunters between the Colorado
and Trinity rivers. Comanches also forged tentative ties with the Hasinai confederacy, the westernmost extension of Caddo people, who lived in large urban communities between the Ouachita and Neches rivers and made annual hunting excursions to the southern plains. This emerging coalition, which Spaniards would come to label as Norteños, was founded on shared foreign political interests. Taovayas, Tonkawas, and Hasinais—like Comanches—were alarmed by
the Lipan-Spanish pact, which threatened to exclude them from Texas markets
and leave them vulnerable against the Apaches. Taovayas and Hasinais were also engaged in a losing war with Lipans over hunting ranges and were eager to enlist the support of the formidable Comanches. Although Spanish officials would
later blame French agents for promoting an anti-Spanish Norteño coalition, the immediate motivation for the Comanche-Taovaya-Tonkawa-Hasinai alliance
was Spain’s decision to ally with the Lipans at the exclusion of the other Native groups.⁸⁵
Thus strengthened by new allies and arms, Comanches launched in the early
1750s a systematic offensive against the Lipans. It was a near repeat of the previous Comanche-Apache wars. Like their northern relatives, Lipans had gradu-
ally taken up small-scale riverside farming, which now undermined their ability to confront the wide-ranging Comanche war parties. Fixed to their fields and short of horses—a severe drought had devastated their herds in the 1740s—the Lipans were powerless to halt the Comanche advance. In 1755 they invited the Comanches to peace talks along the Guadalupe River. The two groups “sang
together and touched weapons in token of friendship,” but the peace did not last.
Lipans then turned to Spaniards for military support, vowing to accept Christianity, give up their nomadic ways, and take on full-time farming. The offer was received excitedly by the colonists who, after decades of frustrating missionary efforts, could finally start fulfilling their assigned role within Spain’s imperial system: turning nomads to neophytes and building a buffer zone of pacified Indian
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farmers to protect the silver mines of northern Mexico against foreign invasion.
The construction of a new mission-presidio complex began in the spring of 1757
in the San Sabá valley.⁸⁶
The San Sabá scheme epitomized in microcosm the kind of strategic miscal-
culations that had encumbered Spain’s North American ventures from the out-
set. The first miscalculation involved the site itself, which at first glance seemed an auspicious choice. The San Sabá valley had a broad, irrigable bottom that was suitable for farming, and it had prospects of mining. Separated from the principal political and population center, San Antonio, by 135 miles, San Sabá also could have become a protective bastion for Texas deep on the interior plains.
But that middle distance also meant that the mission-presidio complex would be an isolated outpost at the edge of Comanche range, where it stood defenseless in a conflict its very presence provoked. (Lipans, it seems, were fully aware of this: in June 1757 a massive party of some three thousand visited the construction site, but in the end only a few families stayed with the Franciscans; the rest, leaving, protested that the site was too close to Comanche territory.) San Sabá was also poorly designed for defense. To prevent sexual interaction and cohabi-tation between Spanish soldiers and Indian women, the friars had insisted that the presidio be built three miles upriver from the mission complex, which thus lay utterly exposed to attack. But perhaps the most serious miscalculation was financial. Although the mission was funded privately by a mining magnate, the presidio, designed to lodge four hundred people, absorbed men and funds that would have been needed elsewhere in poverty-stricken Texas. In the San Sabá
scheme, then, Texas tied its limited resources in an improbable venture that virtually invited enemy assault.⁸⁷
That assault came in March 16, 1758, when an estimated two thousand allied
Comanches, Taovayas, Tonkawas, and Hasinais appeared at the gates of the San Sabá mission, announcing that “they had come with intention of killing the
Apaches.” The bulk of the force broke into the mission compound and began
looting it and searching for Apaches, while the rest approached the presidio.
When the presidial soldiers opened fire, the Indians retreated and gathered
in and around the mission. Their faces “smeared with black and red paint,”
equipped with lances, cutlasses, helmets, metal breastplates, and “at least 1,000”
French muskets, and led by a Comanche chief clad in a French officer’s uni-
form, they set fire to the buildings—“so quickly that it seems probable that they were prepared in advance to do so,” one soldier recalled—and gunned down
those who failed to find shelter. The body count, made by the presidial soldiers who had been too terrified to confront the overwhelming Indian force, revealed eight casualties.⁸⁸
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If the loss of life was limited, the psychological aftermath was enormous. The attack was a military operation aimed at eliminating an enemy encroachment,
but it was also a symbolic act laden with political messages. The attackers openly declared their nationality, perhaps to stake territorial claims or perhaps to proclaim that they were not afraid of Spanish reprisals, and their French weapons, by all accounts manifestly displayed, bespoke of far-reaching commercial and political connections. The violence itself, it seems, was staged for maximum impact. The attackers slaughtered oxen and other animals, destroyed church ornaments and sacred jewels and pictures, and overturned and beheaded the effigy of Saint Francis. They left behind stripped, scalped, eyeless bodies and placed the beheaded body of a friar on the church altar. If the intention was to use strategic violence to coerce the Spaniards to cut off their support to the Apaches, it worked. “Intent as they are on robbery and blunder,” Father Manuel de Molina testified, “they will not desist from such activities, nor cease to carry out their d
iabolic schemes. Therefore I consider it impossible to reduce and settle these Apache Indians along the San Sabá, or for many leagues roundabout, even with the aid of the King’s forces.” The bare facts of the assault—the size of the coalition, its abundant French weaponry, its apparent organizational capacity—sent shock waves across Spanish Texas. The Indians were so superior “in firearms as well as in numbers,” one officer declared, “that our destruction seems probable.”
Seeing French intrigue behind the attack, other officials feared that the attacks would be repeated as long as French traders and French guns poured west from Louisiana. The destruction of the San Sabá mission also left the Apaches demoralized, although none of their kin had died in the attack. Realizing that Spanish presidios and soldiers could not protect them on the plains, the Lipans began to retreat south and east and established new villages along the Colorado, Guadalupe, and Frio rivers on the edge of the grasslands.⁸⁹
With the Lipans fleeing the plains and the San Sabá mission lying in ruins,
Spaniards found themselves fighting a war that had lost its strategic rationale.
But instead of seeking peace with the Norteños, the officials in Mexico City decided to continue the war. Motivated more by a desire to restore Spanish honor than tactical reasoning, they ordered the presidio of San Sabá to remain occupied. When Spanish officials convinced some Lipan bands to settle down in the vicinity of the presidio, Comanches responded with constant attacks. Then, in August 1758, Spanish authorities dispatched Colonel Diego Ortiz Parrilla, the desecrated commander of the San Sabá presidio, with 360 presidial soldiers and volunteers, 134 Apache scouts, and 42 other Indian auxiliaries to the north. Parrilla’s force scored a sensational victory on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River, where it ambushed an isolated Tonkawa camp and killed 55 and captured 149
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men, women, and children. Heady from the unexpected triumph, the party
pushed ahead to the Red River valley, where they came upon the heavily fortified Taovaya village, which also hosted some Comanche bands. Parrilla ordered his troops into a frontal attack, but mounted Taovaya and Comanche warriors
launched an equally organized countercharge, firing repeated volleys from
horseback. Other Taovaya and Comanche men fired upon the attackers from
the village’s elevated palisades, pausing only to ridicule the bewildered troops.
After four hours of futile attempts, and with the death toll rising at alarming rate, Parrilla ordered a retreat, leaving two bronze cannons behind.⁹⁰
It was only in the wake of the Parrilla disaster that the Spaniards began to question the rationale of their anti-Comanche policy and the idea of an Apache barrier on the plains. In 1760, Texas Governor Ángel Martos y Navarrete suspended campaigns against the Norteños, who responded in kind, halting their