The Comanche Empire
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attacks on the Apaches and Texas. Two years later, Franciscans established two unauthorized missions, San Lorenzo de la Santa Cruz and Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria del Cañon, on the upper Nueces River. Situated almost ninety miles south of San Sabá, the missions provided an asylum for the Apaches far from
Comanche domain.⁹¹
But the realignment of Texas’s frontier policy remained incomplete, for the
colony still kept troops at the San Sabá presidio and even provided military escorts for Apache hunting parties onto the plains. Spaniards also harbored
Apaches near San Antonio, which prevented the Norteños from trading in the
villa. The indecisiveness of Texas officials nearly destroyed their colony. Incensed by the continuing support to their enemies, Comanches and their allies began a fierce raiding war. They attacked Apache villages and Spanish settlements relentlessly, creating a broad, triangle-shaped shatterbelt extending from the San Sabá to San Antonio and the Nueces missions. The attacks culminated in January 1766, when four hundred Comanches, Taovayas, Tonkawas, and Hasinais
sacked San Lorenzo, sending the Lipans fleeing in panic; after the assault not “a single Indian” remained in the mission. Although the campaign ended in disaster when the returning Norteños ran into a Spanish ambush and suffered heavy casualties under cannon fire, the massive show of force quashed Lipan hopes
of maintaining a foothold even at the outskirts of the plains. Within a year, all Lipans had retreated to the coastal plains of Texas, the deserts around the Río Grande valley, and the mountains of Coahuila, where they joined their Natagé cousins to build a new economy on poaching Spanish villages and ranches in
southern Texas, Nueva Vizcaya, and Coahuila. The Apache diaspora from the
plains was now complete, and a largely depopulated hundred-mile-wide buffer
zone separated the Apache realm from the southern border of Comanchería.⁹²
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With the destruction of San Lorenzo mission, Texas’s frontier strategy had
come to a dead end. Yet, true to the pattern, it took an outside intervention to nudge long-standing practices and policies on a new course. That intervention came in 1767 when marqués de Rubí extended his famous two-year inspection
tour of northern New Spain’s frontier defenses to Texas. Like Pedro Rivera in New Mexico forty years earlier, Rubí found in Texas a battered, overstretched colony struggling under Comanche pressure. Comanches and their allies, he
discovered, were “bordering our settlements, which are weak, ill-placed, and incapable . . . of making opposition to a torrent of enemies who in reality are appreciable in strength and number.” And like Rivera, Rubí offered some drastic solutions. Determined to stamp out the “credulity and the shameful indulgence” of Texas officials with a strong measure of realpolitiks, he urged them to seek peace with the powerful Comanches and dissolve the “unfortunate” Lipan alliance,
which only provoked Comanche aggression against Texas. If necessary, Rubí advised, Texas should consider “the total extermination” of the Lipans, who had taken up raiding in southern Texas while at the same time “spoon-feeding us
with their deceitful friendship and supposed desire to be reduced.”⁹³
Rubí’s proposals did not receive official crown approval until 1772, but the officials in Texas promptly put them in practice. In 1769, at Rubí’s recommendation, they finally removed the presidio from the San Sabá River and adopted a conciliatory policy toward the Comanches. Much after the fact, Spaniards
began to reenvision their plains borderlands as a bipolar world where there were two great powers, the Comanches and Spain, and no room for the ailing Apache nation.⁹⁴
“We shall have, it is undeniable, one day the Nations of the North as neigh-
bors; they already are approaching us now,” Rubí warned in 1768, trying to advocate the removal of the Apaches from the plains that separated Texas from the expanding Comanchería. Rubí’s warning was as pertinent as it was dated: by the time he filed his report, Comanches had already arrived at the Texas border, and their realm was staggering in size.
With the Lipans beaten and routed, the Comanches controlled almost all of
the southern plains, flanking and fencing off Spain’s far northern frontier nearly across its entire arc. Western Comanchería, the domain of the Yamparika, Jupe, and Kotsoteka divisions, pressed against New Mexico from Taos down to Albuquerque. Eastern Comanchería, primarily a Kotsoteka realm, was separated
from San Antonio, the main population center of Texas, by the distance of one day’s ride. Rather than the seat of a grand colonization project, San Antonio
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had become the frontline on a Spanish frontier that had caved in at the center, folding itself around Comanchería.
Comanche colonization, moreover, had dislocated thousands of Apaches
from the Great Plains south and west of the Río Grande, where they joined
other Apache groups in raiding Spanish villages, haciendas, and ranches. By
midcentury the Apaches had forged an immense war zone that stretched 750
miles from northern Sonora through Nueva Vizcaya to Coahuila, posing a
severe threat to northern New Spain’s mining districts. Rubí’s ultimate goal had been a solid northern frontier anchored in New Mexico and Texas, but by the
late 1760s the sister colonies had become narrow and isolated ribbons pinched between two rapidly expanding indigenous dominions. Indeed, if Spanish troops and travelers wanted to reach Santa Fe from San Antonio, they struck south and circled to their destination by way of Saltillo in southeastern Coahuila and El Paso in the middle Río Grande valley, carefully skirting the newfound Comanchería and the transplanted Apachería.⁹⁵
When those new geopolitical realities suddenly dawned on Spanish offi-
cials—and when the officials in Texas and New Mexico compared the stunning
success of their Native rival to their own failures to extend Spanish authority to the North American interior—the Comanches and their colonizing campaign
became the objects of intense scrutiny. To many Spanish observers, analyzing the Comanches’ ascendancy from obscurity into regional dominance was also
an exercise in excruciating self-criticism. In the far north, more completely than anywhere else, Spaniards had failed in the critical prerequisite of their colonial project—preventing large-scale diffusion of European technology among
nonconquered, nonsedentary Indians. Across the northern frontier from New
Mexico to Texas, Spanish colonists faced Comanches who fought on horseback
with flintlock muskets and iron-tipped lances, using Spanish technology to contain Spanish imperialism. That techno-military turn, coupled with Comanches’
assumed intrinsic cruelty, explained the Comanche rise to dominance in Span-
ish minds. In 1778 Miera y Pacheco offered a typical assessment in a series of map legends. “This nation is very warlike and cruel,” read one of the legends, describing the Comanches, while another depicted the Comanche colonization of the southern plains as epic military conquest: “They acquired horses and weapons of iron, and they have acquired so much skill in handling both that they surpass all nations in agility and courage. They have made themselves the lords of all the buffalo country, seizing it from the Apache nation, which formerly was the most widespread of all known [Native nations] in America. They have
destroyed many nations of them [Apaches], and those which remain they have
pushed to the frontiers of our King’s provinces.”⁹⁶
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Accounts such as this capture an elemental truth: Comanches were superior
fighters who had matched and then surpassed Spaniards in mounted combat.
Their swift, wide-ranging guerrilla attacks, refined during the protracted wars against the Apaches, wreaked havoc against Spanish settlers and soldiers who preferred to fight in closed places and in tightly organized formations. Extraordinarily mobile, Comanches could strike unexpectedly and distract and disable their enemy with seemingly unorganized individual charges before abruptly
breaking off and riding hard for dozens of miles into safety. If chased, they scattered across the trackless grasslands, forcing their pursuers to choose among multiplying targets. Yet the explanations that emphasize raw fighting ability alone miss a fundamental point: Comanches’ overwhelming military power
stemmed from a dynamic economic, social, and cultural core. Beneath the mar-
tial surface were adaptable people who aggressively embraced innovations, subjecting themselves to continuous self-reinvention.
Comanches’ power complex was much more than a military creation; it
was also, and indeed primarily, a political construction. Their colonization of the southern plains was a military enterprise built on astute and pragmatic diplomacy. As they swept across the southern plains, Comanches forged a series of strategic alliances, which buttressed their own strength while leaving their competitors variously defenseless and divided. They defeated the Apaches and their Spanish allies in several successive wars, and in all those wars they fought with powerful allies of their own. They sustained their long-standing union with the Utes for decades, only to detach themselves from the alliance in the 1750s, when the collapse of Apache resistance on the Llano Estacado turned Utes from useful allies into rivals. Exploiting existing rifts among Spanish colonists and their subject peoples, Comanches nurtured close ties with Taoseños, who supplied them with horses and weapons even when an open war raged between
New Mexico and Comanches. Twice, in the early 1750s and in the early 1760s,
Comanches also negotiated highly favorable peace treaties with New Mexico,
blending diplomatic persuasion with the threat of violence to force the Spaniards to modify their aggressively paternalistic frontier policy toward a more accommodative approach.
The pinnacle of Comanches’ diplomacy was the sweeping alliance network
they forged in the early 1750s with the Taovayas, Skidi and Chaui Pawnees, Tonkawas, Hasinais, and French Louisiana. That cluster of alliances turned the nascent Comanchería from an isolated, militarized landscape into a nexus point of multiple trade routes while leaving the Apaches and Spaniards politically and commercially marginalized. It gave Comanches an access to guns, powder, lead, and other European goods and allowed them to play the Spaniards off against
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their French rivals. It also enabled them to mobilize large multinational military campaigns, which crushed the remains of Apache resistance and forced New
Spain to accept a new geopolitical order on its northern borderlands.
But Comanche ascendancy was also rooted in economics: there was a direct
link between territorial expansion and productive power. As the first people on the plains to fully commit to mounted nomadism and hunting, Comanches
enjoyed a decisive advantage: they could exploit the vast reserves of bioenergy stored in the plains’ bison herds more thoroughly than any of their competitors.
By reinventing themselves as mounted bison hunters, Comanches dramatically
simplified and intensified their economy; few societies in history have relied so totally on a single food source, and few have experienced such a sudden increase in total caloric intake as the early eighteenth-century Comanches did. This in turn made possible a rapid and sustained population growth, the single most
important factor behind the Comanchenization of the southern plains.
Though punctuated by several lulls, the Comanche-Apache conflict was
a drawn-out, half-century-long war of attrition in which the linkages among
demography, production, and military power became increasingly pronounced.
Where Apache population growth stagnated and then turned into a sharp de-
cline, the Comanches grew rapidly in numbers, even while absorbing major
losses. They suffered repeated and devastating losses to war—most notably in 1747, 1751, and 1761 when Spanish troops
engaged war bands traveling with
families and forced them into pitched battles—and yet the population growth
continued unabated. According to one estimate, there were fifteen hundred
Comanches in 1726 (probably an underestimation), but by 1750 their popula-
tion seems to have exceeded ten thousand and was probably approaching fifteen thousand. For Apaches, Comanche invasion must have appeared like a swelling, unstoppable human tide that swept the southern plains, brushing aside their way of life with its sheer force of momentum.⁹⁷
But if full-time equestrianism offered such obvious economic, demographic,
and military advantages, why did only the Comanches make the shift? Why did
the Apaches cling to their fields and villages even after it had become clear that their commitment was pushing their plains civilization into oblivion? At least part of the answer can be found in the two groups’ divergent evolutionary trajectories and the resulting differences in their attitudes toward innovations and culture change. When the Comanche-Apache wars erupted in the early eighteenth
century, the Apaches were in the midst of a long process of transforming themselves into agricultural people. Having begun at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this process had gathered considerable force in the early eighteenth century. By then, the farming complex—its distinctive annual cycle,
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labors, social relations, beliefs, and ceremonies—had permeated the very core of the Apache culture, making a return to full-time nomadism and hunting all but unthinkable. External political pressures further narrowed Apaches’ options, for every Spanish offer of military assistance against the Comanche onslaught was contingent on the premise that they give up even part-time hunting, settle down for good, and become full-time farmers.⁹⁸
For Comanches, in contrast, the equestrian shift was nearly effortless. Viewed broadly, equestrianism represented to them merely a stage in an expedited evolutionary continuum that had witnessed them migrating from the central plains to the southern Rocky Mountains and, in the space of a few years, transforming themselves from stone-and-bone-using pedestrian hunters into horse-mounted,
gun-and-metal-using slave and livestock raiders and traders on the Spanish
borderlands. Against this backdrop, the shift to full-blown mounted nomadism on the southern plains was less a cultural revolution than a phase in a great adaptive spurt. Already remolded by a sweeping migration, the Comanches entered