the southern plains as an extraordinarily adaptive people ready to exploit the possibilities of a mounted way of life to the full.
In the end, then, the dazzling equestrian maneuvers and fearsome guerrilla
attacks that fired the contemporary imagination were simply an application of overwhelming economic and demographic power made available by adaptive
fluency. Athanase de Mézières, a French and later Spanish career officer who observed the changing power relations on the southern plains at close range, noted as much in 1770. Instead of stressing military prowess as the building blocks of Comanche ascendancy, he listed prosaic economic factors ranging from manpower and economic independence to pasturelands and animal bounty. For
him, the Comanche conquest of the southern plains was a case of demographic
and economic imperialism. Comanches, he concluded, “are scattered from the
great Missuris River to the neighborhood of the frontier presidios of New Spain.
They are a people so numerous and so haughty that when asked their number,
they make no difficulty of comparing it to that of the stars. They are so skillful in horsemanship that they have no equal; so daring that they never ask for or grant truces; and in the possession of such a territory that, finding in it an abundance of pasturage for their horses and an incredible number of cattle which furnish them raiment, food, and shelter, they only just fall short of possessing all of the conveniences of the earth, and have no need to covet the trade pursued by the rest of the Indians whom they call, on this account, slaves of the Europeans, and whom they despise.”⁹⁹
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In February 1763 the world’s greatest powers gathered in Paris to untangle a global chaos they had created. The summit was convened to terminate the virulent Seven Years’ War that had raged for eight years over three continents, but it became an imperial reordering of unparalleled scale. Humbled by a series of defeats, France ceded all its possessions in North America and saw its American empire reduced to a few sugar islands in the Lesser Antilles, tiny fishing bases off Newfoundland, and a foothold in Guyana. Britain, whose army and fleet had scored victories from Manila to Montreal, won Canada, Grenada, and Sene-gal, emerging as the world’s paramount colonial empire. Spain, a late arrival to the war, had suffered one humiliating loss after another as France’s ally, but two interlinked transactions allowed it to actually expand its imperial presence in North America. It ceded Florida to Britain in Paris but balanced that loss with the 1762 Treaty of Fontainebleau in which Spain gained Louisiana from
Louis XV, who was eager to get rid of the money-draining colony. And so, with a few casual incisions of diplomatic surgery, North America received a new imperial face. New France was stamped out, British dominion expanded to the
north, south, and west, and the Spanish frontier leaped eastward. The complex colonial collage of old was replaced with a symmetrical division into British East and Spanish West along the Mississippi watershed.
The Treaty of Paris reconfigured the global balance of power and streamlined colonial North America, but its makers suffered from a striking tunnel vision. Acknowledging only claims to land of European nation-states, they utterly ignored the realities of indigenous power on the ground. The Indian nations in the Great Lakes region and the Ohio Country bitterly objected to the new order, insisting that the French had no right to give Britain lands that were under Indian con-68
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trol. The British then provoked a massive pan-Indian uprising, Pontiac’s War, by claiming possession to the entire eastern half of North America, by treating Indians as conquered subjects, and by building unauthorized forts on their lands.¹
A similar neglect and disregard of Native presence and power took place in
the Southwest, where Spain won vast paper claims to the interior. At the same time that Britain and France had won and lost enormous colonial claims across North America during the French and Indian War, Comanches had completed
their own sweeping campaign of conquest, which by the early 1760s made them
the masters of the entire western Great Plains south of the Arkansas River. When Louis XV surrendered Louisiana to Carlos III in 1762, the transfer was, in effect, imaginary. By European reasoning, the treaty gave Spain all lands between the Mississippi valley and the Río Grande, but the real Spanish possessions formed a mere edging to a much larger geopolitical entity, Comanchería, which stretched six hundred miles north of Texas and four hundred miles east of New Mexico.
Ignoring that reality—as well as the warnings marqués de Rubí and other
frontier officials had made about the rising Comanche power—Spanish policy-
makers set out to create a cohesive colonial domain out of their suddenly swollen North American possessions. Embellishing their frontier policy with French-styled strategies, they moved to pacify and ultimately absorb the indios bárbaros of the interior plains through treaties and trade.² But because Spanish officials failed to take cognizance of the Comanche ascendancy, their attempts were
destined to fail. Ignored and massively underestimated, Comanches continued
their decades-long expansion, but with a new set of ambitions. If earlier their aim had been to colonize the game-rich grasslands of the southern Great Plains, they now moved to bend the bordering regions—New Mexico, Texas, the lower
Mississippi valley, and the northern Great Plains—to their own uses. By the late 1770s, less than two decades after the Treaty of Paris, Spain’s imperial system in North America had become hollow. Rather than New Spain absorbing the
southern plains into its imperial body, Comanches had reduced the Spanish
borderlands to a hinterland for an imperial system of their own.
In 1762, the year Spain won the vast territory between the Mississippi valley and the Río Grande in the Treaty of Fontainebleau, the Spanish kingdom of
New Mexico entered into treaty relations with the Yamparikas, Jupes, and Kotsotekas, who formed the powerful western branch of the Comanche nation. In
Spanish minds, the treaties complemented one another perfectly. The Treaty of Fontainebleau granted Spain a nominal claim over North America’s lower midsection, while the Comanche treaty turned the people who occupied those lands into Spain’s loyal allies. New Mexico Governor Tomás Vélez de Cachupín, the
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Spanish signatory of the Comanche treaty, succinctly articulated the Spanish interpretation: the accord had attached the Comanches to the Spanish empire
as the king’s compliant vassals.³
Such optimism was not unwarranted. France’s expulsion ended French
contraband trade and political scheming on the southern plains, giving Spain more sway over the region and its Native inhabitants. Moreover, New Mexico
was now western Comanches’ only reliable source of European goods, and
Spanish policymakers had a reason to expect dependence to translate into compliance. That compliance was the key to Spain’s imperial ambitions. There were no Spanish settlements on the interior grasslands, but if Spanish authorities could command the western Comanches, they could also claim control over
the vast southern plains. In Spanish designs, the Comanches were masters of the southern plains and the Spaniards were masters of the Comanches.
But that grand imperial vision was founded on an illusion, for the assumption of Comanche compliance proved premature. Comanches had entered the 1762
treaty expecting Spanish presents and protection, but they rejected all restrictions on their autonomy and kept seeking trade and allies anywhere they could.
And so instead of welding themselves to New Mexico as subordinates, western
Comanches launched in the late 1760s a vigorous diplomatic and commercial
expansion on the Great Plains, forging a far-reaching trade and alliance network that in time dwarfed Spain’s imperia
l arrangements in mid-North America. Sustained by their growing wealth and power, Comanches yanked themselves free
from New Mexico’s economic grip and then went to war.
This reorientation of Comanche foreign policy rested on the geostrategic centrality of the upper Arkansas basin, the heart of early Comanchería. A superb hunting niche framed by two major agricultural spheres—the Río Grande valley and the southern prairies—the upper Arkansas was primed for commercial
prominence. Comanches had capitalized on the Arkansas’ centrality since the
1740s, when they forged exchange ties with the Taovayas and the French in
the east. From the 1760s on, however, Comanches increasingly focused their
commercial activities to the northern and central plains, where the diffusion of horses had opened fresh commercial opportunities.
The spread of the horse frontier across the Great Plains revealed yet another natural advantage of the upper Arkansas basin: it marked the northern limit for intensive horse husbandry on the continental grasslands. The climate became
increasingly adverse for horses above the Arkansas, turning noticeably harsher north of the Platte River and outright hostile above the Missouri. The long and cold northern winters took a heavy toll on foals and pregnant mares, and the vicious blizzards could literally freeze entire herds on their hooves. Such hard-
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ships kept most northern tribes chronically horse-poor: only a few groups beyond the Arkansas valley managed to acquire enough animals to meet basic hunting
and transportation needs. To the south of the Arkansas, however, winters were considerably milder, posing few limitations on animal husbandry. This meant
that western Comanches could raise horses with relative ease and then export them to a vast perennial deficit region—a prerogative that gave them trading power that was rivaled on the plains only by the Mandans’ and Hidatsas’ celebrated trading villages on the middle Missouri River.⁴
As the various Native groups on the central and northern plains acquired their first horses around midcentury, they quickly began to look south to Comanchería to build up their herds. In the course of the 1760s and 1770s, western Comanches incorporated many of those groups into an expanding exchange
circle. They opened trade relations with the Pawnees, Cheyennes, and Kiowas, who ranged on the western plains between the Arkansas River and the Black
Hills, and with the Ponca, Kansa, and Iowa farmers along the lower Missouri, Kansas, and Des Moines rivers. Recent converts to equestrianism, all these
groups coveted horses and were willing to travel hundreds of miles to the Arkansas valley to obtain them. They incorporated these trade journeys into their semiannual hunting expeditions, traveling along established trails that led from the Republican and Kansas rivers to the Great Bend of the Arkansas, which was only a few days’ journey away from the Big Timbers, the favorite camping ground of western Comanches.⁵
While extending their commercial reach onto the northern plains, western
Comanches continued to trade actively on their other fronts. They visited the Taos fairs and restored the ties with the Wichitas that had been severed in 1757
when the Taovayas fled from the Arkansas River. Now traveling to western Co-
manchería from their new villages on the middle Red and Brazos rivers, Tao-
vayas traded garden produce as well as high-quality guns, which they obtained from wide-ranging British contraband traders operating out of the numerous
British posts that emerged on the east bank of the Mississippi after 1763. As a dramatic example of the volume of this trade, a Taovaya trading party sold seventeen horseloads of guns to western Comanches in a single transaction in 1768.
The three-way commerce among Comanches, Taovayas, and British thrived
well into the 1770s. According to a 1776 Spanish account, western Comanches
received quantities of rifles, pistols, munitions, iron hatchets, and metal utensils from Taovayas, who in turn acquired these goods from the lower Mississippi valley. Comanches also traded with Spanish Louisiana’s French merchants who
took advantage of the colony’s weak border controls and kept venturing to the far western plains. One exasperated Spanish observer reported in the late 1760s how
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“the French come into their [western Comanches] rancherías and live there for years.”⁶
Over the course of the 1760s and 1770s, western Comanches turned the
upper Arkansas valley into the nodal point of a multifaceted commercial net-
work that linked together numerous peoples and markets. Absorbing trade from several distinctive economic and ecological regions, they built an exceptionally comprehensive import structure. In exchange for horses and mules, they
received manufactured goods—guns, powder, ammunition, spearpoints, knives,
kettles, and textiles—from five colonial markets: from British Canada by way of the Mandan and Hidatsa villages and Pawnee and Cheyenne middlemen;
from Illinois (or Spanish Upper Louisiana) via Kansa, Ponca, Iowa, and Kiowa intermediaries; from Spanish Lower Louisiana and British West Florida through itinerant Franco-Spanish merchants or the Taovayas; and from Spanish New
Mexico by way of Taos. Intertwined in this trade in livestock and manufactured goods was an active commerce in locally produced subsistence goods. Pueblos, Wichitas, Pawnees, Poncas, Kansas, and Iowas all traded in maize, beans, and squash in exchange for Comanches’ luxurious, high-quality bison robes and
hides.⁷
The rise of the western Comanche trade center in the upper Arkansas basin
marked a profound change in the commercial architecture on the Great Plains
and in the Southwest. Until the mid-eighteenth century, major arteries of long-distance commerce were latitudinal, running from the farming villages of the eastern tallgrass prairies to the bison hunters’ realm on the western shortgrass steppes, and from there to the Rockies and beyond. This began to change with the rise of the upper Arkansas basin as the main redistribution point of horses from the Southwest to the central and northern plains. Commerce was realigned along a south-north axis and repositioned around two gravitational points: the Mandan and Hidatsa villages on the middle Missouri River and the western
Comanche rancherías on the upper Arkansas. When Estevan Rodriguez Miró,
the acting governor of Louisiana, in 1785 collected the accumulated Spanish
knowledge of Indian nations of the interior, he noted this realignment: “all the wealth of the Indians on the Missouri consists in having many horses which they get from the Laytanes [Comanches].”⁸
Out of this restructured commercial geography other important changes
emanated. One was a shift in the Native American arms race that was escalating on the Great Plains. Initially, in the early eighteenth century, Comanches had been largely cut off from the burgeoning trade in European weaponry in the
continent’s center. Large quantities of guns, lead, and metalware flowed onto the grasslands from the north and east, from the French and British outposts in
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Canada and the Mississippi valley. In contrast, the Spaniards in New Mexico and Texas were reluctant to sell guns to Indians, fearing that those weapons might be turned against themselves if the Natives allied with France or Britain for an attack against Spanish colonies. This disparity in the patterns of diffusion gave the northern and eastern plains tribes a decisive military edge—something that Comanches painfully learned in their early wars with the Pawnees and Osages.
But the rise of the upper Arkansas trade center allowed western Comanches to break free from the gun embargo. By channeling vast numbers of horses to the northern and eastern Great Plains, they managed to create a substantial inflow of firearms. Alarmed Spanish officials reported as early as 1767 that the western Comanches were be
tter armed than Spanish troops.⁹
Before long, in fact, western Comanches accumulated such quantities of guns
and other manufactured goods that they could start exporting them. Domingo
Cabello y Robles, governor of Texas, reported in the 1780s that western Comanches sold guns, powder, balls, lances, cloth, pans, and large knives to their eastern relatives on the Texas plains, who in turn supplied western Comanches with horses and mules, some of which were then traded to Wichitas, Pawnees, Cheyennes, Kiowas, Kansas, and Iowas. Moreover, in a reversal of the typical roles of colonial trade, western Comanches started to sell guns and other manufactures to Spanish New Mexico. Such a trade was first mentioned in 1760 by Bishop
Pedro Tamarón y Romeral who wrote that Comanches sold muskets, shotguns,
munitions, and knives at Taos. Fifteen years later the trade had become a routine. When visiting the town’s summer fair in 1776, Fray Francisco Atanasio
Domínguez was struck by Comanches’ export stock, which included tin pots,
hatchets, shot, powder, pistols, and “good guns.” The gun trade, Domínguez
noted, had become established enough to be based on fixed rates: “If they sell a pistol, its price is a bridle.” In exchange for the precious manufactured items, Comanches received special equestrian and hunting gear, such as bridles and
belduques, broad butchering knives, which were available only in New Mexico.
Western Comanches, it seems, were creating a multilevel commodity flow that
furnished them with imported staples, such as maize and horses, as well as with more specialized manufactured products.¹⁰
But the inverse trade in guns and other European commodities only hints at
a much more profound shift in Comanche-Spanish relations: western Coman-
chería had began to replace New Mexico as the paramount economic, political, and military power center in the Southwest.
The embryonic common ground of political and cultural accommodation
that New Mexico Governor Tomás Vélez de Cachupín and western Comanche
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The Comanche Empire Page 12