The Comanche Empire
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chiefs had cultivated after the 1762 treaty crumbled almost immediately after 1767, when Cachupín left office. The change in Comanche-Spanish relations
could hardly have been more drastic: during the decade that followed, Coman-
ches lashed New Mexico with more than a hundred attacks,¹¹ turning the Río
Grande valley into one of the most violent places in early America. Mixing small hit-and-run guerrilla raids with massive destroy-and-plunder operations, they killed and captured hundreds of settlers, stole thousands of horses and mules, slaughtered countless sheep and cattle, and left dozens of villages burned and abandoned. When Pedro Fermín de Mendinueta, Cachupín’s unfortunate successor, retired in 1777, New Mexico was a broken colony.
To an extent, Spaniards had themselves to blame for the turmoil. Governor
Mendinueta lacked his predecessor’s political instincts and diplomatic pro-
ficiency and ignored the social and political protocols that were critical for maintaining peace with the Comanches. Mendinueta also failed to carry on
Cachupín’s successful maneuvering among New Mexico’s neighboring Indian
nations. Eager to pacify the colony’s southern border and safeguard the Chihuahua Trail, the umbilical cord that linked New Mexico to central Mexico by way of Chihuahua, he focused his energies on forging an alliance with the Natagé and Sierra Blanca Apaches, letting the all-important personal ties to Comanche leadership corrode. A mere year into his tenure, Mendinueta had lost touch with Comanches and was beginning to question their “reliability.” Fearing that Comanche war parties might invade the heart of New Mexico from the north,
through “the weak frontier of Ojo Caliente,” he stationed fifty troops on the San Antonio Mountains, fifteen miles north of Abiquiu and twenty-five miles
southwest of Taos. It was an ill-calculated move that alienated the Comanches further. The troops threatened Comanches’ access to Ojo Caliente fairs, where they had traded since the 1730s, and undercut northern New Mexico’s status as an open realm that could be entered and exited unhindered.¹²
A climatic shift in the early 1770s inflamed the already volatile situation. In spring 1771, after three years of escalating raiding, Mendinueta succeeded in negotiating a truce with the western Comanches, securing New Mexico a much
needed respite. But then a severe drought struck the Southwest, taking a heavy toll on New Mexico and straining the delicate peace. As the rains failed and crops died, Pueblo farmers grew reluctant to share their dwindling stores with the Comanches, which in turn triggered one of the oldest dynamics of hunter-farmer relations in the Southwest: unable to get what they needed through
barter, Comanches relied on plunder. Mendinueta’s truce did not last beyond
the first dry months in the summer of 1772.¹³
But the most compelling impulses fueling Comanches’ raiding in New Mexico
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stemmed from their commercial ascendancy on the plains. It was not a coinci-
dence that the raiding war erupted at the same time as the western Coman-
ches turned the upper Arkansas basin into a major trading point to the north.
The seemingly limitless horse markets on the northern plains created an almost insatiable demand for southern horses—a demand western Comanches tried
to meet almost single-handedly with stolen New Mexican stock. Moreover, the
new trading allies supplied Comanches with a range of European commodities,
lessening their reliance on New Mexico’s markets and allowing them to raid the colony without fearing Spain’s commercial sanctions.
Comanche raids on Spanish and Pueblo Indian horse herds in the late 1760s
and 1770s generated the first of many wholesale property transfers that marked the Comanche-colonial relations into the mid-nineteenth century. In 1757, according to an official census, New Mexico possessed more than seven thousand horses, but by the mid-1770s Comanche raiders had moved the bulk of that
animal wealth into their own camps and market circuits. In 1775 Mendinueta
reported that New Mexico did not have enough horses for effective defense,
pleading with the viceroy to send fifteen hundred animals from Nueva Vizcaya, lest “desolation will follow.” A royal council in Mexico City promptly granted the request, but for unknown reasons the viceroy failed to deliver the animals.
A year later New Mexican troops were deemed “useless” as they did not have
enough horses to mount even token retaliatory expeditions.¹⁴
Meanwhile, horses proliferated in Comanchería. In the 1770s and 1780s many
western Comanche rancherías possessed more than two horses per capita, which indicates a substantial surplus, since plains nomads needed only an average of one horse per capita for basic hunting and transportation needs. For example, a western Comanche family of eight needed one or two running horses for hunting and warfare, three to five riding animals for women and children, and two or three pack horses to move the tipi and other belongings. Such a family was likely to have possessed approximately eight extra animals that could be traded away at any time.¹⁵
The burgeoning horse wealth enhanced western Comanches’ trading power,
but it also gave them yet another reason to raid New Mexico—captive seizure.
The rapidly growing horse herds, together with probable negative demographic effects of the drought years, increased the demand for imported labor in Comanchería. Since most Apache villages had retreated below the Río Grande and beyond easy reach from Comanchería, Comanches turned on New Mexico.
The Comanche–New Mexico border became a slaving frontier. In many of their
recorded attacks on New Mexico, Comanches took or tried to take captives,
usually women and children working in fields or tending livestock. Some of
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these captives were returned to New Mexico for ransom—Spanish bureaucracy
established in 1780 a formal limosna (alms) fund to facilitate such rescues—
and some were sold to the Wichitas, Pawnees, and French. But Comanches also
absorbed large numbers of captives into their workforce as horse herders and hide processors, thereby initiating a process that in the early nineteenth century would see the emergence of a large-scale slave economy in Comanchería.¹⁶
By the late 1770s, New Mexico began disintegrating under the weight of
Comanche violence. The combined effect of raids and drought sapped the
colony’s energy, pushing it into a steep decline. In 1766 Nicolás de Lafora, the engineer of the marqués de Rubí expedition, had envisioned New Mexico as
an “impenetrable barrier” against hostile Indians, but only a decade later this strongest of Spain’s North American colonies had been reduced to a captive
territory, where horseless troops watched in passive frustration as Comanche raiders destroyed towns and drained ranches, and where impoverished settlers subsisted on roasted hides, old shoes, and “the vellum from the saddletrees.”
Age-old settlement patterns broke down as violence and horror uprooted fami-
lies and entire communities. In 1776, with Comanches storming into the colony
“by all routes,” New Mexicans lived “in such a state of terror that they sow their lands like transients and keep going and coming to the place where they can live in less fear.” But finding such places was virtually impossible amidst the shifting coordinates of terror: in 1777 and 1778 alone, Comanches killed or captured
almost two hundred New Mexicans.¹⁷
Over time, as communities dispersed and disappeared, large sections of New
Mexico were left desolate. Along a hundred-mile stretch of the Río Grande valley numerous farms and villages vanished as panicked pobladores (settlers) sought refuge in Taos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque. The situation was especially critical in an area bou
nded by Picurís, Ojo Caliente, Nambé, and Santa Clara. Using
the Ojo Caliente valley as an entryway, Comanches hit this prosperous region with incessant attacks. The fifty troops Governor Mendinueta had stationed near Abiquiu proved wholly inadequate, leaving the region’s mixed-descent communities “exposed to the sacrifice of inhumanity and fury of the enemies.” Settlers began to flee the region, stirring alarm in Santa Fe. Fearing that the heart of northern New Mexico would become vacant, Mendinueta ordered the settlers
to reoccupy and rebuild the villages or have their lands confiscated. That threat, spiced with admonitions of the fleeing settlers as “pusillanimous and cowards,”
had little effect. Settlers continued to pour out, risking losing their lands or simply relinquishing their titles. One of them, Diego Gomes, offered what was a common reason: five of his relatives had been killed in “his presence” and “he was not able to prevent it.” By the late 1770s, the entire region between the Río
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de Ojo Caliente and Río Grande lay deserted, “destroyed by hostile Coman-
ches” as a Spanish map explained. On the eastern side of the Río Grande, the outlying Las Trampas de Taos, Las Truchas, and Chimayó were repeatedly abandoned and resettled, which crippled the local economy. Picurís stood “isolated and therefore indefensible against the continuous incursions which the Comanche enemy is making.”
Another zone of intense raiding emerged farther south, covering central New
Mexico from Pecos in the east to Jémez in the west and to Tomé in the south. As in the north, Comanche raiders were after horses, captives, and food, but here strategic considerations gave their forays added intensity: Pecos, Albuquerque, and other central New Mexican towns still maintained political and commercial ties with Jicarillas, Carlanas, and other Apache groups, thus provoking aggressive assaults. Worse still, Comanches were not the only Indians raiding central New Mexico. While Comanches pushed in from the east and northeast, Mimbreño
Apaches and the allied Gileños and Navajos invaded the region from the northwest, west, and southwest.¹⁸
Besieged by Indian enemies, central New Mexico began to cave in. In 1779,
according to a Spanish map, frontera y entradas de los enemigos Cumanchis, “the frontier and entrances of enemy Comanches,” extended to Pecos and Galisteo,
exposing the heart of New Mexico to plundering. Small villages were next to defenseless. A single raid on Tomé, apparently provoked by the refusal of one of its citizens to give up his daughter to a Comanche chief, nearly stripped the village of its male inhabitants. But not even the bigger fortified villages could escape devastation. Pecos, the colony’s eastern stronghold, was cramped and claustro-phobic. The village was surrounded by fertile farmlands “in all the four principal directions,” but as Fray Domínguez reported in 1776, the fields “are of no use today because this pueblo is so very much besieged by the enemy.” The settlers tried to raise corn in small dry-land fields near the town walls, but the drought kept their harvests poor. “What few crops there usually are do not last even to the beginning of a new year from the previous October,” Domínguez wrote, “and
hence these miserable wretches are tossed about like a ball in the hands of fortune.” A bastion of nearly one thousand people in the early eighteenth century, Pecos was reduced by 1776 to a hamlet of one hundred families, a dozen horses, and eight cows. A few years later only eighty-four families remained.¹⁹
Nearby Galisteo faded even faster. “Most of the year,” Domínguez wrote, the
war-weary and drought-ravaged inhabitants “are away from home, now the men
alone, now the women alone, sometimes the husband in one place, his wife in
another, the children in still another, and so it all goes. Comanche enemies and great famine because of the droughts are the captains who compel them to drag
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out their existence in this way. The former have deprived many of them of their lives and all of them of their landed property. The latter drives them to depart.”
Eighty families had called Galisteo home in 1760, but sixteen years later only forty-one families remained, trying to eke out a living without a single horse or cow. Fatally crippled, the village vanished from census records in the early 1780s.²⁰
Spain’s response to this devastation was conspicuously weak. Comanches’
two raiding spheres were separated by a relatively peaceful twenty-mile belt, and at the center of that belt stood Santa Fe, its garrison utterly incapable of repressing the escalating violence. The Governor’s Palace simply kept a toll of the mounting damage around it, and its grotesque imperial décor—strings of dried enemy Indian ears hanging in its portal—now mocked Spain’s pretensions of
dominance over indigenous communities. For the more than one hundred raids
Comanches launched on New Mexico in the late 1760s and 1770s, Santa Fe dis-
patched only sporadic punitive expeditions into Comanchería, and only once,
in 1774, did they manage to inflict major damage.²¹
In September of that year six hundred presidial and militia troops led by an experienced frontier officer, Captain Carlos Fernández, surprised and surrounded a large Comanche ranchería in a wooded enclosure 125 miles from Santa Fe.
What followed was an orgiastic outburst of revenge and looting. The troops
“poured in an unremitting fire to destroy” the cornered Comanche camp. “As
shot and shell has no respect for sex or age,” Mendinueta later reported, they killed nearly three hundred men, women, and children. The Spaniards took
more than one hundred captives and confiscated “a thousand beasts of burden
of all kinds,” which were promptly “divided among those present, who also took possession of the tipis and the rest of the spoils of the enemy.” The captives, as Mendinueta explained, were “maintained in accord with what was ordered by
His Majesty in his new royal regulation.” For adult men, this probably meant slavery in Mexican mines or Caribbean plantations, while the women and children were likely turned over to missionaries for religious instruction and later adopted into Spanish households as servants. But Comanches’ ability to absorb losses was greater than Spain’s ability to inflict them, and the battle had no effect on the larger balance of power. As Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli reported only a year later, “the barbarous Comanches appear to overcome the injuries
received. . . . In place of teaching them lessons, the punishment can have exasperated them and thus be the motivating reason for their uniting to seek the vengeance to which they are accustomed.”²²
Spain’s failure to ward off the Comanches stemmed from a number of weak-
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nesses, some of them inbuilt, some inflicted by the Comanches. During the