The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

1770s much of northern New Spain below the Río Grande became a battle

  zone, where Spanish soldiers waged a losing war against several loosely allied Apache tribes, many of them refugees of the Comanche wars. Having turned

  raiding into a profitable economy, Apaches pilfered horses, cattle, and captives and destroyed towns, haciendas, ranches, farms, and mines from Sonora to

  southern Texas. The turmoil stretched the resources of New Spain to the limit, undermining its ability to sustain the northern provinces. Desperately under-funded, New Mexico was left to fight the well-armed Comanches with some

  100 presidial troops, 600 guns, and 150 pistols. Most settlers could not afford to buy powder and shot. To protect the exposed colony, Governor Mendinueta

  urged his subjects to consolidate in larger and more compact and defensible

  communities and pleaded with Mexico City to authorize a new presidio near

  Taos. Both attempts failed. The wealthier settlers refused to congregate near or within towns, clinging to the Hispanic tradition of living close to their fields, and the Taos presidio conflicted with the new policy of military retrenchment recommended by marqués de Rubí.²³

  In 1779, Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco was ordered to prepare a map show-

  ing the New Mexican settlements “in their present condition.” The picture was bleak. Miera y Pacheco added to his map a long legend, part of which reads as follows: “[the villages are] extremely ill arranged, with the houses of the settlers of whom they are composed scattered about a distance from one another. Many

  evils, disasters, and destruction of towns, caused by the Comanche and Apache enemies who surround said province, killing and abducting many families, have originated from this poor arrangement.” That decentralized layout—which both reflected and facilitated Comanche raids—also caught the eye of Fray Juan Augustín de Morfí, who assessed New Mexico’s military and economic condition

  in the closing years of the 1770s. Morfí reported widespread destruction and depopulation in eight districts. Only the more compact Santa Fe had escaped

  devastation, but the capital had become a veritable refugee center as fear cleared the countryside: it “comprised two hundred and seventy-four families with one thousand nine hundred and fifteen souls of all ages, sexes, and conditions, having been augmented progressively by the settlers at the cost of the depopulating frontier where the workers, not being able to withstand the invasions, abandoned the ranches where they were cultivating and took refuge in the capital.”²⁴

  By the seventh year of his term, writing despairing reports to his superiors seems to have become a numbing routine for Governor Mendinueta. In a letter

  to Viceroy Bucareli, dated September 30, 1774, he described in a blunt, method-

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  ological manner the latest Comanche raiding spree in the province.²⁵ There had been five raids during the previous eight weeks. The first had occurred on June 22

  when Comanches killed two Indians near Picurís, and in the next attack on the following day Comanches ran off the horse herd of Nambé pueblo. A more destructive raid took place on July 27 when a massive force of “more than one thousand Comanches” invaded the Chama district, “reaching as far as the pueblos

  of Santa Clara, San Juan, and three other districts of Spaniards.” Comanches killed seven people, took three captives, slaughtered twenty-five head of cattle, and stole more than three hundred horses during this wide-ranging raid. On August 15, some one hundred Comanches attacked Pecos, killing seven men and

  two women and carrying off seven captives, “all of whom were working in their maize fields.” One hundred fourteen militia and presidial troops and Indian auxiliaries rode out from Santa Fe, surprising a large Comanche ranchería some

  150 miles east of the capital. They kept the Comanches under siege and fire

  “until the evening prayer, when they retired in such good order that the enemy did not dare to molest them.” The last Comanche raid of the summer, possibly a retaliation, followed three days later when one hundred warriors struck Albuquerque, killing five, capturing four, stealing “a body of horses,” and slaughtering four hundred sheep.

  Mendinueta listed the attacks, death tolls, and material losses in almost detached detail, noting with grim relief that “the barbarians” “killed only seven of our people” in one of the raids, but the most curious part of his report is a brief remark at the end: “On the 27th of the month of June, sixty groups of this same nation [Comanches] entered the pueblo of Taos in peace, and, during the trading, they ransomed six Indians, male and female, and traded some one hundred and forty animals, two guns, and a large quantity of meat and salt.” Again, what is striking about the remark is its matter-of-fact tone. The governor expresses no surprise over the fact that Comanches, in the midst of the devastating raiding spree, would conduct peaceful trade at Taos.

  By the mid-1770s, in fact, such blending of violence and trade had become

  commonplace on the New Mexico–Comanche border. Two years earlier, for

  example, Comanches had raided Picurís five and Galisteo four times, besieged Pecos with five hundred warriors, and scorched maize fields around Ojo Caliente. Yet, as Mendinueta reported, they “did not find it inconvenient to present themselves peacefully at Taos” and barter for “bridles, awls, knives, colored cloth, and maize.” Similarly, during a five-month period in the winter of 1771–

  72, Comanches carried out six raids in northern New Mexico and sent six trade convoys to Taos, sometimes arriving to the fairs only a few days after attacking other towns. Sometimes the raiding and trading parties arrived in chorus, con-

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  vincing Mendinueta that they were part of a “crafty stratagem.” On May 31, 1768, six Comanche chiefs rode to Taos carrying a white flag and announcing that a larger party would come to the pueblo on June 2 with a captive to ransom. On that day four hundred Comanches did indeed arrive in Taos where they “were

  provided with muskets and munitions.” But Comanches had also “dispatched

  one hundred men to attack Ojo Caliente, confident that, at the news of peace and trade they had announced at Taos, the people [of Ojo Caliente] would attend” the Taos fair. Only a propitious intervention by Spanish troops saved the village from attack.²⁶

  This policy of alternating raiding and trading marks the beginning of Coman-

  ches’ cultural ascendancy over New Mexico. Capitalizing on their military superiority, Comanches divided the colony into distinct zones where they could simultaneously plunder horses, mules, and captives; purchase maize and other commodities that were difficult to obtain through raiding; and circulate stolen New Mexican goods for profit. More abstractly, this raiding-and-trading strategy epitomizes how New Mexico fell captive to alien cultural rules. Like most North American Indians, Comanches understood hostile and friendly acts differently from Europeans. They saw trade and theft not as mutually exclusive acts but as two expressions of a broad continuum of reciprocity. Raiding, when not aimed at killing, was not the antithesis of exchange but an alternative to it, a culturally sanctioned way to circulate material goods when peaceful exchange was

  not an option. Whenever a group failed to trade sufficient amounts of goods to its allies—whether due to internal problems or environmental reversals—those allies could carry out periodic raids without canceling the partnership.

  This kind of fluidity had defined intergroup relations in the Southwest for

  centuries, and Comanches’ raiding-and-trading policy is best seen as an elaboration of this ancient theme. In the 1760s and 1770s New Mexicans struggled

  with a number of hardships—Navajo and Apache attacks, drought, and overall

  economic stagnation—that undermined their ability to carry out trade. Coman-

  ches, by contrast, were experiencing sustained economic growth and needed

  horses to fuel their burgeoning trade. From t
heir standpoint, the expected and accepted response to such a situation was to rely on theft in order to ensure continuous circulation of goods.²⁷

  Such logic was alien to Spaniards who saw trade and theft as mutually exclu-

  sive acts that canceled one another out. The thriving trade between Comanches and Taoseños in the midst of escalating violence represented therefore an acute embarrassment to Spanish officials, who had been assigned to keep New Mexico unified and intact. Not only were they unable to defend the frontier against “barbarous onslaughts,” they could not even prevent their own subjects from inter-

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  acting with the enemy who was slowly consuming the colony. Against the bloody background that was the New Mexican frontier, the Taos fairs seemed like a perverse display of Comanches’ cultural supremacy and Spaniards’ degeneration

  into savage decadence. By simply allowing the trade to continue, New Mexico

  seemed to be succumbing to an alien cultural order.

  Comanches’ raiding-and-trading policy violated the basic tenet of the Span-

  ish imperial project, the notion that New Spain constituted a single, undivided colonial realm. Comanches, it seems, conceived Taos not as part of the larger Spanish-controlled New Mexico but as a separate community following autonomous policies. After all, except for one violent episode in 1761, Taoseños had nurtured their relations with Comanchería for generations, remaining neutral in the recurrent wars that erupted between Spaniards and Comanches. Such a behavior was a compelling sign of loyalty and affinity to Comanches, who determined group identity not by race or law but through the behavior of flesh-and-blood human beings. Some Spaniards, too, saw Taos as a virtual Comanche satellite.

  Rumors of an anti-Spanish Taoseño-Comanche coalition, first heard in the late 1740s, resurfaced in the troubled 1770s. Taos had incorporated the surrounding Hispanic settlers, who sought protection in the pueblo from Comanche raids,

  but that had little effect on the town’s loyalties. Mendinueta complained how the Comanches who visited Taos for trade could easily “learn our decisions,” while others scolded the Taoseños’ willingness to cater to Comanche trade customs

  (there was no bargaining over prices, which were fixed). Visitors deplored the widespread popularity of the Comanche language in northeastern New Mexico

  and abhorred the pobladores’ coarse Spanish, lewdness, and propensity to go about nude—in European imagination a telltale sign of savage degeneration.²⁸

  It was therefore with considerable unease that Mendinueta tried to explain to his superiors New Mexico’s peculiar relationship with the Comanches. His 1771

  letter to Viceroy Bucareli was uncharacteristically emotional:

  The alternate actions of this nation at the same time, now peace, now war,

  demonstrate their accustomed faithlessness. . . . Since it is impossible to . . .

  limit their freedom so that they do not do as they fancy, I have adopted the policy of admitting them to peace whenever they ask for it and come with their trade goods and of waging war whenever they assault our frontiers and commit plunder. From war alone, all that results is loss of life and property, but from the alternate this poor citizenry gains some good, as occurred at the last two fairs, or rescates. . . . Indeed at little cost they brought nearly 200 horses and mules, 12 muskets with ammunition, and a considerable number of buffalo

  hides, essential in this kingdom and profitable to trade in Nueva Vizcaya, as well as some Indian captives who are added to the body of Our Holy Faith.²⁹

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  While emphasizing Comanches’ “accustomed faithlessness” and New Mexi-

  co’s inability to “limit their freedom,” Mendinueta’s report also reveals a more fundamental reason behind his decision to allow Comanche enemies to trade

  in New Mexico: he could and would not cancel the trade because New Mexico

  needed it for its very survival. Mendinueta himself admitted as much in 1769, when he wrote that Comanche fairs were the lifeline that protected New Mexico from economic collapse. Mendinueta wrote this at a time when a clash between Comanches and Spanish troops had temporarily interrupted Comanche trade

  in Taos. Poverty and distress spread immediately across northern New Mexico, forcing the governor to admit that the only solution was to reopen trade with Comanches.³⁰

  This is a startling concession from a high-ranking Spanish official that not only betrays New Mexico’s humiliating dependence on Comanche commerce

  but also reveals the colonists’ deeply conflicted attitude toward the Comanches themselves. Similar ambivalence perturbed Fray Domínguez who in 1776 deplored the “barbarity,” “insolence,” and “execrable extreme of evil” of Comanches while in the same breath marveling at the assortment of goods those “in-domitable beasts” brought to Taos markets. There were “guns, pistols, powder, balls, tobacco, hatchets, and some vessels of yellow tin” as well as “buffalo hides,

  ‘white elkskins,’ horses, mules, buffalo meat, pagan Indians (of both sexes, children and adults) whom they capture from other nations.” This was in fact nearly an exhaustive list of the imports New Mexicans needed and desired but could

  not obtain through New Spain’s imperial supply lines. Not surprisingly, the fairs were extremely popular, reminding Domínguez of “a second-hand market in

  Mexico, the way people mill about.” In 1776 so many New Mexican merchants

  attended the Taos fair that the governor was forced to halt government operations until they had returned to their home villages.³¹

  On the face of it, New Mexico’s dependence on Comanche commerce

  stemmed from the colony’s inbuilt economic handicaps—its relative margin-

  ality in Spain’s Caribbean-centered imperial system and its isolation from Atlantic trade channels. After more than a century of slave traffic, New Mexico’s Spanish elite had also come to rely on a steady importation of Indian captives, who ran their kitchens, tilled their fields, tended their animals, and met their sexual needs. In 1776, when Comanche raids had nearly depleted the colony’s horse

  and mule reserves, New Mexicans were still willing to pay Comanches “a she-

  mule and a scarlet cover” or “two good horses” for the most valuable human commodity, “an Indian girl from twelve to twenty years old.”³² More immediately, however, the dependence was a product of Comanche policies. Comanches not

  only exploited New Mexico’s economic weakness but actively exacerbated it to

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  their own advantage. The relentless raids in the 1760s and 1770s served a double function: they supplied Comanches’ economy with plunder while stimulating

  artificial demand for their exports in New Mexico.

  The stealing and selling of horses was central to this dynamic of simultaneous exchange and exploitation. As Comanches depleted New Mexico’s domestic

  herds during the 1770s, they also embarked on an active horse and mule trade in Taos, often selling the villagers the very animals they had pilfered elsewhere in New Mexico. It soon became a large-scale business: the aforementioned 1774

  transaction of 140 horses, for example, amounted to almost 10 percent of the 1,500 horses Governor Mendinueta would ask for the next year to restock New

  Mexico’s wasted herds. Comanches used strategic violence to create demand

  for other exports as well. They drove back New Mexican hunting parties from

  the plains and slaughtered cattle and sheep, depriving the province of animal protein and robes; they torched pastures and fields and destroyed irrigation systems and crop caches across New Mexico, disrupting the traditional agricultural cycle. “The land is fertile,” Fray Morfí noted in 1778 of the Albuquerque district, “although it does not produce what it could because of insufficient cultivation for lack of oxen and leisure, the [threat of ] enemies not permitting them to absent themselves fr
om the villages for various tasks. Thus the land lies fallow.”

  The raids were particularly hard on the widely dispersed Hispanic ranches and farms. Morfí remarked how the Hispanic settlers “dare not go out and work the land, or if they do, they become victims of their indolence, because the swiftness and daring of their enemy [allows them to] penetrate the villages at will, due to their disorderly layout.”³³

  Comanches thus had New Mexico in an economic stranglehold, which,

  together with the prolonged drought, brought the colony’s subsistence system near collapse, triggering periodic bouts of starvation. That devastation in turn ensured that Comanches could use the colony as a market outlet for their surplus bison products and, conversely, maintain a steady inflow of crucial commodities from the impoverished New Mexicans whose only way to fend off cold

  and starvation was often to barter some of their meager possessions—horses,

  mules, metal, even maize—for Comanches’ bison meat, fat, robes, and hides.

  Just how dependent New Mexico had become on Comanches’ meat and hides

  dawned on Juan Bautista de Anza, Mendinueta’s successor, in 1780 when he

  tried to persuade his subjects to support the construction of a supply line to Chihuahua City. The settlers, Anza reported to the viceroy, “are resolved not to form a cordon to cooperate because the present year does not fall in with the formal trading for hides with the pagans, carried on every two years. This affair stimulates and makes up the largest part of the trade in this province.”³⁴

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  Seemingly haphazard, the strategy of slotting peaceful exchanges between

  nearly constant raiding was highly sophisticated, allowing Comanches to simultaneously plunder and purchase New Mexico’s resources and push their own

  products on the colony. It was an exploitative, essentially colonial relationship, the essence of which was captured by the ever-candid Fray Domínguez in an

  offhand remark: “Whether they are at peace or at war, the Comanches always

  carry off all they want, by purchase in peace and by theft in war.” The painful and ambiguous relationship left a lasting imprint on shared New Mexican cultural consciousness. This impression is captured and dramatized by the conquest romance of “Los Comanches,” a traditional folk play that probably originated in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century and is still performed today in many villages and pueblos of northern New Mexico.³⁵