The Comanche Empire
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In spite of its overall vitality, the trade arrangement had a serious flaw from the Comanches’ perspective. As gateway traders, Taovayas controlled the flow of goods to and from the Mississippi valley. Louisiana’s French and Spanish traders, British contrabandists from West Florida, and Caddo middleman traders all frequented their villages, bringing in guns, metal tools, and textiles. Making the most of their key position, Taovayas supplied Comanches generously with produce from their fields but carefully regulated the circulation of guns, powder, and ammunition, the bulk of which they reserved for their own use to keep the well-armed Osages at bay. Taovaya trading policy left Comanches economically marginalized—one observer noted that they often had to settle for petty trading in knives, glass beads, and other “trifles”—but it also violated the kinship-based exchange protocol, which obliged wealthier allies to be generous and share pos-
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sessions with their poorer partners. By limiting Comanches’ access to their guns, lead, and bullets, even if they did so under duress, Taovayas denied Comanches’
social worth as allies and friends.⁴⁸
Comanches also agonized over the Taovayas’ mounting political weight in
Texas. In 1768, spurred by marqués de Rubí’s report, Texas was moving toward a placatory stance toward Comanches, but that development faltered the following year when Spain consolidated its administrative system in lower Louisiana.
From there on, Spanish policymakers concentrated on forging a tight alliance with Taovayas and other members of the Wichita confederacy, which, when
viewed from the double vantage point of Texas and Louisiana, appeared the key Native power of the southern plains, as they had political and commercial ties to both colonies. Spanish officials made the nearly five-thousand-strong Wichita confederacy the focal point of an ambitious three-stage frontier strategy. First, they sought an alliance with the Wichita villages on the Red, Trinity, Brazos, and Sabine rivers in order to create a protective barrier for Texas and northern Mexico against a possible British invasion from the Mississippi valley. Spaniards also planned to use Wichita allies against the Lipans, who were obtaining guns from British West Florida and raiding in Texas with such ferocity that the colony was in danger of being cut off from the rest of New Spain. The final part of the plan involved employing the Wichitas as a barrier to shield Texas and Louisiana against the Osages’ southward thrust, which had accelerated during the 1760s when the French and Indian War drove fragments of several eastern groups—
Sauks, Foxes, Kickapoos, Shawnees, Delawares, and others—across the Missis-
sippi valley into the northern Osage territory in the Ozarks. Pressured in the north, Osages pushed south, turning the Red River valley into “a pitiful theater of outrageous robberies and bloody encounters.”⁴⁹
Spain’s gravitation toward the Wichitas gained momentum in 1769, when
Athanase de Mézières was appointed lieutenant governor of the strategically
sensitive Natchitoches district on the Texas-Louisiana border. A former French officer and Indian trader and now one of New Spain’s most practiced frontier agents, de Mézières’s arrival opened a new chapter in Spain’s Indian policy.
Drawing on both French and Spanish frontier tactics, he blended force and diplomacy to fashion a firm alliance with the Wichitas. He first established formal ties with the Kadohadachos and persuaded them to put the Wichitas in a trading boycott. Next, in October 1770, he sponsored a summit with several Wichita
headmen at Gran Caddo, the principal Kadohadacho village on the lower Red
River. He declared that the French had been “erased and forgotten” and asked the chiefs to pledge loyalty to the king of Spain. He then drew attention to the Wichitas precarious position “in the midst of four fires”—Spaniards, Coman-
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ches, Osages, and Lipans—“which, raising their horrible flames, would reduce them to ashes as easily as the voracious fire consumes the dry grass of the meadows,” and proposed that the Wichitas make peace with the Lipans and pressure them to stop interacting with the British and raiding into Texas. As an incentive, he offered French-style frontier policy—licensed traders, lucrative trade, and liberal gifts. Eager to secure Spanish support and weapons against the Osages who were being supplied by illegal gun traffickers on the Arkansas, Wichitas acceded to de Mézières’s propositions. By 1771, all five member groups of the Wichita confederation—Taovayas, Tawakonis, Kichais, Iscanis, and Guichitas—
had declared allegiance to Spain.⁵⁰
This was a severe blow to eastern Comanches. Regional geopolitics had been
suddenly repositioned on a Texas-Louisiana-Wichita axis, and they found themselves dangerously isolated in a world where linkages conferred power. Spanish Texas, de Mézières believed, was now protected by a cordon of loyal Wichitas who kept the Comanches in check. “It seems difficult for them to commit the
robberies and perfidies which formerly they were in the habit of doing,” he wrote,
“when they know that on their return they cannot escape the vigilance of their enemies, if perchance they should escape them during their entry.” Excluded
from negotiations, Comanches were in danger of becoming pawns in Spanish-
Wichita diplomacy. In October 1771 Taovayas ratified a treaty with Spain in
Natchitoches and pledged to use their influence to pressure Comanches to stop raiding in Texas. Should Comanches fail to comply, Taovayas would “suspend
all communication and intercourse with them and consider them as enemies.”
Taovayas and other Wichitas were liberally compensated for transferring their loyalties. Spanish officials in Texas promised them regular gifts and authorized traders from San Antonio and Natchitoches to visit their villages.⁵¹
Comanches, meanwhile, witnessed their options narrowing as Spanish poli-
cies hardened. In the winter of 1771–72 Spanish troops captured seven Coman-
ches—six women and a girl—and took them to San Antonio. Governor Juan
Maria Vicencio, barón de Ripperdá, decided to use the captives to force the
Comanches to stop raiding. He sent two of the captives to Chief Povea, the supposed head chief of the eastern Comanches, but held the other women and
the girl as hostages to ensure that the Comanches remained peaceful. A few
weeks later a Comanche delegation arrived in San Antonio, led by a woman
carrying a white flag. The woman was the mother of the captive girl, and most of the emissaries were relatives of the captives held by Ripperdá. The governor released one woman and the girl but refused to free the three remaining women on the grounds that they had already been baptized and could not be returned.
The Comanches made a desperate attempt to liberate the women, but Spanish
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soldiers recaptured them. The Comanche party fled the town but was attacked
by the Lipans, who killed seven men and captured four women, including the
mother and the daughter. The Lipans sold the women to Ripperdá, who de-
ported them to missions and labor camps in Coahuila.⁵²
Just how far to the margins of the shifting colonial world they had fallen became painfully clear to eastern Comanches during the next two years. In July 1772 Chief Povea accompanied a Wichita peace envoy to San Antonio, hoping
to retrieve the captive women and establish peace with the colony. Governor
Ripperdá invited Povea to a council but then publicly harangued the chief by displaying the white flag that the Comanches had used to feign truce. Povea
promised to prevent his own band from raiding in Texas, but Ripperdá made
no promise to return the captives. Povea’s delegation—which included the husband of one captive woman—returned home distressed and humiliated.⁵³
But Ripperdá had also seen in Povea�
�s visit an opportunity to establish formal ties with the eastern Comanches and draw them under Spanish influence. It
was possible to “subjugate the Camanche,” he wrote to the viceroy, by making them to “love us through continual intercourse.” In spring 1773 he dispatched a Louisiana trader, J. Gaignard, to establish contact with eastern Comanche rancherías and chart the region’s commercial prospects. Ascending the Red River, Gaignard arrived in the twin Taovaya villages in the fall, but that was as far as he made it. Taovayas allowed him to meet with Comanche emissaries in their
villages—and under their supervision—and Gaignard presented Comanche
chiefs a blanket “to cover the blood which has been shed on the roads” and
knives to “stop up the crooked trail.” But when Gaignard tried to continue upriver to visit Comanche rancherías, Taovayas stopped him in his tracks. Their motives to do so seem apparent. A broad Comanche-Spanish alliance not only
posed a threat to Taovayas’ favored status in Spanish Texas but also would have cancelled their access to stolen Spanish stock through Comanche raiders. Taovayas’ economic prosperity depended on keeping the Spaniards and Comanches
isolated and, preferably, at war. When Gaignard left the Taovaya villages after six months of frustrated efforts to continue to Comanchería, he left behind a strained Comanche-Taovaya alliance.⁵⁴
Facing deepening isolation, eastern Comanches began to distance themselves
from their alliance with the Wichitas and adopted a more aggressive stance
toward the confederation. They began a sustained trade war to grind down the Wichita cordon and extend their own commercial and political reach to Spanish Texas and Louisiana. Raiding and looting, they gradually forced their way deep into the Wichita realm, reaching by the late 1770s the lower Brazos River
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near Bosque Creek, almost one hundred miles east of Comanchería proper. In
1778 de Mézières reported that the Tawakonis and Iscanis were being constantly raided by Comanches “who have settled in large numbers on the same river, the Brazos, so that there is nothing for them to do but to withdraw themselves or, in conjunction with the neighboring [Wichita] nations, take serious action against so deadly a pest.”⁵⁵
Such “serious action” was not possible for the Wichitas, however, because
they were entangled in wars on other flanks as well. In the north, they faced the formidable and expansionist Osages. Harassed in the north by the Sauks and
Foxes and blocked in the west by the Comanches, Osages shifted to the south
and moved to monopolize hunting, raiding, and trading privileges across the
prairie belt between the Missouri and Red rivers. In the south, the Wichitas were engaged in a sporadic raiding war with the Lipans, whose attempts to carve out a larger foothold in the Texas borderlands were failing. Appalled by their continuing raids in Texas, Governor Ripperdá deemed the Lipans undependable and set out to isolate them politically and economically. When in 1773 Lipan delegates approached the Hasinais, Ripperdá interfered. Pressured by Ripperdá, Bigotes, the leading Hasinai negotiator, publicly beheaded four Lipan emissaries. Lipans retaliated with fierce attacks on the Spaniards and all their allies, including the Wichitas.⁵⁶
The three-front war depleted Wichitas’ power, undermining their ability to
fight back the Comanches. Comanches stepped up their attacks against the
Wichitas even as they continued to visit their villages for trade. De Mézières noted in 1778 how Comanches, “in the guise of friends, make them repeated
visits, always with the purpose of stealing.” Wichitas, he continued, tolerated the assaults with curious passivity: “These . . . insults they pretend not to notice, lest they should make other enemies, when they already have too many.” Seeking protection in numbers, Wichitas congregated into larger villages, only to expose themselves to a much greater threat than war. In 1777 and 1778 a virulent epidemic, perhaps smallpox, struck the Wichitas twice, spreading devastation in the crowded villages. The Wichitas lost nearly one-third of their population, including many head chiefs, and they collapsed into poverty and political disarray.⁵⁷
The epidemic had spared the mobile Comanches, who in its wake reduced
the weakened Wichitas to virtual vassalage. They subjected them to “unceasing incursions and insults” and yet continued to visit the Taovaya and Tawakoni
villages on the Red and Brazos rivers to barter for guns, ammunition, and salt. In 1780 Taovaya Chief Qui Te Sain complained in a letter to Louisiana Governor
Bernardo de Gálvez about the Comanches “who happen to be our neighbors,
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but who shed our blood and steal our horses daily.” “Much too embarrassed” to visit the governor personally, Qui Te Sain sent an urgent plea: “My father, we are deprived of everything, and have neither hatchets, nor picks, nor powder, nor bullets to defend from our enemies.”⁵⁸
As Wichitas’ strength dissipated, Comanches usurped their trading niche be-
tween the Texas plains and the Mississippi valley. In 1777 Governor Ripperdá asked Louisiana officials to keep their subjects from trading with the Comanches who raided in Texas, and the following year de Mézières reported that the Comanches are “now masters in the region which must be crossed to get to the banks of this large-volumed river [Mississippi].” As before, Louisiana merchants continued to ignore the province’s trade laws and ventured to the western plains with loads of guns, powder, and balls. “While our troops ignore or pay little attention to the correct use of their muskets,” Teodoro de Croix, the commanding general of the recently founded Commandancy General of the Interior Provinces of the North, agonized in 1778, “the Indians strive with emulation to manage them dexterously.” Croix also fretted over the activities of British traders “who lose no opportunity to introduce themselves among the Indians” of the Texas plains.⁵⁹
The collapse of Wichita power also opened the door for closer relations be-
tween eastern Comanches and Spanish Texas. In 1777 de Mézières suggested
that Texas should make every effort to draw the Comanches—who in his view
“excel all the other nations in breeding, strength, valor, and gallantry”—into a coalition against the Osages, whose raids threatened to obliterate the Arkansas Post, a strategically critical fort near the Mississippi and Arkansas confluence.
Spain faced even graver problems in the south, where Apache war bands rav-
aged Coahuila and Nueva Vizcaya; in the latter province alone Apaches had destroyed 116 haciendas, killed and captured nearly 2,000 people, and stolen more than 68,000 head of livestock from 1771 through 1776. To stop the devastation, Commanding General Croix organized a council of war in Chihuahua City,
which decided to declare a general war on the Apaches and solicit military support among the Comanches and Wichitas. In spring 1778 de Mézières toured
among the Wichitas, who voiced their “hatred” toward the Lipans. He then ex-
tended a peace overture to Comanches by releasing one Comanche captive.⁶⁰
But the planning and implementation of policies did not always mesh easily
on the disjointed Texas frontier. In May 1778, apparently unaware of the peace process, the settlers of Bucareli, a small trading community on the Trinity River, mistook a Comanche peace delegation for a war party and killed several of its members. Comanches retaliated by sacking the town. Unfazed, Spanish officials pressed on with the peace plan, but three events in 1779 nullified their efforts.
First, King Carlos III rejected the planned Spanish-Comanche-Wichita cam-
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paign against the Apaches on the grounds that a genocidal war had no place
on an enlightened state’s agenda. Then, in late August, de Mézières fell off his horse and died of his injuries, leaving the plan without an oversee
r. Last, in mid-December, news of Spain’s involvement in the American Revolutionary War
against Great Britain reached Texas—along with orders to cut down spending.
Within months, then, Texas was deprived of three prerequisites of a successful Indian policy—a common enemy around which to erect an alliance network,
the funds for gifting, and a top official fluent in cross-cultural diplomacy—and it lost its brief window to reach a concord with the Comanches.⁶¹
The collapse of Spanish-Comanche rapprochement could hardly have come
at a worse time for Texas, occurring just as eastern Comanches secured their position as the trade gateway to the Mississippi valley. Infuriated by Spaniards’
failure to deliver gifts to ritually cover the deaths of the Bucareli incident, and coveting horses and mules with which to fuel their growing trade, eastern Comanches launched a raiding war in Texas. Highly mobile and seemingly unpredictable in their actions, their war parties were everywhere and nowhere, attacking villages, missions, ranches, and farms all across Texas only to disappear into the forbidding vastness of Comanchería. Governor Cabello feared that the Comanches were about to annihilate San Antonio and its missions and presidio, and the settlers named Comanche raiders’ staging area, a ridge near the Guadalupe and Colorado rivers, El Monte del Diablo. Facing limited resistance from the overwhelmed local militias and the eighty presidial troops, Comanches raided as far east as Bucareli and as far south as Laredo on the lower Río Grande. Their war parties also fell upon Indian tribes all across Texas, attacking Lipans, Hasinais, Tonkawas, Bidais, Mayeyes, Cocos, Akokisas, Taovayas, Tonkawas, and Kichais and preventing these smaller groups from joining together in anti-Comanche alliances. In 1779 Comanches sacked a large Lipan camp in the
San Sabá valley—now the main Comanche entryway into Texas—killing more