they replied to the Comanches that they would fail in nothing agreed upon.”
The Navajos agreed to a treaty in which they pledged to sever ties with the Gile-
ños, form a military alliance with Spain, and enter a nonaggression pact with the Comanches. The resulting borderlands détente, midwifed by Comanches,
served Comanche interests as much as it served Spanish ones: if Comanches
were to develop closer commercial relations with New Mexico, they needed the colony to be safe and prosperous.³⁷
The Spanish-Navajo-Comanche treaty completed a burst of cross-cultural di-
plomacy that, in the space of two years, reconfigured the cultural and geopolitical landscape of the Southwest. Whereas earlier contestation and violence had defined intergroup relations, now the region’s four major nations—the Spaniards, Comanches, Navajos, and Utes—came together in diplomacy and trade.
The new multipolar coalition was made possible by the Comanche-Spanish alli-
ance, but it was hitched in place by common animosity against the Apaches, the great losers of the geopolitical reordering. Segregated from the tightening circle of commerce, conciliation, and kinship, the Apaches were shut out as enemies of all. Only the ever-adaptable Jicarillas managed to maneuver into the alliance network and maintain a narrow foothold in the ravines of the Sangre de Cristo Range near Picurís. But they were marginal members of the network, living far from New Mexico’s political and commercial centers, and their political and
economic relations with the Spaniards were made subordinate to Comanche
needs and demands.³⁸
With New Mexico and Texas seemingly protected through Comanche treaties,
Spanish officials refocused the empire’s vacillating Apache policy around the exterminationist agenda marqués de Rubí had advocated two decades earlier.
Viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez announced in 1786 that he was “very much in favor of the special ruination of the Apaches” and authorized a genocidal war against all Apaches who refused to submit to Spanish domination. “In the voluntary or forced submission of the Apaches, or in their total extermination,” he explained,
“lies the happiness of the Provincias Internas.” Spaniards launched coordinated campaigns with their Pima and Opata Indian allies against various Apache
groups in Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya and increased military pressure on the
Gileños and Mescaleros in southern New Mexico. Spanish officials began offering bounties for pairs of Apache ears across the northern provinces and promised Comanches a bridled horse and two belduques for each Apache captive they delivered to Santa Fe.³⁹
After the conclusion of the treaties in 1785 and 1786, Comanches and Span-
iards worked diligently to cultivate and expand the peace that had stabilized the
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Southwest. In early May of 1786, when the Comanche–New Mexico accord had
been in effect for two months, Tosacondata, Ecueracapa’s lieutenant, reported in Santa Fe that he had traveled across western Comanchería, visiting Kotsoteka, Jupe, and Yamparika rancherías. “In all he had announced peace, exhibiting
to them the cane in testimony of it and of his trust,” and all had accepted the cane “as a sure sign” of their approval of peace. Anza, now using language that blended Comanche ideas of metaphorical kinship with Spanish notions of patriarchal order, responded that he “was watching with the tenderness of a father the rapidity with which they were moving toward their own happiness.”⁴⁰
During the late spring and early summer, several Jupe and Yamparika embas-
sies came to Pecos and Santa Fe to meet with Anza in person and declare their support for the peace that had begun as a narrow Kotsoteka-Spanish pact. As
had happened during Governor Cachupín’s tenure a generation ago, a nascent
common ground of mutual compromise and tolerance began to emerge out
of these meetings. The Comanche visitors, Spanish officials rejoiced, “showed a great desire to understand our language, to accommodate themselves to our
customs in whatever they could imitate, even in matters of religion.” For their part, the Spaniards spent more than six hundred pesos in feeding and housing the Comanches and “for presents voluntarily divided among them and for demonstrations of our affection.”⁴¹
The frequent visits to New Mexico reflected the Comanche principle that
relationships between societies should be forged and cemented through inti-
mate, face-to-face interactions. Comanches had begun to mold the Spaniards
into metaphorical kin whose actions would be guided more by familial obliga-
tions than political contracts. This personalization of Comanche-Spanish relations through fictive kinship culminated in late May 1786, when Paraginanchi, a Kotsoteka captain, brought Ecueracapa’s third and youngest son, twenty-year-old Tahuchimpia, to Santa Fe, stating that Ecueracapa “charged Anza strongly to instruct his son in the language and customs of the Spaniards as if he were his own child.” By now conversant in Comanche diplomacy, Anza accepted
Ecueracapa’s offer and pledged to treat the young man “as his very own.”⁴²
With Ecueracapa’s and Anza’s close personal bond now at its core, the western Comanche–New Mexican alliance won widespread acceptance on both sides.
In July, Ecueracapa traveled to Santa Fe where he told Anza that the western Comanches would soon formally recognize his status as “Superior Chief.” On
the Spanish side, Jacobo Ugarte y Loyola, the newly elected commanding gen-
eral of the Interior Provinces, approved Anza’s settlement with Ecueracapa. But Ugarte also made several additions to the treaty stipulations, which he seems to have found too lenient. He ordered Anza to find ways to induce the Comanches
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to settle in permanent farming villages near New Mexico so “they might forget hunting.” He commanded the governor to bestow Ecueracapa with an annual
salary of two hundred pesos, and in keeping with Spanish expectations of hierarchical government, he wanted Anza to persuade the Kotsotekas, Jupes, and Yamparikas to each elect a lieutenant general who would be subordinate to Ecueracapa and receive one hundred pesos per annum from the Spaniards. Finally,
Ugarte addressed the politically and culturally charged question of captives and slaves. He demanded that Comanches return all their Christian captives
without compensation but authorized Anza to ransom from them all Apache
captives under the age of fourteen. This “useful and Christian thought,” Ugarte explained, would encourage Comanches to “conserve [the] life of those of the above-mentioned age,” but unmentioned in his humanitarian reasoning was the
fact that Indian children were highly desired commodities across northern New Spain. Intentionally or not, Ugarte’s oblique decree sanctioned the continuation of the age-old rescate institution in Spanish-Comanche borderlands.⁴³
The peace process culminated in the winter of 1786–87. In November Anza
traveled to Comanchería where he witnessed a large western Comanche council
appointing Ecueracapa as “captain general” with Tosacondata as his lieutenant.
Comanches ratified a modified treaty that included Ugarte’s revisions. A few weeks later Oxamaguea, Ecueracapa’s son, and Tosacondata led a delegation of nine Comanche men and two women to Ugarte’s headquarters in Chihuahua
City, where the commanding general ratified the peace treaty and bestowed
each Comanche man with a medal and a musket in recognition of his status.
Finally in April 1787, Anza journeyed for the last time to Comanchería to observe how Ecueracapa and Tosacondata were formally recognized as general
and lieutenant general of the Kotsotekas and witness Paruanarimuca (Bear Harness) appointed as lieutenant general for the Jupes and Yamparikas.⁴⁴
Then, in July 1
787, Chief Paruanarimuca came to Santa Fe with a startling proposal: he wanted the Spaniards to build an establecimiento fijado for his people on the upper Arkansas River near the Rocky Mountains. The idea of a fixed
settlement probably stemmed from yet another dry spell that spread starvation in Comanchería: Paruanarimuca, it appears, hoped to create a secure supply depot inside Comanchería to help his followers through the hard times. Anza, however, saw in Paruanarimuca’s anguish an opportunity to realize Ugarte’s vision of cultural engineering that would mold Comanches into sedentary farmers. He dispatched a master builder and thirty laborers to construct adobe houses and sheep and ox corrals on the upper Arkansas River, the chosen cradle for Comanche urbanization. When Anza was reassigned to Sonora in the fall, Ugarte
ordered his successor, Fernando de la Concha, to make certain that the Jupes
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participated in the construction work so they “develop an affection for their possession.” The construction was slow and expensive, costing New Mexico nearly seven hundred pesos, more than 10 percent of its annual budget for Indian affairs. By early winter, numerous Jupe households had settled in the half-finished village, prompting Concha to exult how “the disposition of the Comanche nation is such that it will embrace any proposal made to them with gentleness, affection, and a few gifts.” This settlement may well have grown into an important link between New Mexico and Comanchería had Paruanarimuca’s favorite wife
not died suddenly in January 1788. The chief and his followers immediately deserted the village, which they now considered uninhabitable, possibly infested with a deadly disease. Spanish officials pleaded them to return but to no avail.⁴⁵
As dramatic a demonstration as the settlement experiment was of the na-
scent Comanche-Spanish rapprochement, border fairs formed the heart and the
sinews of the union. Spanish officials opened New Mexico’s border villages to Comanches who embarked on a vigorous exchange to satisfy their pent-up demand for European imports. Jupes and Yamparikas traded in Taos, where, at
the standing orders of Viceroy Gálvez, they “never should be denied whatever they request.” Kotsotekas concentrated their business in Picurís and especially in Pecos, which soon began to compete with Taos as New Mexico’s main gateway to Comanchería. Most Comanche convoys came to the border fairs in late
summer and early fall, after the great summer hunts in Comanchería and the
fall harvest in New Mexico. In addition to bulk provisions, Comanches obtained from the fairs a wide variety of luxuries and manufactured goods—raw sugar,
cigarettes, scissors, soap, mirrors, saddlebags, hatchets, war axes, lances, knives, scarlet cloth, serapes, woolens, cloaks, indigo, and vermilion—which flowed into New Mexico from Chihuahua via the Chihuahua Trail. In exchange, Comanches traded “Indian captives of both sexes, mules, moccasins, colts, mustangs, all kinds of hides and buffalo meat” and so many horses that Taos and Pecos were soon reported having “a considerable number.” Comanches and Spaniards also
shared resources outside the market. Between 1787 and 1789, for example, New Mexico donated almost three hundred bushels of corn to the drought-ravaged
Comanches who were struggling to keep hunger out of their camps.⁴⁶
Just as Spaniards opened New Mexico to Comanches, Comanches unlocked
the plains to New Mexicans. They allowed New Mexican bison hunters, cibo-
leros, to enter Comanchería’s hunting ranges, and soon large caravans of two-wheeled carretas journeyed annually eastward from New Mexico’s various border towns. During their long travels, ciboleros engaged in trade with Comanches, supplying them with bread, flour, sugar, and beads in exchange for the right to hunt bison. Governor Concha gave a formal endorsement to such a commerce
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in 1789 by authorizing New Mexican traders to travel to Comanchería under
the pretext that their activities helped accumulate “a complete knowledge of the waterholes and lands in which [the Comanches] are situated, in order to wage war with this advantage in case they suffer some alteration in the established peace.” The itinerant New Mexican traders were initially called llaneros (plains-men) or viageros (travelers), but would later become known simply as comancheros.⁴⁷
While expanding political and economic ties, Comanches and Spaniards also
launched a joint war against the Apaches. Spanish officials equipped Coman-
che war parties with horses and guns and informed them of the locations of
distant Apaches camps. Between 1786 and 1788, Comanches and Spaniards
combined their forces for at least fiver major campaigns against the Apaches, razing Gileño and Mimbreño villages across New Mexico. All the while Comanches also raided the Apaches on their own, seizing captives whom they absorbed into their ranks or sold to Spanish authorities in New Mexico and Texas, who in turn shipped shackled Apache slaves to labor camps in central Mexico and
sugar plantations in the Caribbean. By decade’s end, Gileños and Mimbreños
were fleeing in droves to Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya—only to run into the anti-Apache coalition the Spaniards had forged with the Pimas and Opatas. Caught
between two aggressive fronts, many Apache groups sought peace with the Spaniards, allowing New Spain to enjoy at long last a measure of tranquility on its northern borderlands. As for Comanches, the Apache capitulation marked the
realization of Ecueracapa’s vision. They had eliminated the Apache presence
from their borders and hunting ranges and won a monopoly over New Mexico’s
eastern markets.⁴⁸
On the Comanche-Texas borderlands, meanwhile, a similar, albeit less in-
tense, process of cross-cultural conciliation and cooperation was unfolding. The political alliance between the eastern Comanches and Spaniards never reached the depth of the western Comanche–New Mexico union, in part because Commanding General Ugarte had assigned New Mexico the lead role in Comanche
diplomacy, and in part because Cabeza Rapada, the powerful eastern Coman-
che head chief, died in 1786, leaving behind a temporary power vacuum and
political confusion in eastern Comanchería. Unlike in New Mexico, therefore, Spanish officials in Texas had only sporadic interactions with and limited knowledge of the top-level Comanche leadership. Between eastern Comanchería and
Spanish Texas there was no parallel to the unifying Ecueracapa-Anza bond.⁴⁹
Trade, however, flourished on the Comanche-Texas border. Spanish traders
frequented Comanche rancherías, and Comanche trade convoys visited the
Texas border towns. In 1806 alone more than two thousand Comanches visited
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San Antonio and Nacogdoches to barter bison products and Apache captives for horses, belduques, clothing, and iron tools. As in New Mexico, Spanish officials regulated the prices at the fairs and distributed abundant presents—medals, canes, uniforms, flags, tobacco, and guns—to Comanche chiefs, who in turn pledged to honor the peace with the province. Comanches even invited Spaniards to reactivate the San Sabá mission as a trading depot for eastern Comanchería.⁵⁰
Much as their western relatives did with New Mexico, eastern Comanches
commenced close militarily cooperation with Texas. This collaboration was
given particular urgency by the revival of the Lipan Apaches, who had gradually rebuilt their economy and military power in the early 1780s, at a time when
smallpox devastated the Comanches and the American Revolutionary War pre-
occupied the Spaniards. With their enemies temporarily weakened or distracted, Lipans raided horses and mules in Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Nuevo Santander; bartered stolen livestock for food and manufactures at the Spanish towns along the lower Río Grande; and obtained guns from the lower Mississippi valley through Native mi
ddlemen. Thus reinforced, Lipans made yet another bid
to reenter the buffalo plains in the north. So forceful was their thrust that the Comanches persuaded the Taovayas to relocate from the Red River south to
the Pedernales River, where their reconstructed villages served as a bulwark for eastern Comanchería.⁵¹
The revived Lipan power pushed the eastern Comanches, the Wichitas, and
Spanish Texas into a firm anti-Apache alliance. Beginning in 1786, Comanches and Wichitas staged several individual and joint attacks against the Lipans and their Mescalero allies, all of them strongly endorsed by Spanish officials who supplied provisions, horses, and guns as well as information on the whereabouts of Lipan rancherías. In 1789 and 1790 the Spaniards briefly entered the war on the ground by joining the Comanches and Wichitas in raiding Lipan rancherías near San Antonio. A subsequent series of Comanche attacks broke Lipan power.
In a repeat of the 1750s, the Lipans retreated to the Río Grande, and like the Gileños and Mimbreños farther west, many of them sued for peace and solicited Spanish protection.⁵²
By the early 1790s, then, northern New Spain had entered a new era. The
Apaches who had kept vast expanses of the Spanish empire in chaos since mid-
century appeared pacified. From Sonora to southern Texas, different Apache
groups accepted subordinate positions under Spanish rule and settled in
establecimientos de paz, peace establishments, where they were to live in towns near presidios and missions and learn the civilized arts of farming, ranching, and self-government under Spanish tutelage and control. By 1793, there were
eight establecimientos in Sonora, Nueva Vizcaya, Coahuila, and New Mexico,
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housing some two thousand Apaches. Farther north, the formidable Navajos
lived in peace with New Mexico, having severed their ties to the Gileños with whom they had raided the colony for decades. The Utes, Jicarillas, and Wichitas, too, had made treaties with the Spaniards, who in turn had modified their paternalistic and aggressive policies in favor of diplomacy and trade.⁵³
But the most dramatic changes took place on the plains borderlands where
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