The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  that “the Comanche nation . . . would, with little effort on our part, unite with the Spaniards.”¹

  For Spanish Texas, such a union was quite literally a matter of life and death, for it shielded the colony against Comanche raids, which had wreaked unimaginable havoc in the 1770s and early 1780s and nearly destroyed the all-important ranching industry. Ranching began to revive in the late eighteenth century under the Comanche peace, but the colonists lived in constant fear of renewed attacks.

  At a broader geostrategic level, the alliance with the Comanches shielded entire northern New Spain against a possible invasion from the young and expanding

  United States. In theory, the role of a buffer territory belonged to Louisiana, but that overextended, disjointed colony was utterly incapable of meeting the challenge. In fact, Louisiana had become more a magnet than a barrier for footloose Americans in the late eighteenth century when Spanish officials, after having failed to people the province with immigrants from other Spanish colonies,

  opened its borders to American settlers. By 1795 Madrid had concluded that at-

  144

  The Empire of the Plains

  tempts to defend Louisiana from American takeover were futile and started the preparations for selling the money-draining colony to France. While Bourbon

  officials played the imperial board game with Louisiana, the role of buffer fell once again to Texas. To fulfill its lofty mission, the relatively sparsely populated colony needed to keep a critical mass of Indians under its influence in order to create a barrier of pro-Spanish Natives that would help offset growing American power. The alliance with the eastern Comanches, by far the most powerful Native group on the Texas borderlands, was the focal point of that barrier.²

  But the Comanche alliance was more precarious than Spanish officials be-

  lieved. Eastern Comanches—like their relatives in western Comanchería—had

  never given Spain the kind of loyalty Bourbon administrators expected from

  them. They offered the Spaniards their amity but not their compliance. They

  traded with the Spaniards and accepted their treaty presents, but they jealously guarded their political autonomy. This had begun to dawn on Spanish officials almost immediately after the 1785–86 treaties. Comanches refused to return

  Hispanic captives without ransom, turned down requests to participate in joint military campaigns that did not advance their interests, and made unauthorized raids into Apache reservations, jeopardizing the delicate peace process between Apaches and Spaniards. Such actions tested the consistency and limits of the alliance, but Spanish officials, careful not to alienate their vital allies, routinely ignored or forgave the transgressions. Indeed, Jacobo Ugarte, the commanding general of the Interior Provinces, had specifically advised the governor of New Mexico that “a case can occur in which it may be convenient to use clemency

  even when the crime has been committed against ourselves . . . when inflexibility on the part of your lordship could cause some important altercation. Prudence requires then that indulgence be preferred to satisfaction for the injury.”³

  A more subtle but ultimately more serious challenge to the Comanche-

  Spanish alliance emerged in the late 1790s, when American merchants and

  agents operating out of Spanish Louisiana began to push into the southern

  plains. Evading Louisiana’s Spanish officials—and sometimes cooperating with them—itinerant American traders infiltrated the contested borderland space between Spanish Texas and the United States and then proceeded toward eastern

  Comanchería. Americans’ arrival constituted a litmus test for the pact between eastern Comanches and Texas, for the treaty of 1785 had anticipated the United States’ westward thrust and explicitly prohibited Comanches from dealing with American agents. Spanish officials expected eastern Comanches to honor the

  treaty, remain loyal to Texas, and banish the intruders. They expected that not only because Comanches had signed a political contract but also because Spanish gifts and generosity obliged them to do so.

  The Empire of the Plains

  145

  The Americans, however, did not come as conquerors carrying guns and ban-

  ners but as merchants carrying goods and gifts, and eastern Comanches eagerly embraced them as potential trading partners. Comanches simply viewed the

  linkage between presents and politics differently from Spaniards. Gifts, Bourbon administrators insisted, were contractual objects that created a political bond, an exclusive bilateral union, whereas for Comanches the meaning of gifts was primarily of a social nature. Bourbon officials insisted that Spanish gifts should forbid Comanches from trading with foreign nations, but this was a narrow interpretation of loyalty and friendship that did not easily translate into the Comanche worldview. If foreigners—American, French, or any other kind—who entered

  Comanchería were willing to adhere to Comanche customs and expectations,

  Comanches had no reason to reject them. Indeed, as the pages that follow will show, by demanding eastern Comanches to choose between devotion to Spain

  and hospitality to Americans, Texas officials eventually wrecked their alliance with the Comanche nation.

  And so, by simply letting American newcomers in, eastern Comanches began

  to turn away from their fledgling, uneasy alliance with Spain and toward American markets and wealth. It was a momentous shift that changed the history of the Southwest. By establishing exchange ties with Americans, and by linking their pastoral horse-bison economy to the emerging capitalist economy of the United States, eastern Comanches set off a sustained commercial expansion that eventually swept across Comanchería. Spanish officials were slow to recognize this change and even slower to react to it. When José Cortés applauded Comanches’

  loyalty to Spain in 1799, eastern Comanches were already engaged in an active trade with the westering Americans, and when Pino echoed Cortés’s praise thirteen years later, eastern Comanches had already turned their rancherías into a thriving gateway between the Southwest and the U.S. markets. By the time the Spanish colonial era came to an end in 1821, the entire Comanche nation had

  moved out of the Spanish orbit. They commanded a vast commercial empire

  that encompassed the Great Plains from the Río Grande valley to the Mississippi and Missouri river valleys, and they looked to the north and east for markets, wealth, allies, and power.

  The first known American to test Comanchería’s commercial waters was

  Philip Nolan, an aspiring Kentucky entrepreneur who had immigrated to New

  Orleans in the late 1780s, only to realize that greater economic opportunities loomed on the Great Pains to the west. He secured in 1791 a passport from

  Louisiana’s governor to catch wild horses in Texas and during the next ten years led five major forays to the west, often setting out from Nacogdoches, a Texas-

  146

  The Empire of the Plains

  Louisiana border town that developed into a major hub of contraband trade

  soon after its founding in 1779. Nolan carried large numbers of horses to Louisiana’s markets and militia troops, but he also traded extensively with the Indians of the southern plains. In 1799 he returned with twelve hundred wild and Indian horses, infecting Natchez and other frontier settlements with a trading fever that sent large numbers of American merchants to the plains. But Nolan’s activities also had political underpinnings. He was the protégé of General James Wilkinson, onetime Spanish spy and from 1798 on the commander of the U.S. Army’s

  Southern Department. Although still conspiring with Spanish agents, Wilkin-

  son keenly promoted U.S. exploration and filibustering in the Southwest under the sponsorship of Vice President Thomas Jefferson.⁴

  Realizing the mistake they had made by admitting Nolan, Spanish officials

  stopped issuing passports by 1799, but neither that nor Nolan’s death at the hands of Span
ish troops in 1801 deterred the westward-pushing Americans who

  received strong support from Wilkinson and Washington, D.C. This support

  only intensified after the Louisiana Purchase, which left the boundary between Spanish Texas and U.S. Louisiana undetermined and, as Americans saw it, up for grabs. The 1806 Neutral Ground Agreement, in which Wilkinson and Lieutenant Colonel Simón de Herrera declared a demilitarized neutral zone between

  the Sabine River and the Arroyo Hondo near Natchitoches, only added to the

  confusion and contestation. Quietly urged on by Wilkinson—from 1805 the gov-

  ernor of the newly organized Louisiana Territory—and other U.S. agents, several American trading parties and individual merchants pushed into the disputed

  Red and Brazos river countries in the early years of the nineteenth century.⁵

  Viewed from the Mississippi valley, the westward thrust of American traders

  gave rise to the “Texas Trading Frontier,” a zone of bustling commercial ac-

  tivity stretching from the Arkansas River to the Gulf Coast. For eastern Comanches, however, the U.S. commercial expansion did not constitute anything as

  dramatic as a new frontier. Rather, it caused their old rivalry with the Wichitas over trading privileges to flare up. Earlier, in the late 1770s, eastern Comanches had been on the verge of replacing the Wichita confederacy as trade gateway

  to the Texas plains, but they had eased their pressure in the 1780s when smallpox devastated their rancherías and when the revolutionary convulsions in the East disrupted westbound trade from the Mississippi valley. By the late 1780s, Comanches were again interacting and trading peacefully with the Wichitas.

  The cessation of Comanche aggression allowed Wichitas to regain their former strength, and when American traders arrived, they were once more in the position to dominate the east-west commerce. From the late 1790s on, U.S. traders visited the Wichita villages along the Red River on an annual basis, bringing in

  The Empire of the Plains

  147

  guns, metal weapons, and clothing; exchanging gifts; and creating strong political and kinship bonds.⁶

  As in the 1770s, Wichitas locked the Comanches out of eastern markets, and as before, they demanded what Comanches considered excessive prices for serving as middleman traders. Unlike in the 1770s, however, Comanches were reluctant to rely on force, largely because an ominous military situation had developed on their northeastern border: the Osages had embarked on yet another expansionist round. This time, however, Osages’ aggression in the west was triggered by their dispossession in the east. In the 1790s the expansion of Anglo-American settler frontiers in the Southeast exiled large numbers of Choctaws, Cherokees, Delawares, and Shawnees west of the Mississippi, where they clashed violently with Osages, forcing several villages to relocate closer to Comanchería. At the same time, Spain’s liberal immigration policy in Louisiana lured thousands of Ken-tuckians and Tennesseans to the lower Missouri valley, where they established farmsteads on traditional Osage hunting grounds, compelling many Osages to

  withdraw toward Comanche and Wichita lands. Restraining these Osage en-

  croachments remained a strategic priority for eastern Comanches through the

  1830s and they needed Wichitas’ military and material assistance to manage the task.⁷

  Rather than trying to break the Wichita trade barrier with force, therefore, Comanches attempted to circumvent it through diplomacy. They rebuilt their

  alliance with the Wichitas during the 1790s and peacefully visited their villages for trade. Then, in 1807, they dispatched a large delegation to Natchitoches, the westernmost U.S. settlement within the Louisiana Purchase, hoping to persuade the agents to send traders among them. The delegation was enthusiasti-

  cally welcomed by Doctor John Sibley, the Indian agent of “Orleans Territory and the region South of the Arkansas River,” who had been commissioned by

  Congress to sweep the southern plains Indians from the Spanish orbit into the American one. Armed with a lavish budget of three thousand dollars to win over the Natives, Sibley staged a series of ritual performances to display the wealth, munificence, and attentiveness of the Americans. He gratified the Comanche

  visitors with guns, powder, lead, vermilion, blankets, metal gear, and officers’

  uniforms. Then, in the presence of Comanche, Wichita, Caddo, and Tonkawa

  headmen and with the “Calumet & Council fire lighted,” he delivered a remarkable speech in which, through expedient historical amnesia, he claimed nativeness for Americans. “It is now so long since our Ancestors came from beyond the great Water that we have no remembrance of it,” he asserted. “We ourselves are Natives of the Same land that you are, in other words white Indians, we therefore Should feel & live together like brothers & Good Neighbours.” He also ad-

  148

  The Empire of the Plains

  dressed the larger geopolitical context: “we are not at war with Spain, we therefore do not wish, or Ask you to be less their friends for being Ours, the World is wide enough for us all, and we Ought all of us to live in it like brothers.”⁸

  By proclaiming his readiness to treat Comanches as kin, by refraining from

  interfering with the relations between Comanches and Spaniards, and by ex-

  hibiting exceptional largesse, Sibley demonstrated the Americans’ willingness to conform to the Comanche cultural order. One of the Comanche chiefs responded to him, declaring that he was “highly pleas’d” to see the Americans,

  “our New Neighbours.” The practical matter of trade, however, was foremost in the Comanche agenda, and the chief promptly moved to explain how Comanches’ desire for European technology created ready markets for American goods:

  “we are in want of Merchandize and Shall be Always Glad to trade with you on friendly terms. . . . You have every thing we want.”⁹

  Those wants were stimulated not only by the guns and powder that helped

  Comanches cordon off the Osages and other enemies. Having used European

  technology for generations, they had come to rely on its availability and consumption in countless everyday activities; from cutting meat to cooking it, and from keeping their bodies warm to beautifying them, they had grown dependent on imported products. Spanish Texas had failed to meet their expansive

  and complicated needs, and eastern Comanches now put their trust in the

  United States. To press the point to Sibley, Comanches let him understand that Spaniards had “imposed” their trade on the Comanches. Two months later, another Comanche party visited Natchitoches, hoping to jumpstart commerce.

  The head of the delegation (whose name went unrecorded) promised Sibley

  that American traders would “be well treated” and find the longer journeys to Comanche rancherías well worth the effort, because “Horses & Mules were to them like grass they had them in Such plenty,” and because “they had likewise dress’d Buffalo Skins & knew where there was Silver Ore plenty.”¹⁰

  Eastern Comanches thus aggressively sought market relations with the United

  States and appeared to be willing to sacrifice their alliance with Spain to achieve their goal. One of their chiefs, Sibley exulted, had laid a Spanish flag at his feet, declaring that Comanches “were very desirous of having Our Flag and it was the Same to them whether Spain was pleas’d or displeas’d and if I would give him One it Should wave through all the Hietan Nation, and they would all die in

  defence of it before they would part with it.” This, Sibley argued, was no small feat, for the Comanches dominated all lands from the vicinity of San Antonio to the Missouri River and, along the east-west axis, from the Wichita villages far beyond the Rocky Mountains. But Sibley’s euphoria over his coup conceals a more somber reality. He had been assigned to persuade the Indians to shift

  The Empire of the Plains

  149

  their loyalties from New Spain to the United States, but
it was starting to seem that it was the Comanches who were calling the shots: they were pulling the

  United States westward into their vast sphere of power, which the Americans

  could barely comprehend let alone manipulate. Indeed, Wilkinson himself had

  argued two years earlier that if the United States hoped to win a foothold in the Southwest, it could happen only by forming a treaty with the Comanches, “the most powerfull Nation of Savages on this Continent [who] have in their power to facilitate or impede our march to New Mexico, should such movement ever

  become Necessary.”¹¹

  In summer 1808, accordingly, Sibley outfitted and licensed Anthony Glass, a

  prominent Louisiana merchant, to lead an expedition of eleven men to the Red River country. Glass spent two months in the Wichita trading villages on the Red River, but in the late fall he decided to proceed farther west among the Comanches. Clinging to their privileged position, Wichitas first begged Americans not to proceed and then tried to misdirect their reconnaissance party away from

  Comanche rancherías. Glass and his men pushed forward, however, and had

  a profitable trading season in Comanchería. Moving from one ranchería to an-

  other, the Glass party was transformed into a movable fair that increased steadily in size as more Comanches joined the assembly. In the space of a month, Glass’s mobile marketplace hosted several hundred Comanches who purchased all the

  goods the Americans had to offer. Glass’s success lured in other American trader-agents, who were eager to tap into Comanchería’s vast commercial potential. In 1810 Americans were reported to be operating a trading settlement on the Colorado River and interacting with several prominent eastern Comanche leaders.¹²

  American merchants had thus already begun to bypass Wichita villages and

  move their operations into Comanchería when, in 1811, the Wichita confederacy suffered a paralyzing blow. Awahakei, longtime principal chief of the confederacy, died in a battle against the Osages. Unable to agree on Awahakei’s successor and suffering under Osage pressure from the north, Wichitas abandoned their