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Red River villages and scattered across the southern prairies. Some moved westward and sought refuge among the Comanches, initiating a process of gradual
merger of Comanche and Wichita communities. Other bands congregated into
nine small villages along the Brazos, Navasota, and Trinity rivers and encircled themselves with large defensive dugouts and earthworks.¹³
As the Wichita blockade dissolved, Comanche commerce boomed. From
the early 1810s on, American trading parties from the newly established state of Louisiana frequented eastern Comanche rancherías along the middle Red and
Brazos rivers, now the focal point of U.S. commerce on the southern plains. In 1818, W. A. Trimble, commander of the western section of the 8th District of the
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U.S. Army, reported that eastern Comanches “carry on, with traders from Red
River, an extensive traffic, in horses and mules, which they catch in the plains or capture from the Spaniards.” Another observer noted that eastern Comanches “are becoming quite expert in fire-arms within a few years, having been furnished by traders from the United States, by way of exchange, for horses and mules, which the Indians would, from time to time, plunder the Spanish settlements of.” Governor Antonio Martínez of Texas, monitoring the developments
from a different angle, reported in helpless frustration that “the traffic between the Comanches and the traders from the interior continues without interruption, and that arms, munitions, and other war supplies are being brought in.”¹⁴
Comanches also established commercial ties with the Spanish-American
filibusters and revolutionaries who, after a briefly successful revolt in Texas in 1812 and 1813, took refuge in Natchitoches, turning the frontier outpost into a quasi-autonomous political entity on the Comanche-Texas borderlands. Still
determined to fight the Spanish regime, the refugee rebels began operating
as middlemen between the Comanches and the American merchants, carry-
ing guns, munitions, and powder to the west and horses and mules to the east.
Nemesio Salcedo, commanding general of the Interior Provinces, lamented
in 1813 that this contraband trade utterly undermined Spain’s “national com-
merce” in Texas. By 1818, the traffic had created “a well worn road through the unsettled region towards Natchitoches.”¹⁵
Then, in 1821, Spain’s American empire collapsed, and the resulting confusion in the Southwest opened the floodgates for Comanche–U.S. commerce. Only a
year later Stephen F. Austin reported that eastern Comanche rancherías had become the nexus point of three well-established trade routes that connected them to U.S. markets along the Mississippi valley. The northernmost route linked eastern Comanchería to St. Louis via a chain of Native middlemen traders. Below
was the Red River channel, which funneled traders from Vicksburg, Natchez,
Baton Rouge, and New Orleans into the heart of eastern Comanchería. The
busiest of the trade routes was the southernmost one, leading from eastern Comanchería to Nacogdoches, which had nearly expired during the 1812–13 revolt in Texas and then, like Natchitoches, became a haven for American merchants
and filibusters. With close ties to Natchitoches and New Orleans, Nacogdoches grew into a major trading community, boasting an annual trade of ninety thousand dollars in the early 1820s.¹⁶
The newly established Mexican government tried to keep American peddlers
out of the land it considered Mexican soil, but controlling the porous Texas-Louisiana frontier was beyond its capacity. In 1823 two special investigators advised Mexico City to immediately deploy two hundred troops to Nacogdoches
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to repel the burgeoning American contraband trade with Indians. The troops
never came, and Anglo immigrants and merchants continued to pour into
Nacogdoches and Comanchería. So lucrative was this illicit commerce that
it attracted a large number of Yamparikas to relocate eastward. By the 1820s, those Comanche immigrants had assumed a new identity as Tenewas (Those
Who Stay Downstream) and established a distinct political organization on the middle Red River, where they joined the eastern Kotsotekas in trading with the Americans.¹⁷
Eastern Comanche rancherías along the Red and Brazos rivers were now the
gateway to and from the southern plains, a busy central place where the American homesteader frontier’s seemingly inexhaustible demand for livestock met
an equally boundless supply, the massive horse herds of the Southwest. Facing east, Comanche rancherías anchored an extensive, triangle-shaped hinterland
that stretched across the southern prairies toward St. Louis and New Orleans and into the farms and plantations of Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Facing west, they were the tip of a wide-mouthed trade funnel that moved livestock toward eastern demand and wealth. As gateway traders,
Comanches no longer had to travel to trade; they could simply wait in their
rancherías for American trade convoys to arrive. This made a strong impression on the French scientist Jean Louis Berlandier, who visited Comanchería in the late 1820s, reporting how American traders “bring their merchandise right into the [Comanche] rancherías and . . . get from them not only the furs they have to sell, but also the mules and horses they have stolen from the townspeople [of Texas].”¹⁸
The eastern Comanche gateway also drew Native nations into its sphere.
One such nation was the Panismahas, a three-thousand-member offshoot of the
Pawnees that in the late eighteenth century had escaped Lakota expansion in
the lower Missouri valley and fled to the middle Red River. Once relocated to the south, the Panismahas sought an alliance with the Wichitas, their linguistic and cultural relatives, but they soon gravitated toward the more powerful Comanches. They reportedly sent “600 well-armed men” to a peace ceremony
in 1822, after which they began conducting regular trade journeys up the Red, Brazos, and Colorado rivers. Panismahas were a crucial addition to the Comanche trade network. While American traders furnished Comanches with guns,
powder, shot, and clothing, Panismahas offered maize, squash, and other staple foods. Most important, Panismahas traded high-quality smoothbore British rifles, which they obtained from their Pawnee relatives, who in turn received the guns from British fur traders on the Missouri. Assessing eastern Comanches’ commercial arrangements in the late 1820s, one visitor was struck by the complementary
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nature of their trade links and the drawing power of their markets: “The Aguaje
. . . sell guns made in Great Britain which are preferred by the Comanches.
The Anglo-Americans supply the Comanches with ammunition. The Aguaje
Indians come all the way to the Brazos River to deal with the Comanches. The latter do not visit the Aguaje settlements.” According to another observer, the volume of this gun trade was enough to keep the Comanches “abundantly supplied
with firearms” and make them “equally at home with the gun, the bow, and the lance.”¹⁹
The eastern Comanche trade system operated steadily through the 1820s,
but the next decade brought dramatic changes. With the passing of the Indian Removal Act in 1830, the United States government began a wholesale relocation of eastern Indians across the Mississippi valley—the proclaimed permanent Indian frontier—into Indian Territory in what today are Oklahoma and Kansas.
The removal policy brought thousands of Indians into present-day Oklahoma
and Kansas, creating a new and deeply volatile geopolitical entity on Coman-
chería’s borders. The most populous of the transplanted peoples—the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Choctaws—were
placed in the southern and western
sections of Indian Territory where, around the Wichita Mountains, their lands overlapped with Comanchería’s eastern fringe. Hundreds of removed Cherokees, Delawares, Shawnees, and Kickapoos also moved across the Red River into Texas, where Mexican officials offered them legal land grants if they served as border sentinels to protect the province from Comanche raiders and to keep
illegal American traders from entering Comanchería.²⁰
A clash was immediate and, it seems, inevitable. Dismayed by the agricultural prospects in subhumid Oklahoma, many immigrant groups began to experiment with bison hunting. The westernmost bands of the Delawares, Kickapoos,
and Shawnees developed a typical prairie economy of farming and foraging and started making regular hunting excursions to the plains, tapping into Comanchería’s bison reserves. Comanches responded to these transgressions by attacking the intruders and by raiding deep into Indian Territory to exact revenge and to plunder maize, cattle, and captives. The death toll climbed on both sides. The fighting also disrupted the Comanche-American trade that had flourished for
two decades on the southern plains. Unable to penetrate the wall of immigrant Indians and put off by the escalating violence, American traders gave up their ventures from the Mississippi valley into Comanchería.²¹
In moving across the Mississippi valley, the immigrant nations had encroached upon the Comanche realm but, more important, they had entered an ancient
borderland where commercial gravity tended to pull peoples together. Their
position between the livestock-rich Comanchería and the livestock-hungry Mis-
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souri and Arkansas territories invited the removed Indians to become middle-
men who facilitated the movement of goods among the centers of wealth
around them. Like the Wichitas, French, and Americans before them, several of the immigrant nations responded. A propitious diplomatic opportunity to attach themselves to the Comanche trade network opened to them in 1834 and 1835
when the U.S. government sponsored two large-scale political meetings among
the Comanches, their allies, and the immigrant Indians, hoping to quell the violence that threatened to abort the entire Indian removal policy. In August 1835
some seven thousand Comanches and their Wichita allies gathered at Camp
Holmes near the Canadian River, where nineteen Comanche chiefs signed a
treaty and agreed to open their lands “west of the Cross Timber” to the immigrant tribes. In return, they expected trade.²²
The immigrant Indians did not disappoint, and within a few years the bor-
der region between Comanchería and Indian Territory had become a site for
thriving trade. Although uprooted and dislodged, the removed Indians could
still generate impressive surpluses of manufactured and agricultural products, which they were keen to exchange for the plains products they needed to survive in their new homelands.²³ Comanches sponsored massive intertribal gatherings along the Red and Brazos rivers and on the Salt Plains of north-central Oklahoma, often sending messengers to Indian Territory to announce a forthcoming fair. Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole trading con-
voys frequented Comanche rancherías, bringing in maize, wheat, potatoes, to-
bacco, vermilion, wampum, beads, powder, lead, and government-issued rifles.
In exchange, they received robes, skins, meat, salt, horses, and mules, a part of which they traded again to American settlers in Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Sometimes the seminomadic and more mobile Delawares, Kickapoos, and
Shawnees served as intermediaries, moving commodities between Indian Ter-
ritory and Comanchería. The thriving commerce also pulled more marginal
groups to the Comanche orbit. Quapaws, who had found a refuge among the
Cherokees, frequently attended the fairs, and in 1843 Omahas sent a trading
delegation to eastern Comanchería from their villages in present-day Nebraska.
Omahas were reported to have traded all their guns and bullets for Comanche
horses, which they needed to defend themselves against the expanding Lakotas.
The dynamics of this exchange mirrored the direct Comanche-American
trade it had supplanted, but there was an important new element: slave trade.
The removed Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles had
brought with them approximately five thousand black slaves, and the bondage
institution persisted in Indian Territory as the planter-slaveholder elite set out to rebuild its exchange-oriented cotton and tobacco economy. This created secure
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markets for Comanche slavers who now commanded extensive raiding domains
in Texas and northern Mexico. More improvised than organized, the slave traffic offered multiple opportunities for its practitioners. Removed Indians purchased kidnapped Mexicans, Anglo-Americans, and black slaves from Comanches
either to augment their own labor force or to resell them to American Indian agents, who generally ransomed the offered captives, especially if they had fair skin. At times Comanches bypassed the middlemen and took their captives directly to U.S. officials at Fort Gibson and other frontier posts, and sometimes they relied on comanchero intermediaries who then delivered the captives to
American agents. Occasionally, Comanches even kidnapped black slaves from
Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks and then sold them to Dela-
wares, Kickapoos, and Shawnees. They also captured black runaway slaves from Indian Territory and incorporated them into their ranks.²⁴
Alongside the pacification of Comanche–eastern Indian relations, another
critical peace process unfolded: eastern Comanches formed an alliance with the Osages with whom they had been at war since the early eighteenth century. The conciliation stemmed from Osages’ suddenly plummeted fortunes. In the 1820s
and early 1830s, after years of brutal fighting against the Cherokees, Osages surrendered most of their old homelands in present-day Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma and relocated their villages west, closer to Comanchería. Hemmed
between two aggressive and expanding geopolitical entities—Comanchería
and Indian Territory—Osages clustered in a narrow belt between the Verdi-
gris and Arkansas rivers in northwestern Oklahoma. According to one observer, their diminished power was such an acute source of “anxiety” for Osages “that very often when they knew the Patoka [Comanches] were in the field around
the Arkansas they changed the usual direction of their hunts in order not to cross this river, for on the other side they would be in a continuous state of warfare.” Cornered and collapsing, Osages began to seek accommodation with the
Comanches and found a diplomatic avenue in the peace talks the United States sponsored between the Comanches and the immigrant Indians. Comanche and
Osage representatives met at Fort Gibson in 1834 and concluded a formal peace at Camp Holmes in 1835. “Half of my body belongs to the Osages and half to
the Comanches,” Comanche Chief Ishacoly declared at the council, evoking
a sense of kinship between the long-standing enemies, “and the rest I will hold close to my heart.”²⁵
With peace came commerce. Eastern Comanches opened their eastern hunt-
ing ranges to Osages who in turn kept their access to the bison herds open by supplying their new allies with American goods. Although disease organisms
and pressures from removed eastern Indians had eroded Osages’ hegemony on
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the southern prairies, forcing them to abandon their old homelands near the
Arkansas River, they still controlled trade at several American posts in M
issouri.
Like the immigrant Indians, Osages now became middlemen between U.S. and
Comanche markets. In 1838 Victor Tixier, a French traveler, reported a flourishing exchange. Comanches, “no longer able to obtain any of the things manufactured by the whites . . . sought the friendship of the Osage, who had such frequent and easy dealings with the civilized people and obtained without difficulty what the Patoka needed. Trading was started after the war; every year the day of the full moon in July is the meeting time for the two nations. The Osage bring red paint, kitchen utensils, blankets, cloth, iron, and the Patoka give in return horses which they breed, mules stolen from Texans, all kinds of pelts, etc.”²⁶
Annual rendezvous were held at the junction of the Arkansas and Cimarron
rivers and on the Big Salt River, a tributary of the Brazos, where in 1843 “the whole body” of the Comanches was reported to be waiting for Osage traders.
The amount of goods exchanged at these meetings could be astounding. In 1845
the Arkansas Intelligencer reported that Osages had purchased twenty white captive children from Comanches, a transaction that would earn Osages several thousand dollars’ worth of goods if they ransomed the children to American agents. Two years later Osages reportedly purchased fifteen hundred mules from eastern Comanches with a selection of guns, powder, ammunition, blankets, blue cloth, and strouding. The value of the transaction was estimated at sixty thousand dollars, several hundreds of thousands in modern equivalents.
And as gateway traders, Comanches had yet another possibility for increasing profit margins; according to a U.S. Indian agent, they could resell Osage guns to their Mexican and Indian trading partners for three times the value. To put these transactions into perspective, the average annual volume of the Santa Fe trade, the largest single economic enterprise in the early nineteenth-century American West, was estimated in the 1840s at approximately two hundred thousand
dollars.²⁷
The stabilization of relations among Comanches, immigrant tribes, and