Comanchería asylum from political persecution, religious oppression, poverty, and enslavement. People, in other words, exchanged themselves—their bodies
and their labor—for the protection and wealth that kinship bonds with Coman-
ches made available. But while grounded in material impulses, immigration was also a social and psychological process. That process is largely inaccessible to us for the sources fall silent—Spanish officials, for example, simply brushed off the problem of outward immigration by labeling the renegades who abandoned
them to live with salvajes as “perverse”—but it is possible to delineate its approximate contours.⁵⁸
A passage to Comanchería was not necessarily a trek to the unknown. Living
within Comanchería’s seductive cultural sphere, the Wichitas, Chariticas, Mexicans, and others who embarked into Comanchería were often preacclimatized
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Map by Bill Nelson.
The Empire of the Plains
177
to Comanche way of life, customs, traditions, and language. Nor did a move into Comanchería necessarily involve negotiating racial barriers, for Comanches did not define the world in terms of color lines. Race for early nineteenth-century Comanches was essentially a political conception. They talked about their mistrust and hatred toward the whites ( taibooʔs), but it was always in a specific geopolitical context and generally directed toward the encroaching Anglo-Texan
settlers. Behavior and beliefs, not blood lineages, determined who would be accepted into Comanchería and could become Comanche. If a newcomer of His-
panic, Anglo, Caddoan, or any other ethnic descent was willing and able to adopt the proper code of behavior, he or she would be accepted as a member of the
community. Acting like a Comanche—honoring kinship obligations, respecting
camp rules, obeying taboos, yielding to consensus rule, adhering to accepted gender roles, and contributing to communal affairs—was more important than
looking like one. “When at war with us if Mexicans are in their camps,” one
Mexican observer wrote in 1828, “the Comanches will not harm them, showing
that he who lives with them is their friend, regardless of his nationality.”⁵⁹
If Comanche society welcomed newcomers, it also sustained them after
their entrance. Naturalized Comanche carried no visible stigma of their background and apparently faced few obstacles for social fulfillment and elevation.
They could marry into Comanche families, enter kinship networks, and achieve positions of power. In 1834 the traveling American artist George Catlin visited Comanchería with a U.S. peace commission and painted a portrait of His-oo-san-ches, “one of the leading warriors of the tribe.” It was only after finishing the painting that Catlin realized that his model was actually Jesús Sánchez, a progeny of a Comanche-Spanish union.⁶⁰ As stories like Jesús Sánchez’s show, outsiders embraced Comanche identity precisely because that identity was at
once distinctive, accommodating, and negotiable. Comanches may have used
language that had nationalistic overtones and felt strong ethnic pride, but they were permissive in determining who could claim membership in their community. Later in the nineteenth century, when the U.S. expansion threatened their very existence, Comanches tried to build an anti-American pan-Indian alliance by appealing to race—a more exclusive concept than tribe or nation—but in the early part of the century they still believed that almost anyone could become Comanche.
Why, then, did Comanches open their borders for such a massive influx of
new peoples and foreign practices, beliefs, and languages? Just as th
e many
peoples who crossed the border into Comanchería displayed a multitude of
motives for doing so, so too did Comanches accept them for a wide variety of reasons. The newcomers provided Comanches with information about distant
178
The Empire of the Plains
To view this image, please refer to
the print version of this book.
8. His-oo-san-ches (Commanche Warrior).
Oil on canvas by George Catlin, 1834. Courtesy of
Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
lands and markets, defense systems on colonial frontiers, and raiding opportunities within them. They introduced novel ideas about animal husbandry, ex-
plained the workings of exotic diseases and perhaps provided new cures, and
offered new skills that could repair guns or heal the wounds inflicted by them.
Some groups came to operate as middlemen traders, shuffling goods between
Comanchería and faraway markets, while others produced maize and other ne-
cessities that were not available in Comanchería. Some, by simply moving into Comanchería, afforded Comanches a more direct access to surrounding markets and resources.
In the end, however, large-scale ethnic absorption was a necessity born less of strategic calculations than of shifting demographics. Comanches’ far-reaching trading network opened their communities to new markets, but it also opened
them to deadly microbes traveling with the traders who flocked in from all directions. After the first devastating outbreak of smallpox in 1780–81, the Comanches were hit by repeated waves of disease. Smallpox erupted into major epidemics
The Empire of the Plains
179
in 1799, 1808, 1816, 1839, 1848, and 1851, and a potent cholera virus washed over Comanchería in 1849. The epidemics claimed thousands of lives, grinding deep dents into Comanchería’s demographic base. Comanche population may
have peaked around forty thousand in the late 1770s, but most estimates in the 1820s and 1830s put it between twenty and thirty thousand. This drop, moreover, occurred when the communities around Comanchería experienced steady and
at times explosive growth. Natural increase and immigration from the United
States boosted New Mexico’s population from thirty-one thousand in 1790 to
forty-two thousand in 1821 and to some sixty-five thousand in 1846. In Texas, a deluge of American immigrants and their slaves swelled the province’s population from approximately two thousand in the early 1820s to some forty thousand in 1836. Indian Territory, fed by constant removals, was home to some twenty thousand Indians by 1832.⁶¹
Under such conditions, incorporation of people, groups, and even entire
nations into Comanchería became a matter of preserving political and eco-
nomic power. On one hand, the newcomers were essential workers who sus-
tained Comanchería’s burgeoning pastoral economy as spouses who produced
children for the community. Comanches themselves believed, one mid-
nineteenth-century observer wrote, that “they have increased greatly in num-
bers . . . by the connexion with other small prairie bands.” On the other hand, the new nations residing within Comanchería acted as allies in wars and buffers when those wars swept back into Comanchería. Wichita villages cushioned Comanchería’s eastern border against Osage raids and its southern border against Anglo-Texan soldier-settlers, while the Kiowas bore a disproportionate brunt of the Cheyenne and Arapaho attacks during the struggles over the Arkansas basin.
More abstractly, the sheer mass of peoples under their auspices gave Coman-
ches substantial esteem and leverage in their diplomatic dealings with Euro-
Americans—a point not lost on colonial agents, Comanches themselves, and
the people caught between them. As many Euro-Americans saw it, negotiating
with Comanches often meant yielding to their demands or risking a clash with a broad Comanche-led intertribal coalition.⁶²
The willingness of other peoples to become Comanche is a striking mani-
festation of Comanches’ international power and prestige. It made a deep im-
pression on American visitors like Josiah Gregg, who claimed that Comanches
“acknowledge no boundaries, but call themselves the lords of the entire prairies—all others are but ‘tenants at will.’” For the resident Spaniards and Mexicans, however, Comanchería’s gravitational pull was a source of fear and envy.
In 1828, following the signing of a boundary treaty with the United States earlier
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that year, the Mexican government dispatched a Comisión de Límites (Bound-
ary Commission) under General Manuel de Mier y Terán to determine the
northern and eastern borders of Texas. The commission was also assigned to
survey the attitudes of Texas tribes and explore the possibilities of incorporating the Plains Indians into “the Mexican family” and, if they settled down and embraced Catholicism, as citizens of the republic.
The situation in Texas shocked the commission. American immigrants were
flooding in from the east, blurring the boundary line between Texas and Louisiana, and Comanches were incorporating Mexico’s prospective Indian allies
across the entire province. “The weaker tribes that cause the Comanches no
concern are added through alliance,” Terán noted. “By allowing them to live
independently distributed into camps of two or three hundred persons, the
Comanches teach them their own martial habits and help to improve their con-
dition.” Lieutenant José María Sánchez found Mexican presence in Texas weak
and reported in disbelief how the Comanches systematically absorbed and as-
similated other Native societies into their ranks. To him, the Comanches ap-
peared an expanding hegemonic people who imposed their identity on other
groups whom they kept under paternalistic rule. The “desire to increase their tribe,” he wrote, “makes the Comanches very considerate of the small tribes with which they have friendly relations, protecting them, teaching them their habits and customs, and finally amalgamating them into their nation. For this reason the Comanches are the most numerous of those [indigenous nations] found in
Texas.”⁶³
5
Greater Comanchería
Like most empires, the Comanche empire had many faces. Viewed from the
north and east, it was an empire of commerce and diplomacy, an expanding
transnational nexus that radiated prestige and power, absorbed foreign ethnicities into its multicultural fold, and brought neighboring societies into its sphere as allies and dependents. Viewed from the Southwest and Mexico, however, the Comanches showed a different kind of face. Here their empire brushed directly against Euro-colonial frontiers, and its tactics were often grounded in violence and exploitation. This was an empire that marginalized, isolated, and divided Spanish and Mexican colonies, demoting them, in a sense, from imperial to
peripheral status. But while distinctive, the opposite faces of the Comanche empire were connected, parts of an integrated whole. Comanches knitted the deep sinews of their power by looking north and east toward the vast political and economic resources of the Great Plains and the cis-Mississippi east. It was there, in landscapes far removed from the opportunities and dangers of the colonial Southwest, that they found the allies, subordinates, and markets on which they built their imperial ascendancy in the Southwest and northern Mexico.
In this chapter I explore how Comanches’ plains hegemony shaped their poli-
cies toward the colonial regimes. Sustained more by mediation and cultural
sway than force and coercion, Comanches’ far-flung
trading and alliance net-
work pacified their northern and eastern borders, liberating resources to confront the expansionist Bourbon Spain in the west and south. They subjected
Texas to systematic stock-and-slave raiding and tribute extortion, bringing the colony on the verge of collapse, but they traded peacefully in New Mexico, using the colony as a source of political gifts and an outlet for surplus stock. These policies aborted the promising developments of the Bourbon era and ultimately dis-181
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Greater Comanchería
solved Spain’s imperial system in the far north. Isolated from the interior and its resources by the Comanches, New Mexico gravitated economically, politically, and even culturally toward Comanchería even as Texas nearly expired under
Comanche pressure.
Independent Mexico inherited in 1821 a badly fragmented frontier in its far
north, and the fledgling nation failed to put it back together. New Mexico continued its drift toward Comanchería, distancing itself from the rest of Mexico, while Texas, in a doomed attempt at self-preservation, opened its borders to U.S.
immigration. The founding of the Republic of Texas posed a grave threat to
Comanches, but ironically, it also spurred one of the most dramatic extensions of their regime. While struggling to secure their border with the Lone Star Republic through war and diplomacy, Comanches shifted their market-driven raiding operations south of the Río Grande, turning much of northern Mexico into a vast hinterland of extractive raiding. That subjugated hinterland was what the United States Army invaded and conquered in 1846–48.
This chapter, then, is about how Comanches harnessed and exercised power
but it is also about how they imagined, managed, and produced space. Coman-
ches refused to recognize national and international boundaries as Euro-
Americans defined them. They treated New Spain and Mexico not as undivided
imperial realms but as collections of discrete entities, devising distinct policies toward New Mexico, Texas, and other colonial states. By doing so, they imposed an alternative spatial geometry on what historians have called the Spanish and Mexican borderlands. Spanish and Mexican mapmakers invariably depicted the
far north as intact and cohesive, an inseparable part of New Spain or Mexico, but it is also possible to view New Mexico and Texas as a part of an expanding Comanche dominion, or the Greater Comanchería. Whether through violent
exploitation, coercive diplomacy, economic dependence, or intimate cultural
ties, New Mexico and Texas were irrevocably bound to Comanchería, whose
effective sphere of influence, if not actual political boundaries, extended far to the south and west of its southern plains core area. The composition of this chapter is designed to highlight this hidden geographic reality. Rather than following the orthodox temporal organization of dividing the early nineteenth-century Southwest into Spanish, Mexican, and American periods, I adopt a spatial approach in order to make visible the geopolitical structures, divides, and continuities enforced by Comanches. Doing so reveals the blueprint of the Coman-
The Comanche Empire Page 29