The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  iards,” and Amangual, whatever reservations he may have had about its sincerity, carried the message to San Antonio. But such a sentiment of affinity had to be constantly nourished with acts of generosity, which gave tangible meaning to abstractions like loyalty and love, and Comanches found Spanish acts increasingly wanting.¹³

  Comanches were particularly offended by the Spaniards’ failure to provide

  guns, which not only had enormous military value but were treasured as important prestige items and symbols of chiefly authority. Gun shipments from Mexico City to Texas were often unreliable. In 1806, for example, the rifles intended for Indian allies were of larger caliber than usual and Comanches refused to accept them because they were difficult to handle on horseback. To offset such problems, the Spanish government licensed much of Nacogdoches’ Indian trade to

  the trading house of William Barr and Samuel Davenport, two former U.S. citizens who acquired the bulk of their gun supply from Natchitoches. But in 1808, as the rivalry between Spain and the United States intensified, Natchitoches’s American agents cut off Barr’s and Davenport’s supply line, leaving them unable to provide guns to Spain’s Indian allies. When visiting San Antonio two years later, two eastern Comanche chiefs, Chihuahua and El Sordo, bluntly told Governor Salcedo that they were disappointed in the Spaniards because they did not

  “give them rifles” and because they did not “let them trade with the Americans.”

  They warned the governor that people who displayed such indifference to their needs were not “friends.” By failing to act the role of generous kinspeople, Spanish officials had unknowingly alienated the Comanches, and when they tried to prevent the Comanches from trading with the Americans who did offer liberal

  gifts and goods, the already thinned attachment snapped.¹⁴

  But the American success among the Comanches is open to a second, more

  mundane interpretation. Americans did not necessarily read Comanche cul-

  ture any better than Spaniards did. Instead, their fuller adherence to Comanche conventions may have been—at least in part—a fortuitous accident made possible by the ways in which their commerce with the Comanches was structured.

  The trade between the Comanches and Spanish Texas took place mainly in San

  Antonio and Nacogdoches, where Comanches visited fairs and trading houses

  that, until the troubled 1810s, abounded with merchandise. When Comanche

  visitors departed, Spanish merchants were likely to still have plenty of goods left.

  Comanche-American trade, by contrast, rested on itinerant American traders

  who ventured into Comanchería from distant frontier outposts and spent long

  periods of time in Comanche rancherías, hoping to sell all their goods before

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  returning home. Thus, the basic logistics of their business directed the Americans to behave like true kin. Unlike Spanish officials, they lived, traveled, ate, and slept with Comanches, and unlike Spanish merchants, they shared without

  restraint.¹⁵

  Comanche violence in Texas, then, had a distinctive sociocultural compo-

  nent that was articulated through kinship politics. And yet contemporary ob-

  servers were right in that the raids were materially motivated. Comanches may have been provoked to punish the Texans for being bad relatives, for failing to respect their sense of cultural order, but their principal reason to raid Texas was commercial: they needed a steady access to horses and mules in order to maintain their privileged access to the United States markets, the only reliable source of manufactured imports in the early nineteenth-century Southwest.

  But yet again things were not so simple. Why raid Texas when Comanchería

  itself swarmed with massive herds of feral horses and offered one of the best conditions in North America for horse breeding? Comanches did take advantage of this ecological potential and built massive domestic horse herds, but they still preferred to fuel much of their trade with plundered animals. There were compelling economic, ecological, and cultural reasons for this. Feral horses could be turned into superior hunting mounts, but their taming was a difficult and time-consuming process, whereas raiding supplied domesticated, ready-to-sell horses that commanded high prices in eastern markets. Raiding also yielded mules

  which, thanks to their endurance and resilience to heat, were the preferred draft animal in the Deep South, where a large portion of Comanche livestock was

  eventually sold.¹⁶

  So close, in fact, was the association between livestock raiding and trading that Comanches kept two separate sets of animals that served different economic and cultural needs. They channeled the stolen horses and mules swiftly into trading routes, but rarely sold processed mustangs or domestically raised animals, which had been specifically trained for various tasks from pulling travois to bison hunting and war. Such animals were treated almost like family members, as one American official found out in the early 1850s. Sanaco, an eastern Comanche

  chief, refused to sell his favorite horse to the American, explaining that trading the animal “would prove a calamity to his whole band, as it often required the speed of this animal to insure success in the buffalo chase. . . . Moreover, he said (patting his favorite on the neck), ‘I love him very much.’”¹⁷

  When Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821, it inherited in Texas

  a bankrupt province whose ruinous state endangered the very existence of the infant nation. As the buffer province of Texas teetered toward collapse under

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  Comanche pressure, northern Mexico lay exposed to an invasion from the

  United States, whose citizens had already infringed on the border areas along the Sabine and Red rivers. Although preoccupied with the nation’s turbulent

  center, Mexico City realized the urgency of rebuilding of Texas and ordered

  frontier officials to seek appeasement with the Comanches.¹⁸

  And so, in September 1821 at a Wichita village on the Brazos River, a delegation of Mexican officials met with Comanche chiefs Barbaquista, Pisinampe,

  and Quenoc. The chiefs listened as the emissaries explained the shift of power in Mexico City but, unimpressed with their gifts, refused to a sign a treaty. Mexican authorities tried again two months later when José Francisco Ruíz, now as an officer of the Mexican Army, journeyed to eastern Comanchería and presented a peace offer to a grand council presided over by principal chiefs and attended by some five thousand Comanches. The council reached consensus

  after three days’ deliberation, and in summer 1822 the “ancient” Pisinampe, the

  “father” of the eastern Comanches, led a delegation of chiefs to San Antonio to formalize a truce. Later that year Ojos Colorados, “a general of the Comanche nation,” signed a treaty with Nuevo Vizcaya Governor Mariano Urrea and recognized Mexico’s new government. Mexico’s diplomatic cajoling culminated in

  fall 1822, when its troops escorted a Comanche delegation led by Chief Guo-

  nique to Mexico City. Guonique attended Agustín Iturbide’s coronation as em-

  peror and later signed a formal treaty between “the Mexican Empire and the

  Comanche Nation.”¹⁹

  The grandiose title notwithstanding, the treaty bespoke Mexico City’s des-

  perate need to reach a settlement with the Comanches, who controlled the balance of power in Mexico’s far northern borderlands. The government offered

  Comanches duty-free trade in “silk, wool, cotton, hardware, food supplies,

  hides, tools for various crafts, all types of hand work, horses, mules, bulls, sheep, and goats” in San Antonio and, in reference to the Americans, asked them to

  notify Mexican officials about “people who come into their territory to explore it.” Comanches were asked to return Mexican prisoners, “excepting those who

  w
ish to stay,” and they were invited to send “twelve youths every four years, so that they may be educated at this Court in sciences and arts to which they are most suited.” The treaty granted Comanches a right to round up wild horses

  near the Mexican settlements and even promised them a standing reward for

  “any iron-shod horses” they might end up capturing in the process. Finally, the Comanche nation was assigned an emissary-interpreter who would be in permanent residence in San Antonio and have direct access to the Mexican secre-

  tary of state. Pleased with the generous terms, Chief Guonique promised that if Spain would attempt to recapture Mexico—a threat that remained acute

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  throughout the 1820s—Comanches would squash the attempt with “the rifle,

  the lance, and the arrow.” To make clear to the Mexicans who held sway over the Southwest, he boasted that the eastern Comanches could mobilize “within six

  months . . . a body of twenty-seven thousand man” to protect Mexico against its enemies.²⁰

  The treaty spawned one of the recurring but fleeting attempts at accommo-

  dation on the Comanche-colonial borders. Comanche chiefs collected gifts and even accepted honorary ranks in the Mexican militia, Mexican officials such as Ruíz visited Comanchería to nourish the all-important personal ties between

  the two nations, and border trade thrived in San Antonio and Nacogdoches. The French scientist-traveler Jean Louis Berlandier reported how eastern Comanches visited the Nacogdoches presidio “in caravans of several hundred, provided they are at peace with the garrison, to sell their buffalo hides (covered with painting), bear grease, smoked and dried meat, and, above all, furs. . . . It is like a little fair to see a town square covered with the tents of a tribe, with all the hustle and bustle of a bazaar going on among them.”²¹

  But as Berlandier’s report suggests, raiding continued. Mexicans assumed that the treaty covered all their communities; Comanches did not. Replicating their policies toward Spanish New Mexico in the 1760s and 1770s and Spanish Texas

  in the 1800s and 1810s, Comanches alternated raiding and trading with Mexi-

  can Texas. They plundered farms and ranches for livestock and captives, but

  traded peacefully in San Antonio and Nacogdoches. Seeing little contradiction in their actions, they expected Mexicans to follow the Comanche protocol in its intricate details whenever they visited the province for trade. To Berlandier, it seemed that they expected to be treated with the honors and courtesies due to a supreme power:

  As many as two or three hundred of these natives arrived at a time, bring-

  ing their wives and very young children. Whenever they came like this, bringing their offspring, the visit was a proof of peace, of friendship, and of trust; whereas, when they had only a few women with them, it was because they

  were at war. . . . When such a band of natives approaches a presidio, they make a camp a league away and send a courier with notice of their arrival and a

  request for permission to enter. Sometimes the garrison troops mount and go

  out to escort them. The formal entry then is something quite singular. As the bugles sound, you can see all the natives, holding themselves very proudly,

  riding in between the ranks of cavalry drawn up with sabers flashing in salute.

  I have seen one such group of Comanches take umbrage because no escort

  went to meet them. This slight was enough to make them decide not to enter

  the presidio at all.²²

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  In the course of the 1820s the balance between accommodation and antago-

  nism tipped toward the latter. This was in part due to Mexico’s inconsistent Indian policy. Despite the lavish outlays of gifts and extensive promises of further presents during treaty talks, Mexico City procrastinated in sending the necessary moneys to the north, moving the governor of the recently unified states of Texas and Coahuila, Rafael González, to warn in 1824 that the lack of gifts and goods in the province was about to bring “a total collapse of the peace.”

  Soon Comanches and their allies were raiding all across Texas and Coahuila,

  turning the lower Río Grande settlements into a dreadful world “where widows and orphans weep for dear ones slain” and “for sons and daughters carried into captivity.” More funds became available for northern provinces in the late 1820s, but the politically unstable and economically impoverished Mexican republic

  struggled to keep the subsidies steady and sufficient. As the gift flow fluctuated, so too did the frontier relations; Comanches intensified and cut back their raiding activities in proportion to the availability of presents.²³

  But as during the Spanish era, the raids were also stimulated by the Coman-

  ches’ need to supply their trading economy, which in the 1820s became increasingly enmeshed with the United States markets and grew rapidly. In 1826 the

  Natchitoches Courier reported matter-of-factly that the Americans were engaged in “an extensive and often very lucrative trade” with Comanches, who

  “are supported with goods, in return for the horses and mules, of which they rob the inhabitants of the province [of Texas].” Itinerant American peddlers provided Comanches with nearly bottomless markets for stolen stock while sup-

  plying them with weapons that made raiding more effective. Acutely aware of

  the linkage between American trade and Comanche raids in Texas, Mexico’s

  secretary of state in 1826 asked the United States minister in Mexico to suppress the livestock trade, calling the westering Americans “traders of blood who put instruments of death in the hands of those barbarians.”²⁴

  Like their Spanish predecessors, Mexican officials simplified Comanche vio-

  lence and reduced it to mere subset of American imperialism. It was a misconception that led to a massive miscalculation. As the authorities in San Antonio, Saltillo, and Mexico City saw it, the relentless Comanche attacks in Texas threatened to turn the province into an easy catch for the United States, which clam-ored for western lands to accommodate its growing population and its seemingly bottomless demand for raw materials. Faced with what it saw as an entangled

  threat of Comanche aggression and American expansion, the Mexican Con-

  gress adopted in the fall of 1824 a desperate measure: it opened the northern provinces to foreign immigration, hoping to solve both outstanding frontier

  threats at once.

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  Behind the new policy was the calculation that generous land grants and tax

  exemptions would turn the encroaching norteamericanos into loyal Mexican subjects. Mexico tried, in other words, to counter American colonization by

  absorbing the colonizers themselves into its national body. In March 1825 the legislature of Coahuila y Texas implemented the new law, opening its borders to all foreigners willing to accept Mexican rule and worship the Christian god. In short order, the state signed some two dozen contracts with empresarios, immigration agents who were responsible for selecting and bringing in the colonists, allocating lands, and enforcing Mexican laws. The other objective of the immigration law was to use the American colonies as shields against Comanches.

  The designated empresario grants covered almost all of Texas to the west, north, and east of San Antonio, sheltering—at least in theory—the state’s vital parts from Comanche invasions. The largest of the empresario colonies, Stephen F.

  Austin’s cluster of five adjacent grants, would eventually extend from the Gulf Coast to some two hundred miles northeast of San Antonio.²⁵

  Far from imposing frontier buffers, the new Anglo colonies were in their early years weak and exposed. Established on sprawling grants, they were scattered, isolated, and an easy prey for the mobile Comanche war parties. Rather than

  shields against Comanche raids, the
y became targets for them. Discouraged by the prospects of his settlement plans—and fully aware of the geopolitical dynamics of the Comanche trading-and-raiding economy—Austin in 1830 com-

  plained to the Mexican government that peace with the Comanches would be

  impossible as long as there was a market in the United States for horses stolen from Texas. By purchasing Comanche livestock, he bristled, American traders

  had effectively “hired” Comanches “to prosecute a pillaging war against the

  frontiers of Texas, Quahuila, and Nuevo Sentender, robbing those Provinces of Horses and Mules.” But even Austin himself was not aware just how vulnerable his colony was: Texas officials suspected that some of Austin’s own settlers were engaged in contraband livestock and arms trade with Indians.²⁶

  The wealthy and well-connected Austin eventually managed to organize

  effective militia or “ranger” units, which provided a measure of protection

  against Comanche attacks, and in the mid-1830s his colony boasted more than

  eight thousand settlers, extensive cotton plantations, regular mail service, and a dynamic capital, San Felipe de Austin, with three thousand residents and four schools. The vast majority of American immigrants, however, quickly learned to shun the violent interior of Texas and instead established themselves near the Nacogdoches region and along the Gulf Coast. This left the Mexican-controlled Tejano Texas around San Antonio wide open to Comanche raiders, whose mili-

  9. Map of Texas by Stephen F. Austin, 1835. Published by H. S. Tanner. This map captures the process of “cartographic dispossession.” Euro-Americans diminished and delegitimized the power and territorial claims of indigenous inhabitants through map making. Although Comanches dominated much of the territory shown on Austin’s map, they are depicted as almost landless: Comanchería has dissolved into Anglo-Texan empresario grants and Comanches seem to float above the southern

  plains, unattached to land and the political landscape. Courtesy of the

  Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

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