The Comanche Empire
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to Coahuila. From there on, the raids escalated steadily, eventually engulfing much of northern Mexico. In 1828 Comanches razed the recently built military town of Palafox on the lower Río Grande, killing most of its inhabitants.
A few years later, “emboldened by the slack defensive system of the Mexicans,”
their war parties crossed the Río Grande in several places. They seized control of Apache war trails from Matamoros to northern Chihuahua, forcing the Lipans
and Mescaleros to shift their raiding operations west, south, and north.
By the late 1830s, Comanches were making “continual inroads upon the whole
eastern frontier of Mexico, from Chihuahua to the coast; driving off immense numbers of horses and mules, and killing the citizens they may encounter, or making them prisoners.” Moving through Texas at will, they claimed its entire western part down to the Rio Grande—“the most healthy, fertile, and desirable portion of the republic,” as one Anglo-Texan put it—as their own. There was still another upsurge of raiding activity in 1840 and 1841 when large-scale war parties struck deep into Mexico, and soon the Comanche raiding network
covered much of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Durango,
Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosí. When the Mexican-American War broke out in
1846, Comanche war bands ranged into the Mexican tropics. They were active
in Jalisco and attacked at least once the city of Querétaro, which lies 135 miles north of Mexico City, and their war trails extended 1,000 miles—almost fifteen degrees of latitude—south of Comanchería’s center.⁷⁴
It is not difficult to read strategic intention into such a dramatic expansion.
Like most imperial powers, Comanches strove to separate the zones of conflict from the zones of peace within their realm. By shifting the geographic focus of their raiding operations far to the south—and far from their borders—they were able to decrease the possibility of punitive campaigns into Comanchería. In this sense, the expansion could be seen as a defensive measure, an attempt to render violence remote. The deeper into Mexico the Comanches pushed, the safer they could feel at home.⁷⁵
Seen from a different angle, Comanches’ thrust into northern Mexico stemmed
from the simultaneous vitality and vulnerability of their power complex. Early nineteenth-century Comanchería was a dense and dynamic marketplace, the
center of a far-flung trading empire that covered much of North America’s heartland. The Comanche trade pump sent massive amounts of horses and mules
to the north and east—enough to support the numerous equestrian societies
on the central, northern, and eastern Great Plains and enough to contribute
to the westward expansion of the American settlement frontier. In return for their extensive commercial services, Comanches imported enough horticultural produce to sustain a population of twenty to thirty thousand and enough guns,
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Comanche raiding zone in the 1820s
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Comanche raiding zone in the 1830s
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Comanche raiding zone in the 1840s
Comanche war trail
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11. Comanche raiding hinterland in northern Mexico. Map by Bill Nelson.
lead, and powder to defend a vast territory against Native enemies as well as the growing, expansionist Republic of Texas.
But that thriving exchange system was rapidly approaching the limits of its productive foundation. Since Comanches reserved the bulk of domestically raised horses for their own use, the viability of their trading network depended on con-
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tinuous livestock raiding. But by the 1820s, the traditional raiding domains had become either exhausted or unavailable. Decades of on-and-off pillaging had
wrecked the pastoral economy of Texas, whereas New Mexico, the site of intense raiding in the 1760s and 1770s, had attached itself to Comanchería through a tribute relationship. Comanches continued sporadic raiding in Texas through
the 1820s and 1830s, but the returns failed to meet their expansive livestock demand, which skyrocketed in the late 1830s and early 1840s when they opened
trade with the populous nations of Indian Territory. To keep their commercial system running, Comanches needed new, unexhausted raiding fields, and they
found them in northern Mexico. U.S. Army Captain Randolph B. Marcy saw a
direct link between the trade with removed Indians and the raids into Mexico.
“A number of Delawares, Shawnees, and Kickapoos,” he noted in 1849, “have
for several years past been engaged in a traffic with the prairie Indians, which has a tendency to defeat the efforts of the military authorities in checking their depredations upon the citizens of the northern provinces of Mexico.”⁷⁶
In addition to livestock, Comanches pushed south of the Río Grande in
search of Apache and Mexican slaves. The old eastbound slave traffic had all but collapsed with the U.S. takeover of Louisiana and the subsequent advent of large-scale black chattel slavery in the province, but Comanches could still find profitable markets for captive women and children in New Mexico and Texas.
Moreover, devastated by three successive smallpox epidemics in 1799, 1808,
and 1816, Comanches needed to supplement their workforce with systematic
coerced labor drafts. They transformed themselves into large-scale slav
eholders, and they did so by combing northern Mexico for captives (see chapter 6). According to Miguel Ramos Arizpe, a well-informed priest and diplomat, Mexico’s northern provinces lost more than two thousand men, women, and children to
Indian captivity between 1816 and 1821. Comanches, another observer noted,
“are exceedingly fond of stealing the objects of their enemies’ affection. Female children are sought with greatest avidity, and adopted or married.”⁷⁷
Comanche raiding thus generated a massive northward flow of property from
Mexico into Comanchería and its trade channels, a development promoted by
many interest groups in North America. The Bent brothers encouraged Coman-
ches to raid Mexican settlements, as did Holland Coffee, who “advised them to go to the interior and kill Mexicans and bring their horses and mules to him.”
By the late 1830s it had become a common belief that “enterprising [American]
capitalists” had established trading posts on the Comanche-Texas border in order to tap the “immense booty” that the Comanches, “the most wealthy as well as
the most powerful of the most savage nations of North America,” were hauling from northern Mexico. Texas officials provided Comanche war parties free ac-
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cess through their state, hoping to direct the raids to Mexico, and even supplied southbound war bands with beef and other provisions. By the mid-1840s, the
arrangement had solidified to the point that Chief Pahayuko (Amorous Man)
could ask Texas Rangers to go with his band “to war agenst [ sic] the Mexicans.”
New Mexico’s officials routinely turned a blind eye to the fact that their subjects traded in horses and mules taken from other Mexican provinces, and some New
Mexicans were even rumored to be joining Comanche war parties south of the
Río Grande. From the vantage point of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León,
or Tamaulipas, it easily seemed that a depraved North American coalition of
Indians, Americans, and New Mexicans had emerged to exploit and enfeeble
northern Mexico.⁷⁸
Comanche raiding in northern Mexico was a veritable industry. By the 1830s,
the single path across Texas had evolved into a grid of well-trodden war trails.
The trails started at the present-day Big Spring, a pool of artesian water near the headwaters of the Colorado River, which served as a staging area where Comanche and Kiowa parties from all across Comanchería gathered in spring to rest and water their horses before heading south. From the Big Spring two trunk
lines carried raiders south. The two lines forked into four near the Río Grande and then plunged deep into Mexico, skirting major cities and military forts.
Leading from the main prongs there were numerous lateral lines, which webbed across much of northern Mexico, allowing Comanches to adjust to variations in weather, availability of game, and Apache competitors. Along and around the
trails, Comanches knew numerous waterholes, lookout points, way stations, and prime campsites with winter pasturage.⁷⁹
Once south of the Río Grande, Comanche war parties often camped and ren-
dezvoused at the Bolsón de Mapimí, a lightly populated desert plateau nestled amidst the jagged mountain ranges and sierra forests of southeastern Chihuahua, western Coahuila, and northern Durango. The Bolsón was easily accessible from the western and central trails and offered Comanches and their herds a
sanctuary of mild weather, natural springs, clear streams, seasonal lakes, and protective rock entrenchments for camping. From the 1830s on, the raids into Mexico began to take the shape of seasonal migrations. Comanche war bands
started to bring entire families with them and extend their sojourns over several seasons, turning the previously desolate Bolsón into a permanent, self-sustaining settlement colony. As in Comanchería proper, Comanches spent their days
hunting local game for subsistence, collecting wild foods, and bearing and rearing children, and like the southern plains, the Bolsón was dotted with large, slowly migrating Comanche rancherías that lined streams and river valleys with massive horse herds. Comanches walled their favorite campsites like Laguna de
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Jaco with parapets, and their large horse and mule herds cut wide roads into the terrain. For the occasional American or Mexican visitors, the region had an eerie feel of a colonized landscape. “In the fall and winter season,” one observer wrote,
“their home is . . . in the Bolson de Mapimi, a vast basin shut in by high mountains at the west. Here they enjoy uninterrupted possession of a wide extent of country, whence they make their sallies into the heart of Mexico.”⁸⁰
Part settlement colony and part staging area, the Bolsón plateau was the nest from which Comanche war parties fanned out westward, eastward, and southward, launching wide-ranging campaigns across northern Mexico. Sometimes
in small parties, sometimes in big war bands, they moved from one target to
another, living off the land while sacking ranches, haciendas, villages, towns, and mining communities. They drove off entire horse and mule herds; captured women and children; and butchered cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats for food. To suppress resistance, they killed Mexican men, burned houses, destroyed food
storages, and slaughtered animals they could not take or did not need. Once the parties had accumulated booty, they returned to winter in the Bolsón, waiting for grass to grow along the trails to sustain their massive herds.
The excursions were carefully planned and organized. In 1847 Chief Potsana-
quahip stunned a U.S. Indian official by explaining how he was going to take his band to Parras, Chihuahua, and by identifying in detail the villages he would raid on the return journey. Several Mexican observers remarked that the Comanche
war parties that moved in seemingly random patterns were in fact highly disciplined units, organized under “generals” and “captains” who exercised complete authority over their followers during the campaign. “When the march is in war formation,” Berlandier wrote, “the scouts and spies ride ahead, then the chief of the tribe at the front of his people, with the women staying behind. If the enemy makes a surprise attack on a trail camp the women protect their offspring, if necessary with bows and knives, fighting to the death if they cannot take flight.
Warhorses are never ridden on the trail, except at the approach of the enemy.
Each Comanche fighting man has three or four horses for the trail.” After an attack, Comanche war bands often dispersed to confuse pursuing parties. Disappearing into the countless canyons of the Sierra Madres, they later reunited in the Bolsón de Mapimí. If they faced superior forces and could not escape, the war parties used captives to negotiate safe return into Comanchería.⁸¹
The operations could be extraordinarily profitable. Although Apaches had
pillaged northern Mexico for decades, many areas had been spared and now
offered largely untapped targets for Comanche raiders. In a nine-day stretch in January 1835, for example, Comanches pilfered two thousand horses from
Chihuahua City and its hinterland, and in June, after repeated attacks through-
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out the spring, several hundred Comanche warriors “laid waste” Rancho de las Animas near Parral, burning several buildings, destroying food bins, and taking thirty-nine captives. In all, eastern Chihuahua lost several thousand horses and hundreds of captives in the space of five months. Chihuahua’s governor raised one thousand volunteers for a pursuit but failed to capture the culprits. A similar sequence unfolded in northern Nuevo León and Tamaulipas in the aftermath of
the Texas Revolution. With Mexican troops preoccupied with the Texas rebels, Comanches orchestrated a flurry of raids. They depleted the horse and mule
herds of Lared
o and Matamoros; seized numerous captives; burned houses and
fields; and slaughtered entire herds of cattle, sheep, and goats. They drove off the residents of newly built Mexican ranches from the strategically sensitive strip between the Río Grande and Nueces River, which both Mexico and the Texas
Republic claimed. The attacks continued through the late 1830s, reducing the lower Río Grande villages to a “sad and disgraceful condition” by 1841.⁸²
By the late 1830s, raiding had become big business across northern Mexico.
One report stated that Coahuila alone lost nearly four hundred captives and
some thirty-five thousand head of livestock to Indian raiders between 1835 and 1845, while almost twelve hundred died defending their lives and livelihood.
Another report, from 1841, asserted that a Comanche war party of two to three hundred had made it to north of the Río Grande with eighteen thousand head
of Mexican livestock, leaving behind three hundred casualties. This report may have been hyperbolic, but other evidence suggests that Comanches frequently
returned from Mexico with oversized herds that were all but unmanageable.
The Horseshoe Crossing on the Pecos River, the favorite camping site of the
returning Comanche parties, was littered with horse and mule skeletons. Ex-
hausted by the long travel and unguarded by the outnumbered herders, the animals overdrank and died by the hundreds.⁸³
Far from passive victims, Mexican fronterizos (borderlanders) fought relentlessly—both with weapons and words—to protect their lives, lands, and prop-
erty. Northern officials rejected national policymakers’ wildly unrealistic aspirations of incorporating the Comanches into the “Mexican family” and instead recast them as alien others, animalistic barbarians who had to be erased in the name of civilization, religion, and national honor. Wealthy northerners turned their haciendas into veritable fortresses and organized private mini-armies, local militias patrolled roads and town limits, and provincial troops staged ambushes along Comanche trails, sometimes inflicting heavy losses on the enemy; in 1844
alone, Comanches lost some 150 men in four separate engagements with Mexi-
can troops. And while individual departments labored with local defenses, the federal government tried to formulate broader strategic solutions. Mexico City
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appointed three commanding generals to coordinate the defenses in northern
Mexico and sent a military detachment to Nacogdoches to expel American ped-