The Comanche Empire
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After the Texas Revolution, Mexico City refused to accept the loss of Texas and considered it a Mexican department under the temporary rule of a rebel government. But just as the Comanche threat had propelled Texas to allow immigra-
tion from the United States, ushering it into Anglo-dominated independence,
Comanche violence now blocked Mexico’s attempts to recover its lost domin-
ion. Mexico made several attempts at reconquest, but the turmoil of Comanche raiding in the bordering states—Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas—and
particularly in the disputed Nueces Strip prevented the Mexican Army from
organizing sustained campaigns. The officials of the Texas Republic, fully aware of these dynamics, offered Comanche war parties unrestricted travel through
their lands. Comanche violence also thwarted Mexico’s hopes of recapturing
Texas from within. The citizens in the Río Grande villages had grown alienated from the central government that had failed to protect them from Comanche
incursions and repeatedly refused to provide men, horses, and food for federal operations. In late 1839, moreover, just as Mexico attempted to launch a campaign into Texas, Antonio Canales, the commander of the federalist forces in Tamaulipas, instigated an anticentralist revolt to create an independent border republic out of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, and southern Texas. The
scheme won wide support among the embittered fronterizos, and the centralist troops did not manage to crush it until the spring of 1840. The Mexican Army, then, was forced to wage a war of reconquest from a decimated and rebellious war zone, an attempt that was doomed from the outset.⁹⁹
The linkages between Comanche power politics and U.S. expansion culmi-
nated in the Mexican-American War, a war so one-sided that Ulysses S. Grant
called it “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.” Grant’s candid statement meant to acknowledge the staggering power
imbalance between the two republics—the war pitted a rapidly industrializ-
ing nation of some 18 million people against a young agrarian nation riddled by chronic political instability and fragile local economies—but it missed the underlying fact that the Comanches had exacerbated nearly all of Mexico’s
weaknesses through their power policies along and below the Río Grande. When U.S. troops marched south of that river in 1846, they did so alongside Comanche
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warriors who had raided there for decades, sabotaging Mexico’s nation-building project in the far north and unintentionally preparing the ground for the American invasion. This is a point often missing from modern accounts of the war but not lost to the contemporaries. In 1848, for example, the Chihuahua legislature explained Mexico’s defeat by noting that its northern half had been ravaged for years by Indian war bands. This wasteland of plunder, it derided, was a “worthy stage” indeed for the United States to display its might.¹⁰⁰
As much as Americans despised the Mexicans for yielding to savage rule, their own self-styled civilizing campaign into Mexico was closely intertwined with Comanche power politics. At the outbreak of the war in spring 1846, Mexico’s principal military initiative was not building defenses against the impending U.S. assault but rather a failed attempt to build a line of forts from Matamoros to El Paso to contain Comanche incursions. In the fall of 1845, moreover, Comanches staged a series of destructive raids deep into Durango and Zacatecas, tying up Mexican forces toward the nation’s center at a time they were needed at its borders. The United States’ and Mexico’s lopsided capacities to wage war came into sharp relief in March 1846, when General Zachary Taylor led U.S. troops from Corpus Christi to the north bank of the Río Grande and asserted American sovereignty over the disputed Nueces Strip. Mexico protested fiercely, insisting that Taylor’s Army of Occupation had entered Mexican soil the moment it
crossed the Nueces, but there was no meaningful Mexican presence above the
Río Grande to bolster that claim. Taylor had stepped into a power vacuum created by the Comanches, and Mexico would have to face the invading army not
on the Nueces but amidst vulnerable civil settlements on the Río Grande.¹⁰¹
When U.S. troops pushed deeper into northern Mexico in the summer and
fall of 1846, they entered the shatterbelt of Native American power. The U.S.
Army marched south on abandoned roads littered with corpses, moving through
a ghost landscape of ruined villages, decaying fields, horseless corrals, and deserted cattle herds. It faced Mexican cavalries mounted on “miserable little half-starved horses” and Mexican troops who lacked horses and mules to set up supply trains and move artillery. The few presidios dotting this wasteland were all but defunct. Their failure to curb Indian depredations had further diminished Mexico City’s interest in supporting them, and the morale of the troops was dreadful, corrupted by wretched living conditions, food shortages, poor
salaries, and mortal terror of Comanche attacks. The two hundred soldiers of the Presidio del Río Grande withdrew to Monclova without resistance, letting U.S. troops cross the Río Grande undisturbed near Eagle Pass, a key Comanche entryway into Mexico. It was as if northern Mexico had already been vanquished
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when the U.S. invasion got underway. If Mexico’s collapse in 1847 was quick
and complete, it was because the nation had to fight two invading powers at
once.¹⁰²
If Comanche power politics made northern Mexico militarily and materially
vulnerable to the U.S. invasion, they also rendered it politically and psychologically susceptible for the U.S. occupation. Decades of unremitting exploitation and manipulation by Comanches had critically weakened the northern
departments as well as Mexico City’s hold on them. On the eve of the U.S.
invasion, the Mexican North was destabilized, drained, and, it seems, unresponsive to the orders of federal officials, who had refused to treat Comanche raids as a national crisis that required a national response. War-torn northern Mexico was also deeply divided, so much so that it can be asked whether Mexico itself had become a mere collection of semiautonomous provinces. Most northern
provinces put little value in the policies emanating from the distant, neglectful Mexico City and harbored deep-seated antipathies toward one another. This antagonism had crystallized during the long decades of Comanche violence when
most provinces adopted self-interested policies, which often brought destruction to neighboring communities. (Comanches themselves seem to have been well
aware of these developments: an Anglo captive held in Comanchería reported
how Comanches, when planning a large-scale invasion into Mexico in the late
1830s, “expected to be joined by a large number of Mexicans who are disaffected by the government.”) All this ate away at the already fragile sense of common identity, to the point that it was not unusual for high-ranking officers to openly rejoice when Comanche war parties left their departments for the neighboring ones. By 1846, northern Mexico was a compilation of disconnected communities with ambivalent identities and loyalties.¹⁰³
It is not surprising, then, that U.S. troops faced little local resistance on their march south. Building on a long tradition forged under Comanche violence,
many northern Mexican communities put self-preservation first and cooperated with the invaders. They sold U.S. troops supplies, rented out lands for camping, and served as guides. The Mexican Army fought fiercely at Resaca de la Palma and Buena Vista, but Matamoros, Monclova, Parras, Mier, Camargo, and Santa
Fe all surrendered without a fight. In occupied Matamoros, U.S. Army officials dined at the homes of middle-class Mexicans and soldiers took Spanish lessons from the townspeople. In the lower Río Grande villas of Reynosa and Mier,
Mexican officials requ
ested General Taylor to send American troops to protect the settlements against Comanche raiders, and in Chihuahua, General William
Worth dispatched dragoons to protect villages from Comanche depredations. In
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Tamaulipas, U.S. troops ran into Antonio Canales who was still trying to carve out an independent republic of northeastern Mexico, thereby encumbering
Mexico’s war effort.
Behind northern Mexicans’ rebellious fraternizing with invaders was a viru-
lent bitterness toward the federal government, which had been unable and, as it seemed in the north, unwilling to invest resources to solidify the frontier against Indian incursions. They perceived the unchecked growth of Comanche power
as a sign of Mexico City’s indifference, which it was. The centralist regime that assumed power in 1835 had never taken the Indian threat seriously and had
actually reduced the armaments and manpower of local militias to weaken state power, effectively abandoning the north to the mercy of Indian raiders. So when the distressed Mexico City appealed to the northerners in 1846 and 1847, many refused to join the fight against the Americans.¹⁰⁴
Realizing this, U.S. policymakers and commanders proclaimed themselves
as liberators from Comanche oppression. The war department assigned Gen-
eral Taylor to read in conquered cities a proclamation—simultaneously trans-
lated into Spanish—whose key passages evoked Mexicans’ long suffering under
Comanche terror and Mexico City’s failure to alleviate their misery: “Your army and rulers extort from the people, by grievous taxation, by forced loans, and military seizures, the very money that sustains the usurpers in power. Being disarmed, you are left defenceless, an easy prey to the savage Cumanches, who
not only destroy your lives and property, but drive into captivity, more horrible than death itself, your wives and children. It is your military rulers who have reduced you to this deplorable condition. . . . It is our wish to see you liberated from despots, to drive back the savage Cumanches, to prevent the renewal of
their assaults, and to compel them to restore to you from captivity your long lost wives and children.” Laced with allusions to female debasement and injured
masculine honor, Taylor’s proclamation echoed the rhetoric of beleaguered norteño elites, who felt abandoned and victimized by Mexico City. In June 1846, unaware that President James K. Polk had already declared war on Mexico, Donaciano Vigil addressed the New Mexico assembly, detailing the horrors that
Mexico City’s neglect had produced in the northern provinces: “I have heard
reports regarding the barbaric tribes: of the number of Mexican captives, and especially of young Mexican women who serve the bestial pleasures of the barbaric Indians; of the brutal treatment they receive. . . . Those reports make me tremble with horror. . . . The more so when I contemplate what the fate will be of many people whom I esteem, if timely measures are not taken to guard against such degrading misfortunes.”¹⁰⁵
Whatever the real impact of the U.S. Army’s proclamations, widespread popu-
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lar insurgencies against norteamericanos broke out in northern Mexico only after the occupation had become a fact, and they were almost invariably inspired by the excesses and meddling of U.S. officials. But the liberation rhetoric was not aimed at the Mexicans alone. Its real audience, in a sense, was the Americans themselves, who were being steered to see the war through a morally tilted racial lens. The United States, its top officials insisted, was justified and indeed obliged to usurp territory from the mongrelized and inept Mexicans who not only had
failed to civilize the land but lost much of it to savage Comanches. The conquest of Mexico, as scripted and sold by U.S. policymakers, morphed into an ideological crusade to stop the advance of savagery, to extend the dominions of peace, and to purify a racially defiled landscape.¹⁰⁶
The signature event of the United States–Mexican War was not the Battle
of Buena Vista or the Battle of Mexico City, but the bloodless takeover of New Mexico. By the time General Stephen W. Kearny’s Army of the West marched
into Santa Fe in August 1846—unopposed by Governor Armijo, who fled to Chi-
huahua, and four thousand New Mexican volunteers, who disbanded immedi-
ately after Armijo’s escape—New Mexico was in many ways a Mexican province
in name only. Its postmortem revealed an orphaned province, abandoned by
Spain and neglected by the Mexican government, “a very mean step-mother
to us,” as one of the residents put it. Ignored and isolated, New Mexico had, as it were, turned its back on central Mexico and embraced foreign wealth and
foreign influences, entering the path that eventually led to Santa Fe’s peaceful surrender in 1846.¹⁰⁷
But contrary to the conventional view, New Mexico’s separation from the rest of Mexico did not begin in 1821, when it opened its borders to American merchandise and markets; it had begun three and a half decades earlier, in 1786, when New Spain formed a broad diplomatic and commercial alliance with the
Comanches. That alliance wedded New Mexico to Comanchería through inti-
mate political, economic, and cultural ties and increasingly set it apart from other Spanish colonies. While Texas languished during the late Spanish period as a virtual tributary state of the Comanche empire, New Mexico’s border communities drew closer and closer to Comanchería. They plugged their lagging
economy to Comanchería’s expansive market circuits, adopted Comanche
cultural influences, did business in stolen Texas and Coahuilan livestock, and fiercely defended their ties with the Comanches against Mexico City’s or Santa Fe’s interference.
In 1821 New Mexico was by far the most populous and prosperous of Spain’s
North American colonies, and it owed much of its privileged position to its special bond with the Comanches. Already partly disconnected from the rest of
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Mexico in 1821, New Mexico accelerated its drift from Mexico City’s orbit during the Mexican era, when it was subjected to the pressures and pull of both Comanchería and the United States. Once Comanches began systematic raiding
in northern Mexico in the mid-1820s, and as New Mexicans adopted the policy
of purchasing peace to protect themselves, the province began a gradual but
irrevocable parting from the Mexican body politic. During the quarter-century of Mexican rule, New Mexicans went to great lengths to protect their alliance with the Comanches and in doing so alienated themselves from other northern
Mexican provinces that were at war with the Comanches.
That erosion of political ties went hand in hand with a sweeping economic
realignment that saw New Mexico shifting its commercial system from south to east. Comanche raiding south of the Río Grande dissolved old economic lifelines between Mexico City and the northern frontier, pushing New Mexico to
intensify its reliance on the markets and goods of Comanchería and the United States. Mexico City fought this development, trying to infuse the northern
frontier with national institutions, rules, and rituals, but it was powerless to offset the combined gravitational power of Comanchería and the United States. By the mid-1840s, just prior to the Mexican-American War, New Mexicans across
the social strata had grown openly defiant toward Mexico City’s centralist government, whose nation-building project they thought was at odds with their economic and political interests, which had long ago become affixed to the power and wealth flowing in from the east.
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Children of the Sun
Behind the spectacular acts and institutions that made the Comanches an
imperial power were untold everyday deeds. These mundane activities—elders
>
debating in protracted councils, women running multilodge households, slaves tanning hides, teenage boys tending horses, young men jostling for recognition—
may have lacked the immediacy of long-distance raids or international treaties and trade fairs as imperial acts but they were no less essential: they formed the foundation of the Comanche empire. This quotidian substratum is my focus in
this chapter, which looks at the Comanche power complex from within, explor-
ing the internal adjustments that made Comanches so domineering externally.
Here I ask two interrelated questions: how did Comanches organize themselves to augment their external power, and, conversely, how did their external expansion compel them to adjust existing economic, political, and social arrange-
ments?
The Comanches were a nation that was in a state of constant and at times
uncontrolled change, a society that creatively reinvented itself while scrambling to absorb outside pressures, and an imperial people who both savored
and struggled with their newly found might. Comanches’ external dominance
rested on a series of internal compromises, which kept them balancing between hunting and pastoralism, market production and subsistence production, localism and centralization, egalitarianism and inequality, individual ambition and group solidarity, slavery and assimilation. This internal balancing and compromising sustained the Comanche hegemony, but it was also precarious and dan-
gerous: the Comanche society was a high-strung organism that was constantly
threatened by political disarray, economic overheating, and intersocietal conflict. Such hazards would come to haunt the Comanches later in the nineteenth 239
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century, but for some 150 years balancing and compromising served them well, supporting their continued expansion and dominance.
The horse was to Comanches what ships, guns, and gold were to European
imperial powers—a transportation device that compressed spatial units into con-querable size, an instrument of war that allowed them to wield much more power than their numbers would have suggested, and a coveted commodity around