system, performing tasks that the economically expanding but demographically stagnating nation could not shoulder alone.²⁶
Comanches deemed adult male captives less adaptable to a new life as slaves
and were less likely to try to turn them into laborers. In their slave raids in Mexico, one observer believed, “men were usually massacred on the spot, while women and small children were carried off into slavery.” But if the captured men possessed special talents, Comanches readily employed them in such industries as saddle-making, gun repairing, preparation of weapons and utensils from scrap metal, and taming of feral horses. They put a special value on literate captives, who could translate intercepted dispatches and serve as interpreters in diplomatic encounters with colonial agents. They also used Mexican captives
to guide raiding expeditions into colonial settlements, exploiting their intimate knowledge of geographic features and settlement patterns. George Bent believed that many captive boys, after serving as herders for several years, became “regular warriors” and as such an important addition of the Comanche raiding economy.
Comanches even allowed Mexican captives to lead war parties, exploiting the
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enduring ties of such “peon” war leaders to Mexican peasants, whose loyalties often lay closer to Comanches than to the colonial elite: “Some of these peon war leaders had friends among the peons in Mexico, and they learned from these friends where the finest herds of horses and mules were to be found, and the movements of the Mexican troops. By making use of this information the peons often led their war parties into the heart of the Mexican settlements and made big hauls of plunder.”²⁷
The presence of thousands of enslaved people in Comanchería posed a daunt-
ing challenge to a noncoercive society that lacked institutionalized mechanisms to control a large unfree population. Comanches never drew a hard line between masters and slaves, and they possessed neither the necessary means to enforce unconditional submission nor a racist ideology to mentally suppress the slave population. Yet the Comanche slave system endured and expanded, largely escaping the potential hindrances of growth—social discord, escapes, and the rise of a discontented underclass. Paradoxically, Comanches were able to negotiate the pitfalls of large-scale slavery because they did not relinquish their traditional ideas of the slavery institution itself. Instead of attempting to restrain the alien people with rigid systems of control and punishment, Comanches clung to tradition and kept the slavery institution malleable. Despite its scale, vast economic importance, and emphasis on labor, Comanche slavery remained quite distinct
from chattel-oriented slave systems.
While partly shading into the older, softer systems of kinship and captivity, Comanche slavery was in its essence a coercive, economically driven system
of exploitation—an extension of imperial power. Most enslaved people toiled
and often were overworked in horse herding, hide processing, and other labor-intensive tasks that reduced their lives to a tedious and tiring routine. “Their condition is always harder to bear than of the Patoka [Comanche] women,”
Victor Tixier, the French traveler, observed of captive women: “they have to perform the most disagreeable duties in the lodge.” Rachel Plummer, an Anglo woman captured in Texas, remembered how robe tanning kept her “employed
all the time in day-light”: “Often I would have to take my buffalo skin with me, to finish it whilst I was minding the horses.” Unskilled male slaves, if they escaped death upon capture, faced abuse and exploitation that amounted to sym-
bolic emasculation. “The men prisoners are terribly maltreated,” Tixier wrote.
“They are made to attend the work which women alone are supposed to do. This in itself is a mark of contempt; besides, they are forced to train the horses, which are reputed untamable.”²⁸
All captives also went through an often brutal indoctrination phase during
which they shed their former identity and, in a sense, became a socially blank
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slate. Comanches stripped new captives off all visible vestiges of their former life by renaming them and dressing them in Comanche clothes. They forced men to
follow the Comanche practice of plucking out facial hair and made non-Native boys go naked so that their skin would turn brown. They sometimes tattooed
the faces of younger captives. For most captives the first days in Comanchería were filled with horror and humiliation inflicted by beatings, whippings, mutila-tions, and starvation. “The lot of the [captured] women is dreadful,” Berlandier wrote, “if only because the natives of their own sex amuse themselves by tormenting them, striking them at every turn for no reason at all.” What to Berlandier appeared an act of wanton cruelty was in fact an elaborate transition ritual, a process of “natal alienation,” which rendered the captives utterly powerless and emotionally dependent on their new masters, thereby separating them from their natal societies. To Comanches, the tortured captives were socially dead people who could be reborn as Comanches.²⁹
Delivering this kind of social death could take extremely violent forms, especially if the captive was an adult male taken in a battle that had resulted in Comanche casualties. Burnet wrote how such a captive “is hurled to the [village] centre, while the shouting throng gather around in tumultuous circles, and assail him with clubs, and thongs, and knives, and javelins, and firebrands, in unmeasured and reckless fury, compelling him the while, to unite his voice with the hellish choir, to dance and sing, and wave the standard, reeking with the gory scalps of his kindred, until he sinks to the ground.” But Burnet’s account continues: “If haply, he survives this severe initiation, he is afterwards exempt from corporal punishment, is considered a member, sub conditionis, of their society, and is attached as a slave to the family of the warrior who captured him, where he is generally treated with humanity.” This paradoxical statement—social membership coexisting and intertwined with slave status—encapsulates a
central characteristic of the Comanche slave system. Human bondage in Co-
manchería was not a rigid, nonnegotiable institution, but a fluid, spacious, and inherently ambiguous social continuum that offered captives numerous roles
and spaces with different degrees of freedom, privilege, and servitude.³⁰
Comanches considered some slaves as alienable property, treating and trad-
ing them as commodities that could be sold, bought, or handed over as gifts.
But Comanches also recognized personal slaves, blood bondsmen, who were
attached to individual Comanche men through a patrimonial blood covenant.
Whenever such a slave was sold, a ceremony in which blood was let from the
slave’s hand or arm was repeated in order to affirm the quasi-filial and patriarchal bond between the slave and his owner. As Burnet noted, Comanches had
a reputation of treating their slaves with compassion, and many slaves found a
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measure of emotional comfort and social acceptance amidst the pain and horror of captivity. Captive women, one observer wrote, may have been “abject slaves”
but they enjoyed a measure of protection against abuse. Male slaves could market their talents to secure fair treatment, and many captive women found physical and psychological shelter among Comanche women, whose affinial embrace
protected them against sexual assaults through an incest taboo. Sarah Ann Horn, an Anglo-Texan captured in 1834, later described how she was informally adopted by an old widow woman who worked her hard as hide dresser but also protected her against sexual abuse. It was, Horn said, “an exception to the general character of these merciless beings, and greatly did she contribute, by her acts of kindness and soothing manners, to reconcile me to my fate.” Chief Is-sa-keep (Wolf ’s Shoulder), spoke in 1849 of deep attachments when U.S
. agents pressured him
to give up his Mexican captives. The demand, the chief said, “gave him much
pain.”³¹ Most important, slavery was not necessarily a permanent condition in Comanchería. A large portion of slaves were eventually adopted into Comanche families, which had lost members to disease, war, or other calamities. Such integrated individuals became kwʉhʉpʉ̲s, literally “my captive.” There are no exact figures, but it is possible that only a minority of slaves remained true slaves, tiriʔaiwapIs. ³²
For adult women the principal avenue to adoption was marriage, which turned
them into wives, mothers, and full-fledged tribal members. “Of their female captives they often make wives,” Gregg noted, and a large number of secondary
wives living in polygynous Comanche households in the early nineteenth cen-
tury were former slaves. These wives, whether of Native or Euro-American heritage, were considered pure Comanches. Captive children were adopted into
families as sons and daughters, apparently without ceremonial flourish but also
“without distinction of color or nation.” For girls, the line separating adoption from marriage was not always clear, because some of them were kept in households in anticipatory wifehood. When Wahawma bought Hekiyan’i, a Mexican
captive, from another Comanche man, he told her, “When you grow up, you’ll
be my wife.” For boys, age was crucial in determining their fate, as one Comanche elder, Tasúra, told ethnographers in 1933: “[we] adopted young captives into the family, [but] we made slaves of the older boys.” This principle may have been determined by practicalities—the younger the boy, the easier he was to
assimilate—but Euro-Americans saw deeper symbolic significance in it. Berlandier, with palpable anguish, wrote how male children captured in Texas and
other frontier settlements were “raised with great care.” His notions are those of a person whose expectations about Indians, Europeans, identity, and power have been violently overturned. White captive boys, he lamented, “grow up with such
To view this image, please refer to
the print version of this book.
12. The Spanish Girl (A Prisoner). Watercolor by
James Abert. This teenage girl was captured in 1841
by a young Comanche man, Little Mountain, who
made her a gift to his father. From Message from the
president of the United States: in compliance with a
resolution of the Senate, communicating a report of
an expedition led by Lieutenant Abert, on the upper
Arkansas and through the country of the Camanche
Indians, in the fall of the year 1845, 29th Cong,
1st sess., S. Ex. Doc. 438. Courtesy of Yale
Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke
Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
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good [Comanche] tutors that they become so active and so evil the garrison
people fear the prisoners more than the natives. . . . So thoroughly are the principles of the vagabond life inculcated in these children that, when they reach a certain age, they are the greatest enemies of the peoples of their forebears.”³³
The odds of incorporation were slim for adult males, but some were assimilated through the traditional replacement ceremony in which the captive inherited
the vacant social space of a diseased Comanche. If a candidate for replacement endured and survived the kind of “severe initiation” described by Burnet, he assumed the responsibilities and obligations of the lost family member and became kin. Such replacements had both biological and emotional meaning: they
restored fractured lineages and consoled bereaved relatives by assuring them of social continuity. “The prisoner adopted into the tribe recognizes as his father the man who kidnapped him and takes him as his family,” Berlandier wrote. “At that moment they change their names and are treated with tenderness, as if they actually were the man who died in combat.” Those grown men who were not
assimilated through the replacement ritual were fated to live out their days as tiriʔaiwapIs, common slaves and manual workers, and yet even they could find ways to enhance their cultural value. Several tiriʔaiwapIs won social acceptance through war deeds or years of loyal service, and some eventually gained the right to marry, become Comanche, and continue their lineages. “The captives are
allowed rights and privileges after they join in a battle with the tribe,” Ruíz observed, “and particularly if they distinguish themselves in the campaign.” He also noted that Indian captives were more likely to win social privileges than white captives, probably because they were culturally better equipped to meet Comanche expectations.³⁴
Yet adoption did not remove alien status completely, and it did not lead to
unconditional social acceptance. Comanches made a clear distinction between
nʉmʉ rʉborarʉ̲, those “born of Comanche parents,” and nʉmʉnaitʉ, those who
“live as Comanche,” and most adopted captives lived out their lives in a kind of social limbo where they were at once members of the society and servile laborers.
Comanches used the derogatory “chore wife” for those captive women who were
brought into polygynous households as wife-laborers, and they were said to have kept adopted captive children “in a kind of filial servitude.” According to Tixier,
“young boys are generally taken in or adopted in a fashion by a brave, whom they serve in the quality of a squire or a slave. When they grow up, they are allowed some freedom, for they cannot miss the family which they have hardly known.”
But even if assimilation did not erase the social stigma associated with former slave status, it did open access to such elemental social privileges as the right to marry and own property. What attached adopted slaves “most to these wander-
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ing hordes,” one contemporary observed, “is the fact that they may win the right to marry. When they manage that, they lose no time in taking several wives and settling down as if they had been born to the life.”³⁵
This kind of soft slavery, where the line between the master and slave was
mutable, had an obvious downside: since many or most slaves were eventually
adopted and assimilated, Comanches had to constantly raid to acquire new captives to perform menial work and demeaning services. Slaves were a continu-
ously evaporating resource in Comanchería, and Comanches had to invest vast
amounts of time and energy in renewing that resource.
Then again, the malleability of Comanche slavery made it remarkably stable
as a social institution. The fact that Comanches granted their slaves extensive privileges—including freedom—prevented slavery from becoming a socially
disruptive force. There were only occasional runaways, and most slaves became productive and at least superficially content members of the society. “Spanish boys from 10 to 15 years old,” Burnet wrote, “will become so reconciled to their captivity . . . as to be distinguishable only by the slight variations of nature, from their savage companions.” Contemporary Euro-Americans also believed that
Comanches’ Creole captives “are so happy in this life that many of them have forgotten their mother tongue, have no wish to return to civilization, and loathe the villages of their families and friends.” Creole captives, who undoubtedly came from the lowest rungs of colonial societies, had discovered unexpected spaces of opportunity among the Comanches and seem to have found their bondage almost liberating: “These prisoners do not return to their homes,” one observer noted, “because the nomadic life and the marriages they have contracted afford them an independence they prize, not because their masters watch them so closely they cannot escape.” Comanches, another observer wrote, “wisely judge”
that the privilege to marry “is a powerf
ul incentive to keep them [captives] with the tribe and thus increase its number.” Although Comanches captured most of their slaves in Texas and northern Mexico, there never emerged a substratum of Spanish-Mexican discontents who could have rebelled against the regime. On
the contrary, George Bent argued, the familial and emotional bonds between
the Comanches and their captives ran so deep that ransomed captives often escaped and returned to Comanchería.³⁶
Yet all epithets one might attach to Comanche slavery—soft, pliable, volun-
tary—fail to capture the full human dimensions and costs of the institution.
While ascending the Canadian River to Santa Fe in 1839, Gregg encountered
in a Comanche ranchería a captive Mexican boy who was “ten or twelve years
old, [and] whose nationality could scarcely be detected under his Indian guise.”
When he learned from the boy, who still spoke Spanish, that he was from Parral,
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Gregg offered to ransom him and take him back to his relatives. But the boy, hesitating a little, said “in an affecting tone” that he had become too much of a brute to live among Christians. Gregg also related the story of a Mexican woman from Matamoros who had refused to be ransomed although one thousand dollars had been offered for her freedom. “She sent word to her father, that they had disfigured her by tattooing; that she was married and perhaps enceinte [pregnant]; and that she would be more unhappy by returning to her father under
these circumstances than by remaining where she was.”³⁷
Theirs was a recurring story. There must have been countless others like this boy and this woman, captive-citizens who had resolved to live their lives among the Comanches in quiet, self-imposed exile, serving people who were not their masters but not quite kin either, toiling, propagating, and dying for an empire that bred destruction in the homelands they would never see again.
Chief A Big Fat Fall by Tripping, it is told, owned fifteen hundred horses, but he was so fat that he could not ride any of them and had to be moved around on a travois. That a man so obese rose to a leadership position in a society known for its martial skills may be unexpected, but it was far from exceptional. In 1834
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