The Comanche Empire
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George Catlin encountered the Tenewa principal chief Tabequana (Sun Eagle)
on the north fork of the Red River during treaty talks with the United States.
He painted the chief ’s portrait and, fascinated, described his physical appearance in its fleshy detail: “there was a huge mass of flesh, Ta-wah-que-nah [Tabequana] . . . , who was put forward as head chief of the tribe. . . . This enormous man, whose flesh would undoubtedly weigh three hundred pounds or more,
took the most wonderful strides in the exercise of his temporary authority.” In 1843 representatives of the Texas government negotiated with another powerful Tenewa head chief, Pahayuko, a “large and portly” man “weighing . . . upwards of two hundred pounds with a pleasing expression of countenance, full of good humor and joviality,” and six years later Captain Marcy was entertained by an unnamed Comanche chief, “a very corpulent old man,” along the Red River.
Tutsayatuhovit (Black Prairie Dog), the Yamparika chief who played a central role in peace talks with Kiowas in 1806, is remembered by Comanches as a man not only of “gigantic stature but also of great breadth.”³⁸
Rich, powerful, flamboyant, and physically striking, A Big Fat Fall by Tripping, Tabequana, Pahayuko, and Tutsayatuhovit represented the new elite men who
led the Comanche society in the early nineteenth century. They were too mas-
sive to distinguish themselves in war, the traditional avenue to status and power among Plains Indian societies, but that did not prevent them from reaching the top of Comanche hierarchy. For contemporary observers like Catlin, they were
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To view this image, please refer to
the print version of this book.
13. Mountain of Rocks, Second Chief of the Tribe
(Comanche). Oil on canvas by George Catlin, 1834.
Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Washington, D.C. / Art Resource, N.Y.
mere curiosities, overweight men leading a nation of physically superb warriors, but the voluminous men have more than anecdotal meaning. They embody the
essence of complex changes that transformed the Comanche society during the
zenith of Comanche power. Their ascendancy captures a new social reality in
which material wealth and political power had become intricately intertwined and in which passivity and relaxed benevolence could bring more prestige than overt ambition and industry.
Just as the rise of Comanche hegemony was made possible by horses, so too
did the new elite base its privileged position on horse wealth. An average early nineteenth-century Comanche family owned twenty to thirty horses and mules,
but wealthy families—almost by rule the largest households capable of mobi-
lizing the most labor—could possess two, three, or even ten times that number.
Burnet, who gathered his knowledge about the Comanches mainly in the 1810s,
wrote, “industrious and enterprising individuals will sometimes own from one
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to three hundred head of mules and horses, the spoils of war,” and Marcy noted in the late 1840s that the “most successful horse-thieves among them own from fifty to two hundred animals.” There are reports of Comanche men owning
colossal herds of thousands.³⁹
Comanches always considered their horses private property—their name
for the animal was puku or puc, “one’s personal horse”—and massive herds of horses represented a source of immense economic, political, and social capital to their owners. Horses were tools that allowed men to raid for more livestock and slaves, and they were means of production that multiplied a family’s productive capacity. Men with large herds could support large extended families ( nʉmʉnahkahnis) and several slaves, who provided supplemental labor for hunting, herding, and other household chores. Horses also provided the social currency that gave men access to women. The Comanches were a bridewealth
society in which grooms were expected to compensate brides’ parents with gifts.
Although most men could eventually afford the favored bride-price, one or two high-quality horses, only the wealthiest men could pay the price several times over and amass a substantial labor pool of extra wives. Rich horse owners could thus invest their assets to acquire several slaves and wives to prepare robes, meat, and other tradable goods, which in turn enabled them to dominate the wealth-generating export-and-import trade. Although almost all Comanche men par-
ticipated in trade, high-volume commerce was the privilege of wealthy horse
owners with multiple slaves and wives.⁴⁰
Few men became superrich, the elite of the elite. Typically senior men in
their fifties, sixties, and seventies, they accumulated enough wealth to turn their nʉmʉnahkahnis into veritable manufactories. They had the means to purchase and adopt numerous personal slaves and kwʉhʉpʉ̲s, and they had several wives who not only labored themselves but could feed and care for a multitude of captive children. While most Comanche nʉmʉnahkahnis had one or two slaves, the wealthiest ones had several dozen. Preeminent polygynous elders also had several marriageable daughters, who attracted courting bachelors and their lavish gifts, and several sons, who hunted and raided for them. In 1849 Marcy met
with an old eastern Comanche chief Is-sa-keep who explained to the captain
the ingredients of his status: “He was the father of four sons, who he said were as fine young men as could be found; that they were a great source of comfort to him in his old age, and could steal more horses than any other young men in his band.”⁴¹
Belonging to the new aristocracy meant being able to maintain large and di-
verse nʉmʉnahkahnis that included several wives, children, slaves, bondsmen, and adoptees, but it also meant being able to claim other Comanche men as
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social dependents. Prosperous elite men lent running mounts to horseless young men in return for a share in the bounty, in effect employing the junior men as hired hands. They also might marry their daughters to less accomplished men
who paid the bride-price through labor, serving their fathers-in-law as debt bond-men, sometimes for years. If a man had several married daughters, he might
have been able to stop hunting himself, because custom obliged his sons-in-
law to provide him with meat even after the marriage was concluded. Blood
relatives, too, were sometimes turned into quasi laborers. Wealthy, polygynous elite men were known to give one of their wives to their younger, less established brothers in return for serving the household as hunters and horse raiders.⁴²
The most successful elite men could retire almost completely from physical
labor, becoming something of an anomaly in what was still, in essence, a labor-intensive foraging economy. They were protocapitalists in what was essentially a noncapitalist society, spectacularly wealthy “big men” whose extensive networks of social dependents and privileged access to the means of production enabled them to have other people performing servile work for them. They could mobilize the labor of several slaves, secondary wives, and social marginals, who hunted, herded, raided, and prepared food and robes for them under coercion
or in the hope of improving their prospects through the association. Indeed, they could generate more wealth by simply controlling wealth, a position of
privileged leisure where physical prowess was no longer a requisite for economic success. They could leave the life of a warrior-hunter, grow fat, and carry their bulk as a marker of masculine honor and privilege. They abandoned the standard warrior costume of plain buckskin shirts and pants and publicized their rank through extravagant displays of status goods and ostentatious clothing that included colorful coats, military uniforms, trousers, neckties, and fur sashes. To manifest their control over women and labor, they cut
the hair of female captives and attached it to their own. “Some of the Chiefs . . . wear in that manner the Hair of Twelve or fourteen Wives at the Same time,” one observer wrote, “[their hair] hanging almost to the ground, and so thick a top smear’d over with grease
& a redish Coloured Clay as a Substitute for Vermilion, that they Could Scarsely wear a Hat of Double the Ordinary Size.”⁴³
When men reached the status of prosperous leisure, they were in a position
to amass considerable political power. Since they no longer had to prove their worth in aggressive competition with other men, they could appear indifferent about their personal status and more concerned about group welfare, a quality the Comanches thought essential for leaders. Excess wealth also allowed elite men to display another fundamental leadership virtue: generosity. Possessing several daughters and secondary wives, they could cede their claims to women
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to bachelors and unmarried brothers and thus help other men acquire wives.
And if they were among the select few with dozens of extra horses, they could hand out animals to poorer men in exchange for political support and loyalty.
Such acts of munificence can be seen as conspicuous generosity—an inverse
parallel to conspicuous consumption—through which individuals publicized
their social worth and superiority. At the same time, however, generous acts also promoted group solidarity and stability, earning the givers the moral authority to tell others what they ought to do.⁴⁴
A man who gave lavishly and consistently could eventually become a paraibo and set up his own ranchería, which in effect was a collection of families attached to a single big man and his nʉmʉnahkahni through overlapping ties of generosity, dependency, loyalty, and patronage. Comanche men measured their
political power not by the number of people they could command but by the
extent of welfare networks they could support. Comanche rancherías were gen-
erally identified by the names of their leading men, who held the communities together through their welfare practices. The most powerful paraibos could persuade others to attach their rancherías to theirs and accept subordinate roles as secondary leaders—or, as Spaniards called them, capitanes chiquitos. For example, the celebrated Ecueracapa led a band of 157 lodges, probably some 1,500
people, which was a composite village of several rancherías, and the powerful Tenewa chief Paruakevitsi had three secondary chiefs in his ranchería.⁴⁵
If the leaders of large rancherías formed the upper echelon of the Comanche
society, the bottom end consisted of young men with few or no horses. The building of a substantial herd was a slow and grueling process, and most men spent several years in this lowly position. Like most foraging societies, Comanches put high value on individual self-reliance and expected young men to make their
own fortunes; even the sons of elite men had to devote years to livestock raiding, because it was considered inappropriate for young men to ask their fathers to provide them with horses. And raiding did not offer junior men such a fast track to wealth and status as one might assume. Communal norms dictated that the
senior men who led war parties had the first pick of the booty; younger men were fortunate to score a few low-quality horses. Moreover, young men frequently
gave away all or most of their captured horses to the parents of a potential bride in the hope of earning the right to begin courtship. Successful raiders were pressured to give a portion of their plunder to unmarried women in the Shakedown Dance, and some young men repeatedly gave away all their captured horses to
publicize their prowess and self-confidence as raiders.⁴⁶
The lack of horses excluded young men from key activities that brought men
wealth, respect, and status. They had to borrow animals from senior men and
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pay them with a portion of the kill or plunder, which in turn prevented them from accruing surplus animals and robes for exchange purposes. High-quality
guns, metal tools, blankets, and other imported goods were all but inaccessible to them. Marriage, too, was but a distant prospect. Not only had the escalation of polygyny diminished the pool of potential wives, but junior men lacked the horses with which to pay the bride-price. Poor and prospectless, they were unde-sirable to adolescent unmarried girls and their fathers, who were acutely aware of the burdens of wifehood and carefully weighed their options before agreeing to a marriage. Negotiating the delicate balance between emotions and interests, many unattached Comanche women viewed marriage as a vehicle for social mobility and shunned less established suitors.⁴⁷
Excluded from marriage, horseless and horse-poor young men found their
route to full social enfranchisement severely compromised. Comanches saw
marriage as both the symbol of and the path to masculine honor, the confirmation of a man’s ability to claim women and defend his claim against other men, and unmarried men, tuibihtsiʔs, fell outside that circle of respect. Spaniards called them gandules (loafers) since they lived in all-male gangs on the outskirts of rancherías, sleeping in makeshift shelters, subsisting on small animals, and serving wealthy senior men as hunters and raiders. Many Comanche men spent
more than a decade in this kind of intermediate social place, struggling to accumulate enough horses to acquire a wife and support a family: while most women married in their midteens, men typically did not do so until their late twenties.
Underprivileged, needy, and ambitious, the tuibihtsiʔs formed a pool of readily available laborers whose exploitation allowed the elite to expand its herds and wealth.⁴⁸
Between these two extremes was a large segment of middling sorts, the fami-
lies of early middle-aged men who had acquired enough horses to be considered secure if not quite rich. These men owned enough running horses for hunting
and raiding and enough pack animals to put a large family on horseback. A small reserve of surplus animals enabled them to participate in the wealth-generating export-import trade and announce themselves as potential heads of large polygynous households. Enjoying the prestige of full manhood that came with mar-
riage, they distanced themselves from the unmarried men and emulated the lifestyle of the elite. Although they could not retire entirely from active labor, their wives’ labor allowed them to specialize in hunting and raiding. It was such men Captain Marcy described when he wrote about a “prairie warrior [who] performs no menial labor; his only occupation is in war and the chase. His wives, who are but little dearer to him than his horse, perform all the drudgery. He follows the chase, he smokes his pipe, he eats and sleeps; and thus he passes his time, and
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in his own estimation he is the most lordly and independent sovereign in the universe.” But the social clout of these men had its limits. While enjoying the prestige and personal autonomy that came with marriage, the men of the middle layer were outranked and outpowered by the senior elite men who possessed several wives and dependents, dominated the marriage market as wife-givers, and monopolized leadership positions.⁴⁹
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the injection of privately owned horse and human wealth had turned the Comanches into a stratified society
with pronounced distinctions in prestige and privilege among individuals and families. Wealth, status, and power had become conflated, giving rise to widening inequalities organized around age, marriage, and uneven access to women
and labor. Yet those social cleavages never coagulated into a rigid class society with formalized ranks. The Comanche society had become more hierarchical,
but it retained its traditional flexibility, which reduced the social distance between the elite and commoners and militated against a fully developed class
system. This was the result of several facto
rs, the chief one being a persisting, age-old individualistic mentality, the belief that each man and woman had to prove his or her moral worth through personal achievement. Although there
were instances of sons following fathers as paraibos—the two Cuerno Verdes in the late eighteenth century being the most famous example of this—the general attitude was that positions of privilege had to be earned, not inherited. Comanche big men were self-made men who were not born into wealth and power but
gradually emerged from the masses. As one observer concluded, “Each man en-
deavors to obtain as high a position as their merits allow.”⁵⁰
These meritocratic elements went hand in hand with the belief that a man’s
status was not fixed but forever contestable. A Comanche man had to reaffirm his standing and manhood again and again in relation to other men, which made social standing a matter of unending negotiation. The social ladder on which men moved up or down as their personal fortunes and reputations ebbed and flowed was not fixed, keeping the avenues for upward mobility open. Those avenues
were available even to former slaves: there was no glass ceiling for nʉmʉnaitʉs.
The adopted slaves may have carried the social stigma of not being born Comanche, but there were no institutional hindrances to prevent them from engaging in horse raiding, accumulating property, and obtaining several wives and even slaves of their own.⁵¹
This dual nature of the Comanche society, its deepening segmentation and
its persistent plasticity, fueled fierce social competition. The opportunities for dramatic social ascent together with the ever-present danger of social descent pitted men of different age and status groups against each other. Comanche men,
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especially unmarried junior men who had not yet distinguished themselves in
battle, were extremely sensitive about their standing and eager to improve their position over other men, whom they by necessity viewed as rivals. The society could support only so many privileged positions, and there was a large pool of marginalized individuals, men who did not enjoy full social acceptance. Operating within the open parameters of fulfillment and failure, young Comanche