The Comanche Empire
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men were culturally conditioned to be ambitious, aggressive, and competitive.
The competition took many forms. An upwardly aspiring lower-status man
might steal or wound the horse of a senior man or seduce one of his wives. Although technically illicit, such actions were common enough: later ethnogra-
phers learned that Comanches had developed a standardized procedure for re-
solving disputes involving cuckolding, horse theft, and horse wounding. Since Comanches expected senior men to be dignified, composed, and willing to overlook insults, an aggrieved individual could not rely on overt violence without losing face. He could punish his adulterous wife by mutilating or killing her without suffering personal shame, but he was expected to prosecute the male
offender and demand nanʉwokʉ, material compensation that was usually paid in horses, mules, or guns. In most cases, the offender agreed to pay and the matter was settled. All this was structured and predictable, which suggests that Comanches tolerated face challenging as a pressure-releasing mechanism that
offered lower-status men an alternative way to distinguish themselves. The act of challenging was a social performance, a dramatization of status concerns that allowed the less privileged members of the Comanche society to manage their
emotions and social lives. Face challenging temporarily reversed the prevailing social hierarchy, relieving the tensions and psychological stress resulting from growing inequality, while the nanʉwokʉ symbolically reaffirmed the social order based on clearly defined roles for senior and junior men.⁵²
The main arena for social competition, however, was the battlefield. Senior
elite men could effectively withdraw from war, but a military career remained the most effective vehicle for social ascent for young men. By distinguishing themselves in combat—by earning recognition as tekwʉ̲niwapi̲s (braves)—
junior men gained symbolic capital that brought them honor, and by seizing
horses and slaves they gathered tangible capital that gave them access to women and moved them closer to full social enfranchisement. For young men, Marcy
noted, a military career was a prerequisite for any kind of social recognition: “a young man who has not made one or more of these [raiding] expeditions into
Mexico is held in but little repute.”⁵³
Comanches actively encouraged young men to be competitive in war. They
valued selflessness in their elders but expected junior men to be preoccupied
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with proving themselves as warriors. Like most Plains Indian societies, Comanches had an institutionalized procedure for recognizing and ranking war honors: the counting of coup, which endorsed such daring military acts as hand-to-hand combat and killing at close range. Coup points accelerated a man’s social rise by serving as a public announcement of his military prowess and of his potential value as a husband and provider, and they constituted a strong incentive for young men to prove themselves in battle. Military feats could even serve as a shortcut to marriage. Fathers, one contemporary reported, sometimes gave one of their daughters to a distinguished warrior, apparently without asking the bride-price.⁵⁴
The preparations for war culminated in elaborate dancing and singing rituals in which older men formed a firm, unified front to exploit younger men’s social insecurities and competitive instincts. “The ones on foot walk in two single files forming a long street,” Ruíz reported. “The chiefs march down the middle with their best warriors and children in their finest attire. . . . Old men who have been brave warriors in their youth ride on the outside of the single line formation and relate their past deeds in a loud voice, advising the younger men to die rather than commit an act of cowardice.” Rights to women, the ultimate measure of
masculine honor, figured prominently in these rituals of war. Older men, Ruíz wrote, “urge young women to marry only those who are brave and courageous in battle and to spurn the cowardly warrior. Thus the elders continue haranguing the assembly and to wander through the camp.”⁵⁵
The ambition and insecurity of young men in the face of these social pres-
sures help explain one of the most spectacular manifestations of the Coman-
che military culture—the Lobos. The Lobos was an elite society consisting of prominent warriors who had designated military duties and distinctive regalia and ceremonies and who were willing to take extreme risks in battle. The members, in Ruíz’s words, marched separately, wearing “profuse adornments which only they can use, including wolf-skin belts which reach to the ground. . . . The Lobos are not allowed to retreat from the scene of the battle, not even when they are vastly outnumbered. It is their duty to die rather than surrender their ground, although the other warriors may be in full retreat.” A successful member of the society enjoyed great respect as well as privileged access to women. “When they return victorious from a campaign,” one observer noted, “impromptu dances are begun to which only the unmarried girls are invited, with orders to comply with every desire of the victorious warriors.”⁵⁶
Comanche cultural norms, then, supported a highly structured and com-
petitive warrior cult, which drove young men to take extreme risks in order to achieve social acceptance. It is always tricky to read deliberate planning into
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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.
14. Western Comanches in War Dress. Watercolor by Lino Sánchez y Tapia, ca. 1836. The Comanche military complex was fueled by a fierce competition among young men for horses, women, status, and masculine honor. Many warriors wore headdresses plaited together from the hair of their wives and captives.
Courtesy of Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
cultural traditions and social rituals, but in the case of the Comanche warrior cult, strategic intention seems plausible. By stressing fighting prowess as a measure of a man’s social worth, the warrior cult deemphasized the significance of status challenging as an avenue for social ascent and helped direct the disruptive effects of male rivalry outside the Comanche community and against enemy
groups. If Captain Marcy was correct in noting that young Comanche men’s
“only ambition consists in being able to cope successfully with . . . [their] enemy in war,”⁵⁷ it was not because they were inherently violent but because they were
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desperate to cross the social fault lines from bachelorship to marriage, poverty to prosperity, and drudgery to leisure. They were fixated on war so that some day, perhaps, they no longer would have to fight.
Reconstructing this competitive social dynamic illuminates the conditions
and pressures under which the nineteenth-century Comanches matured, mar-
ried, had children, and sought personal fulfillment, but the social dynamic has broader implications as well: within it can be found a fundamental cause of
the rise and continued expansion of the Comanche empire. If there was an all-embracing internal force behind the rise of the Comanche empire, it was the relentless competition for social prestige among Comanche men. Violent seizure of livestock and captives through pillage represented for men the main path to social acceptance: it gave them access to wealth and women and lifted them
toward full manhood. For Comanche men, raiding was a matter of social life
and death, and it was that mixture of anxiety and raw ambition that pushed them to repeatedly risk life for loot, devote much of their lives in arduous raiding, and travel hundreds of miles into Mexico to find fresh opportunities for plundering.
Comanches embraced battle and built vast hinterlands for raiding because their nation needed pasturelands, buffer zones, slaves, commodities, and commerce, but they did so also because their young men needed to prove their worth as
providers and husbands.
Individual st
atus competition and large-scale raiding were closely interwoven in the Comanche society, but that does not mean that the Comanche raiding
industry was a mere reflection of raw individual ambition, a blind social impulse. Status competition among men served as a potent engine for violent external action, but its thrust was checked and controlled by overarching political institutions that gave direction to Comanche foreign policy. Comanches never developed a unitary, statelike decision-making system, but their evolving political structures were powerful enough to harness young men’s competitive urges for the greater national good and cohesive enough to incorporate the raiding economy into a coordinated diplomatic and military policy. This was as much
a psychological process as it was a political one, involving a creative and sometimes uneasy dialogue between individual self-interest and group solidarity, and it takes us to the very core of the polity that built the most enduring empire in the colonial Southwest.
The basic political unit among the Comanches was the ranchería, a network
of related and allied extended families. A product of compelling economic, ecological, and political forces, the ranchería was agile enough to pursue the migratory bison herds, small enough not to exhaust local pastures with its domes-
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tic herds, and large enough to organize local defenses. Rancherías operated in many ways as independent political units, making autonomous decisions about
camp movements, residence patterns, and small-scale trading and raiding. The ranchería was the primary social group with which people identified, although individuals and families moved between local bands. Most marriages took place within rancherías, and the married couple usually lived in the husband’s lodge near his parents.⁵⁸
Rancherías were held together by interlaced affinial ties and led jointly by paraibos and councils of adult men. Rancherías did not choose their paraibos in formal elections but instead gradually acknowledged the person who exhibited the ideal attributes of a leader. Comanches placed great value on social face and determined a person’s moral worth by his or her ability to adhere to common
codes of conduct. Ideally, a paraibo had demonstrated his diplomatic skills in action, had amassed a personal fortune, and had given chunks of that fortune away. Wealth, if managed in a socially acceptable way, formed an effective path to leadership, and a successful paraibo gave more than other men. He cultivated patriarchal relationships with his followers, pooling resources at times of need, and his generosity attached other family headmen to his household as socially indebted haits (formal friends) or tʉbitsinahaitsInʉʉs (true friends). A successful paraibo, in short, understood the social arithmetic of wealth: when hoarded, it divided people; when given away, it drew them together. “From the liberality with which they dispose of their effects on all occasions of the kind,” Indian Agent Robert S. Neighbors wrote of Comanche big men, “it would induce the
belief that they acquire property merely for the purpose of giving it to others.”⁵⁹
Comanche rancherías were close-knit communities bound by intimate and
intertwined kinship linkages, but their leadership patterns were strikingly fluid and diffuse. “The authority of their chiefs is rather nominal than positive, more advisory than compulsive,” Burnet concluded in the early nineteenth century.
Paraibos certainly appeared powerful. Most of them had personal heralds, who announced their decisions to the camp, and some kept a staff of young men
as aides and bodyguards. Yet their formal power was always limited. Paraibos mediated rather than disciplined, and they led more by example than by giving orders. They held the ranchería together by arbitrating disputes, but they did not have the right to judge or hand out verdicts. They used their dense ecological knowledge to decide when and where the camp was moved, thus safeguarding
the group’s ecological viability, and their puha, medicine power, shielded the ranchería against disease, hunger, and strife. Yet they could not force their followers to stay in the ranchería: any man unhappy with his paraibo simply moved to another band. And if the number of malcontents exceeded a critical level,
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the paraibo himself was removed. Should a chief “disgrace himself by any act of cowardice or mal-administration,” Marcy wrote, “[his followers] do not hesitate to depose him and place a more competent man in his stead.” To the commissioner of Indian affairs of the Republic of Texas, the Comanches were “the most perfect democracy on the face of the globe; everything is managed by primary assemblies, and the people have a right to displace a chief and elect a successor at pleasure.”⁶⁰
But paraibos were not leaders without authority. One setting where they exercised considerable power was the band council, which dealt with matters
like bandwide military campaigns, disposition of spoils derived from large-scale operations, the time and place of summer hunts, and community religious services. All grown men were allowed to participate and speak in councils, but the meetings were dominated by paraibos, who typically sponsored the councils in their tipis and cautiously choreographed the proceedings. As Ruíz noted: “The Chief takes the principal seat, and sends the crier to give notice [to] all the war-riours to come to the council of the pipe. . . . A Sentinel is placed at the door and they come to the door one at a time one and say ‘here I am, what seat shall I occupy?’ The answer is given by the Chief, on the right or left, as the case may be and he enters and seats himself accordingly[,] each one as he enters divesting himself of the ornaments and clothing he wears and depositing them in enclosure in the back part of the tent.”⁶¹
By having personal ornaments removed, the councils downplayed self-
aggrandizement and stressed social harmony. They always sought consensus,
gearing their decisions as close to prevailing public sentiments as possible. Yet in practice the consensuses were often narrow, involving only paraibos and few senior men whose families and interests were closely linked. The majority of men had little influence on policy making. “After the elders had stated their views,” ethnological accounts relate, “middle-aged men expressed theirs, and even younger men might speak a few words.” Generational tensions were palpable. Marcy wrote that elders used the councils as a mechanism to “curb the impetuosity of ambitious young warriors,” and the representatives of the Texas Republic noted in 1845 tangible frustration among young Comanche warriors.
Chief Mopechucope, one official reported, counseled the young men toward
reconciliation, asking “each and singly if they were for peace. Some of them replied that it was a matter of very little consequence whether they were or not as they should abide by the advice of the old men.” And yet, as oral histories assert, junior men regarded council decisions as “sacrosanct.” They may have obeyed
the councils “more from fear of arousing the anger of their chiefs and the dis-pleasure of the supernatural powers” than from abstract notions of political obe-
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dience, but the effect was the same: paraibos and their supporters dominated rancherías and their diplomatic and military affairs.⁶²
Paraibos also dominated the economically essential but socially sensitive arena of foreign trade. Like the leaders of other firmly structured Native societies of the plains, they possessed a culturally sanctioned power to determine when, where, and how trading took place and what was exchanged and at what prices.
When a foreign trading party arrived in a Comanche ranchería, the leader was taken to the paraibo’s lodge where, according to M. C. Fisher, the chief “receives him as his guest, and commands his squaws to unpack his ponies, and convey all his goods, blankets, and cooking kit to the lodge set apart for his reception.” This practice allowed paraibos to examine the visitors’ wares and place them under their personal protection. The next phase involved feasting, smoking, and gift e
xchanges, which helped transform the visitors into metaphorical kin. Paraibos typically accepted pretrade presents and then redistributed them among their followers, a privilege that earned them great prestige. Finally, paraibos agreed on the list of tradable goods and negotiated prices. They then announced the visitors to the camp, thereby authorizing the trade. If things followed the proper protocol, the exchange itself was a mere formality. “In Comanche trade,” Gregg wrote, “the main trouble consists in fixing the price of the first animal. This being settled by the chiefs, it often happens that mule after mule is led up and the price received without further cavil.”⁶³
Paraibos thus acted as brokers and buffers between their followers and foreigners, regulating the social space in which goods exchanged hands. By per-
sonally supervising pretrade negotiations, they were able to eliminate attempts by Euro-American traders to push up prices and preserve their rancherías’
bargaining power. Paraibos also managed to block the introduction of alcohol into their rancherías through the simple measure of confining pretrade talks to their lodges, where they invariably banished the liquor from lists of authorized goods. Since foreign traders had little or no contact with their Comanche clientele until the actual barter commenced, they were unable to incorporate that dependency-inducing commodity to the exchange. The Comanches, like the
Pawnees whose chiefs exercised similar control over foreign trade, remained an exceptionally temperate people well into the late nineteenth century.⁶⁴
In a similar manner, paraibos controlled their own followers during fairs to provide a safe environment for foreign traders. If necessary, they relied on violence, whipping and intimidating dissidents into obedience. Thomas James’s experiences are again revealing. When young Comanche men stole some of his
horses, James informed the paraibo who had adopted him as brother. The chief immediately “mounted his horse, with whip in hand, and in about two hours