The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

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  returned with two of the stolen horses. In the afternoon he brought back a third, and at night came up with the fourth.” His leadership challenged, the chief reasserted his authority with fury: “His whip was bloody, and his face distorted with rage. He was in a mood to make men tremble before him.” “After he had left the last horse with me,” the relieved James recalled, “I heard his voice in every part of the camp, proclaiming what the interpreter told me was a warning for the

  protection of my property. ‘Your horses are yours,’ said he, ‘to sell or keep as you please.’”⁶⁵

  If trading was a structured, top-down-controlled activity among the Coman-

  ches, so too was raiding. Ambitious underprivileged young men might launch

  unsanctioned forays, defying paraibos and elders, and powerful senior warriors who felt confined by consensus policies sometimes struck out on their own and set up raiding-oriented rancherías with discontented junior men. But such incidents were exceptional. Comanche raiding resembled an industry in terms of

  scale, and it resembled an industry also in terms of organization: it was an institution run by many and managed by few. Although in theory any man with a

  reputable war record could lead a war party, in practice only a few senior men possessed sufficient personal clout to launch a major expedition. Some paraibos acted as war leaders themselves, but most relinquished large-scale raiding operations to specialized war chiefs, mahimiana paraibos, usually early middle-aged men whose renowned military records enabled them to recruit numerous followers. War chiefs had nearly absolute authority over the campaigns they led.

  They determined the objectives of the raid, assigned roles to the members of the party, planned the attack, and decided how the plunder was distributed. Under their leadership, raiding parties—which often included hundreds of men and

  women—operated as autonomous political entities, following their own agen-

  das during their temporary existence.⁶⁶

  All this was profoundly puzzling to the colonial agents cowering near Coman-

  chería’s borders. The same paraibos who acted as virtual autocrats in diplomatic and exchange settings seemed curiously weak in, or even excluded from, warfare and raiding. Colonial officials took this as a sign of political disorder, deriding the

  “impotent authority” and worthlessness of Comanche leaders, but it is possible that Comanches deliberately cultivated the power dichotomy for political purposes. Comanches’ principal foreign political challenge in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was not steering all their compatriots behind unified policies of peace and war but rather finding ways to organize composite policies of raiding, trading, and tribute extraction. The dual leadership of civil and war chiefs facilitated that effort.

  Comanches founded their raiding-trading-tribute policy on raw military

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  power and the threat of violence, but the policy also had a more abstract political dimension. The arrangement by which paraibos controlled trade and diplomacy but seldom interfered with raiding gave Comanches tremendous maneu-

  vering space, allowing them to keep their strategic options open. When colonial officials confronted paraibos about raids and pressured them to honor existing peace agreements, the chiefs routinely excused themselves by claiming an inability to restrain the warriors and their leaders. Colonial authorities pressured, pleaded, and scolded the paraibos but rarely blamed them for outright treachery or cancelled their trading and gifting privileges because, as the paraibos themselves were ready to point out, their inability to curb the raids stemmed from institutional restrictions, not from personal choice.

  Governor Tomás Vélez de Cachupín despaired over this kind of maneuver-

  ing in 1750, when, in the midst of one of the first Comanche raiding sprees in New Mexico, he chastised the supposedly peaceful paraibos over their followers’

  raiding activities. The chiefs evaded the accusations “by blaming others of their nation, saying that among them are warlike captains who commit these outrages and those who are well disposed are unable to prevent them.” Cachupín, in a

  fateful precedent, grudgingly accepted the explanation and allowed trading and gifting to continue even as raiding raged on. Almost a century later, David G.

  Burnet, the former president of the Republic of Texas, shared Cachupín’s frustration with the dual leadership: “One captain will lead his willing followers to robbery and carnage, while another, and perhaps the big chief of all, will eschew the foray, and profess friendship for the victims of the assault.” Other observers remarked how Comanche chiefs excused themselves from responsibility by insisting that their followers moved freely between rancherías and were therefore beyond their authority, and still others openly blamed the chiefs for deceit. G. W.

  Bonnell, the commissioner of Indian affairs of the Republic of Texas, wrote how Comanche chiefs entered into endless little treaties with Mexico only to “get presents, and throw their enemies off their guard, and give them a better opportunity of committing acts of rapine and plunder.” U.S. Army officer H. G. Catlett reported likewise in 1849: Comanche paraibos sometimes returned stolen horses to Texas “but evidently as a mere blind to hide their duplicity.” As these disillusioned officers saw it, paraibos’ image of powerlessness was a subterfuge aimed at confusing colonial agents and keeping the avenues of exchange open

  in the midst of pillaging and violence.⁶⁷

  Bonnell’s and Catlett’s helpless exasperation was familiar to countless colonial officials in the Southwest, who failed to comprehend and contain the Comanches. Comanches deflected the controlling gaze of colonial agents through their traditional political culture in which power was dichotomized, leaders could

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  be both strong and weak, and group membership was flexible. A vast collec-

  tion of relatively autonomous bands organized for multipolarity and fluidity, the Comanche nation appeared formidable and fragmented, structured and shapeless, incomprehensible and impregnable all at once. Seen from the outside, the Comanche nation was an amorphous entity that lacked a clear center to negotiate with—or obliterate—and an explicit internal structure that would have rendered its external actions predictable. The Comanches, it seems, were so domineering not in spite of their informal, almost atomistic social organization but because of it.

  The diffuse social structure, so crucial for Comanches’ composite foreign

  policy, could also be a liability. The deepening social fission, the fact that Comanches lived in and identified with numerous local rancherías, inevitably eroded the sense of common identity, threatening to dissolve their nation into a collage of isolated, self-contained fragments. This danger became acute in the early nineteenth century, when Comanches consolidated their hegemony over

  the lower midcontinent. The key components of their power complex—the

  multifaceted trade and alliance network, the expanding hinterlands of pillage and piracy, the maintenance of tributary client states—demanded centralized

  planning and governing. To both realize and survive their rise to imperial dominance, it therefore became necessary for Comanches to find ways to bind the

  scattered pieces of their nation into a more coherent political entity. This necessity spawned the Comanche confederacy.

  The Comanche confederacy was not a corporate polity—it had no charter, no

  standing army, and no supreme ruler—but rather a cyclic arrangement that periodically brought together the many units of the Comanche community. It can

  be visualized as a recurring political process whereby local and divisional headmen came together in interdivisional councils to discuss common concerns, to offset the perils of social fragmentation, and to express and reinforce their sense of national unity. Such macrolevel councils had been part of
the Comanche

  political organization at least since the mid-eighteenth century, but they seem to have gained new meaning and importance during the Comanches’ post-1800

  ascendancy. Although sporadic, the divisional and interdivisional meetings provided an arena for national cooperation and a mechanism for the numerous

  rancherías to share the burdens and fruits of expansion.⁶⁸

  The macrolevel meetings sprang from the inherent mobility of the Comanche

  nation. In their constant search for pasture, water, shelter, and game, Comanche rancherías tended to gravitate from Comanchería’s outer reaches toward its center, where winters were relatively mild and manageable for horses and where

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  the bison congregated to mate in late summer. Although rancherías and divi-

  sions had distinct geographical identities, Comanches regarded Comanchería

  as a common domain available to all. “The utmost harmony subsists between

  these several bands,” Burnet observed. “They have no distinct limits assigned them, neither does one party claim, in relation to another, any exclusive sovereignty over the particular section of country which custom seems to have appropriated to its more special use and occupancy.” He noted how the Yamparikas

  “frequently intermingle with, and are found among the Comanchees [eastern

  Comanches],” and how the Tenewas “often mingle with the Yamparacks when

  traversing the southern extreme of their range.”⁶⁹

  Most multidivisional assemblies took place within and around a small zone

  bounded by three elevations—the Medicine Mounds, a line of four conical hills in southwestern Oklahoma; the Wichita Mountains, a sixty-mile-long mountain

  range two days’ ride northeast from the Medicine Mounds; and the Caprock Es-

  carpment, a steep, rugged canyon face that separates the Llano Estacado uplands from the Texas plains below. This sphere was a sacred space where Comanches

  from all rancherías and divisions met and melded. (Sometimes the allies of the Comanche nation also participated.) Designated police societies—apparently a post-1800 innovation—maintained order in the massive camps where thousands

  of people hunted, feasted, danced, and sought medicine powers together for

  weeks. They exchanged goods and information, reinforcing the idea of Coman-

  chería as a single economic area, and they married across divisional lines, forging kinship networks that flowed from the upper Arkansas valley to the south Texas plains. Tracing their lineage to two or more divisions, many prominent Comanche leaders were living proofs of such crosscutting alliances.⁷⁰

  The gatherings culminated in large political councils, where vital domestic, diplomatic, and military matters could be introduced to a central forum. The assembled rancherías decided on treaties, trading privileges, and major offensive and defensive campaigns and elected principal chiefs to represent them in diplomatic dealings with outsiders. And while delegating power, the councils also controlled its use. They were occasions of social regulation where the policies of local and divisional leaders were exposed to public sanction: any paraibo or principal chief whose actions did not meet collective approval was bound to lose social face, followers, and influence.⁷¹

  The grand councils were massive, ordered, hierarchical, and democratic all at once. They could have hundreds of participants organized into several concentric circles, women and unmarried junior men occupying the far perimeter, the prominent elders sitting next to the center stage, and principal chiefs guiding the proceedings, ensuring that rituals and protocols were honored. “In order to

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  transact an important business or receive any important communication from

  an other tribe,” one observer reported in 1836, “the principal chief always con-vokes the lesser ones in his tribe to meet in general councel when each occupies the seat corresponding to his grade, and after many Ceremonies peculiar to themselves on such occasions, the tobacco pipe is introduced into the assembly, and after passing around, & each taking a ‘Whiff ’ the object for calling the convention is made known by the principal chief. . . . The results of the counsel are proclaimed to all the tribe by order of the princip[al] chief through the medium of a person called ‘Talolero,’ (orator) appointed then for the purpose.”⁷²

  In the end, however, the role of principal chiefs was more ceremonial than authoritative. Vested with little formal (or nonconsensual) power, they were spokes-people who articulated common interests in diplomacy, defense, exchange, and war. Once the agenda of a meeting was identified, the grand council began deliberations to build consensus. If consensus proved elusive, the council sometimes split into numerous informal councils where the paraibos and elders of assembled rancherías met and mingled to find a compromise. When an agreement was reached, the principal chief introduced it to the council, exposing it to public criticism and formal approval or rejection. In this sense, the grand councils were open political arenas that helped legitimize policies in the eyes of the masses. Principal chiefs had little room to maneuver outside such publicly sanctioned policies. In 1843, for example, the representatives of the Texas Republic lavished Tenewa head chief Pahayuko with presents in the hope of persuading

  him to sign a treaty of nonaggression, but Pahayuko declared that no such treaty was possible without consulting the other leaders of his division. All Tenewa paraibos had to be heard, he told the frustrated officials, so “that there may be no lies spoken on my side.”⁷³

  Multidivisional political cooperation both promoted and was made possible

  by a common culture and worldview. Regardless of divisional background, all

  Comanches shared certain core ideals about proper social and political organization; they all knew, for example, that wealth had social meaning only when given away, that power meant giving advice rather than orders, and that individual social existence was defined by an ever-widening range of kinship obligations. The Comanches also shared a collective legal culture, an informal system of private law that recognized universal wrongs and sanctions and allowed individuals to seek retribution across band and divisional lines. There was, in short, a proper way of being a Comanche, a set of beliefs and behaviors through which Comanches ordered their knowledge of the world and themselves. “Notwithstanding the extreme laxity of their whole economy of government, and

  their entire exemption from [formal] legal restraint,” Burnet wrote, “they live

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  together with a degree of harmony that would do credit to the most refined and best organized societies.”⁷⁴

  Along with shared social, political, and legal practices and sensibilities, the Comanches found a common cultural ground in religion. Early ethnographers

  described Comanche beliefs and religious practices as “vaguely defined and

  almost wholly devoid of ceremonial structure” and portrayed Comanches as a

  people “with little interest in building a coherent corpus of belief.” But more recent studies have shown that underneath the varied local ritualism there was a structured religious core. The Comanche life cycle was punctuated with rituals common to all rancherías and divisions. The reliance on puha cut through the community, and members of all rancherías sought visions, trained their extra-sensory skills, and visited graves of powerful individuals in order to become puhakatʉs, “possessors of power.” There were recognized dance, medicine, and military societies—some of which had been “captured” from other nations in

  war—which shared puha and drew members, both men and women, from several divisions. The bonds that such societies generated among their members

  rivaled biological bonds in depth and durability.⁷⁵

  In the end, regardless of their band or divisional affiliation, all Comanches were children of the sun. Durin
g his prolonged exile among the Comanches,

  Ruíz wrote extensively of their uniform, sun-centered religion: “The whole

  Comanche nation believes in the existence of a supreme being which is the

  sun. They call it the ‘father of the universe.’ All their religious rites center around the worship of the sun. The doors of their homes or tents face east so that the rising sun can shine upon them and they can adore it. . . . The earth is considered by them the mother of all living beings and the sustained force aided by the sun, which in turn keeps them warm. It is believed that the sun can see

  everything ‘from the outside.’ If a Comanche wants to be believed by his peers, he calls the sun and the earth as witness in an oath.” Multidivisional meetings often climaxed in the Sun Dance ceremony, which reflected the inclusive, integrated nature of the Comanche society: Comanches had borrowed many songs

  and dances for their ceremony from other nations. Such collective beliefs and religious institutions were both the prerequisite for and the product of a sustained communitywide interaction. Every time the Comanches congregated at

  the Medicine Mounds and other sacred sites, they realized their nation anew, reaffirming their sense of themselves as one people, the Numunu, who shared

  similar views on cosmology, human responsibilities, and good society.⁷⁶

  This sense of unity and belonging made an impression on Euro-American

  observers like Manuel Merino, who in 1804 remarked that the Comanche divi-

  sions “form a close union” and “share a common destiny.” Burnet, writing more

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  than forty years later, noted that the Comanches fell into several divisions but were “essentially one people: [they] speak the same language, and have the same peculiar habits, and the same tribal interests.” Conflict with one Comanche

  division, he warned U.S. policymakers, “would involve a conflict with all; for the Comanche, the lower party, if pressed, would retire to, and coalesce with, their kindred, who would adopt the quarrel without an inquiry into its justice or expediency.” Mirroring Burnet, Agent Neighbors wrote that the Comanches