“appear to have a strong connecting link in the similarity of habits and language, and frequently they unite in war or council.” Neighbors’s brief remark makes an essential distinction. More than symbolic venues to act out a collective identity, joint councils formed a political mechanism that steered the many components of the Comanche nation into a common orbit, interlocking them into a political confederacy capable of projecting a unified front to rivals and allies.⁷⁷
That unity was realized most tangibly in war. The ubiquity of Comanches’ hitand-run stock and slave raiding on colonial frontiers has obscured the fact that they waged many national wars that typically stemmed from territorial disputes over hunting and grazing privileges and frequently involved wholesale killing and destruction. Kinship responsibilities, the obligation to avenge slain relatives and protect live ones, activated such wars and sometimes propagated them for generations. “Their fathers inculcate the ideal of vengeance in them from their tenderest infancy,” Berlandier noted. “They are so thoroughly accustomed to the violence of this passion that they constantly invoke it to incite their compatriots to arms.” When outsiders killed their members, Comanches’ response was decisive, ritualized, and collective. As Ruíz realized, organizing a large multiband military campaign was essentially a matter of invoking the pity of the maximum number of local leaders and then mustering their respective kinship networks for war: “The Comanches are ready to avenge the death of one of their warriors.
They [the relatives of slain warrior] ride into Indian camps . . . crying, and urge the dwellers to follow them. . . . Each chief who agrees to participate in the raid invites all his relatives to go along with him.”⁷⁸
If private revenge campaigns of kinship groups kept escalating through re-
peated cycles of retribution, violence could reach a tip-off point and become a full-scale war involving entire Comanche divisions and their non-Comanche
allies. When this happened, Berlandier wrote, the war became the matter of
the confederacy and its coordinating mechanisms: “When the war is a gen-
eral one, with the entire people gathered in tribes to go on the warpath, public authority intervenes. The chiefs assemble in council, and the old men are admitted to provide the lessons they have learned in their long experience. There the whole matter is discussed with sagacity and prudence, and the advantages
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and disadvantages of each course of action carefully weighed. If the decision is for war, the rallying points are first established, then the strategy and tactics to be used against the enemy in all foreseeable circumstances.” In such national campaigns—which often included several thousand warriors—Comanches employed a rigid if temporary command structure: “On these great expeditions involving whole peoples,” Berlandier wrote, “the most experienced captains from each tribe are put in command. . . . Despite the fact that tribal chieftains may and do take part in such excursions, they must obey the temporary chief in all matters pertaining to the war for the entire duration of the campaign.” Such centrally orchestrated and commanded campaigns were the military backbone
of the Comanche empire and ranged from Pawnee country on the central plains
and the Osage border on the southern prairies deep into Mexico.⁷⁹
Large-scale campaigns were bracketed by elaborate ceremonies that fostered
collective ethos and turned the assembled bands into a temporary army. Pan-
Comanche campaigns began with war councils where participating rancherías
selected leaders and scouts, agreed on goals and strategy, and exchanged pledges of mutual help. The Lobos and other warrior societies played a central role in these councils, maintaining order, evoking martial ethos through war dances, and providing a sense of cohesion though membership that transcended divisional boundaries. Each step was shrouded in rituals of kinship, honor, and retribution. “When another rancheria arrives” at a designated rallying point, one contemporary wrote, “the captain and the warriors of the tribe, bedecked with feathers and covered with their war ornaments, mount their horses and form
two lines, in which formation they make a tour of the camps of those who have already arrived, singing as they go. . . . The host tribe replies to this visit with a ceremony of the same sort, and this scene is repeated at the camp of each tribe that has come to join. . . . These meetings sometimes take place some one or two hundred leagues distant from the enemy. They are sometimes major events, lasting two or three months, so as to give everyone a chance to get there, and meanwhile the most complete harmony prevails among all the tribes.” A successful campaign ended with celebrations in which the victors nurtured their communal identity through ritualized violence: “The Comanches have a custom of helping the neighboring rancherias share in the victory just won by one of their tribes. They send the neighbors an arm or a leg of the victim so that they may celebrate their own festival. A man who has killed an enemy may also give the scalp to another, who then receives all the honors and makes all the gifts.”
The exhibition of enemy body parts around Comanchería was more than a gory
victory ceremony; it was a symbolic performance of solidarity that dramatized
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the power and unity of the Numunu in the face of common, vanquished ene-
mies.⁸⁰
The Comanches operated in unison in war, and they did so also in diplo-
macy. Before 1850, the Comanche nation entered into several major treaties
with colonial powers, and each of those treaties was preceded by multidivisional councils that agreed on terms and delegates under the guidance of elders. An example of these inclusive diplomatic processes is the 1822 treaty with Mexico, which was endorsed by both Kotsotekas and Tenewas. According to a Mexican report, Comanches, “persuaded by the advice of ancient Pitsinampa [Pisi-
nampe], whom they venerate as a father,” decided to pursue peace with Mexico.
“To that end, toward the latter part of the March of the past year of twenty-two, they held a council of principal chiefs, captains, and elders, which was attended by five thousand persons.” The grand council was opened by “paternal speeches of Pitsinampa,” after which the question of peace was discussed for three days.
The council finally “resolved, by unanimous vote, that . . . one of their principal chiefs should go forward to negotiate for peace under the terms he might find most appropriate and useful for the Comanche Nation.” That chief, Guonique,
traveled to Mexico City, where, armed with “the plenipotentiary power con-
ferred upon him by his nation,” he negotiated a detailed fourteen-point treaty that was highly favorable to the Comanches. Oral traditions suggest that the Comanches also had a specific society, the Big Horses, which was responsible for completing peace treaties with other Native nations.⁸¹
Like any complex society, Comanches did not always speak with one voice.
In fact, they sometimes appeared outright cacophonic: dissident chiefs op-
posed majority agreements, and leaders sometimes vied fiercely for political sway within divisions. Yet the Comanche leadership managed time and again
to either neutralize or accommodate such conflicts and forge long-lasting consensuses behind foreign policies. The crowning examples of such unified di-
plomacy are the many long periods of peace in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries. Peace, one scholar has perceptively argued, was to Native Americans primarily a matter of mind, a mental state nurtured by words, rituals, and good thoughts,⁸² but to the numerous and wide-ranging Comanches
peace was also—if not indeed primarily—a political process involving constant consultation, coordination, and mediation. The Comanche nation, through its
integrated multilevel political structure, kept a long-standing peace with the Kiowas and Naishans dating from 1806 and the
Osages from 1838. They lived in general harmony with the Wichitas from the 1810s until the reservation era and honored decades-long truces with the Pawnees. In the early nineteenth century,
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they maintained a seven-year-long peace with the Apaches, with whom they had been at war more than a century. And for thirty-five years after the monumental treaty between Chief Ecueracapa and Governor Anza in 1786, no Comanche
band violated the peace with New Mexico.
These were remarkable diplomatic achievements in an erratic colonial world
where alliances, enmities, and balances of power tended to shift frequently and abruptly, and they testify to the sophistication of pan-Comanche statecraft. Information and initiatives flowed constantly from rancherías to divisional and multidivisional councils, where the actions of local leaders were censured and the broad outlines of Comanche foreign policy were formulated. This was not
easy, for the formation of national policies of peace and war required more than bringing large numbers of people to a certain place at a certain time. An entire political culture had to be reconfigured. Paraibos had to commit themselves to obeying and executing policies they did not necessarily advocate. Bands had to forfeit a degree of their treasured autonomy to the confederacy and its administrative machinery. People known for their ferocious individuality and egalitarian ethos had to subordinate themselves to orders and rules emanating from
the top.
The new centralized political culture generated broad agreements on fun-
damental issues, but it did not eradicate the traditional local autonomy, and it did not turn the Comanches into a monolith. The grand councils decided only
on general war and general peace, in the absence of which rancherías were free to determine their relations with outsiders as they saw best. The core ideals of personal autonomy and freedom of association endured, permeating the entire
community: just as individuals could move between bands without restraint, so too could entire rancherías shift between divisions. The early nineteenth-century Comanchería was a human kaleidoscope whose particles—bands, families, and
individuals—moved around constantly, seeking new political and economic op-
portunities in the distant parts of the realm, often shifting their affiliations in the process. Sometimes, as when El Sordo’s Yamparikas relocated to eastern Comanchería and reinvented themselves as Tenewas, entirely new divisions developed and sometimes old ones dissolved. The Jupes vanished from the historical record in the early nineteenth century, probably as a result of the amalgamation of Comanche divisions.⁸³
This enduring social flexibility was as essential to Comanche hegemony as
were the new centralized political institutions. Fluid group membership gave the Comanche nation extraordinary resilience by allowing its component parts to coalesce, dissolve, and unite again into various configurations as external exi-
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gencies demanded. The freedom of association also served as a political safety valve: individuals and bands that found it difficult to conform to the policies of their division could simply move to another. Macrolevel political unification and local fluidity, moreover, were not necessarily contradictory developments.
The constant shifting of people and bands turned rancherías and divisions into rather loose entities, but such mobility also helped stitch the larger community together: each relocation outside one’s own ranchería or division created a new kinship bond that transcended existing social and political boundaries. This creative balancing between flexibility and unity did not escape the attention of colonial officials, whose imperial projects were often wrought with stifling bureaucracies and defiant subject peoples. It must have been with perplexing resentment that Fernando de la Concha, the late eighteenth-century New Mexico
governor who tried in vain to bring order to his unruly colony, described the political organization of New Mexico’s ostensibly savage neighbors: “They agree among themselves perfectly, and the internal quarrels never exceed the limits of the petty disputes which arise between individuals. All four of the divisions live in a close union, and it frequently happens that those of one go to live among the others, so that their interests are common, and they share a common destiny.”⁸⁴
Nomads, the historical record shows, can evade, resist, stop, sustain, exploit, destabilize, and destroy empires. They can also build enduring empires of their own, but only if they modify the essence of their being and become less nomadic.
Nomadism appears fundamentally incompatible with empire-building. Empires
thrive on structure and stability, whereas nomads—at least the nomads one finds in most scholarly studies—are shifting and factional. Their institutions, like their very way of life, tend to be fluid and ephemeral, and they lack such classic elements of empires as state structure and surplus-generating agriculture. Indeed, to preserve their might, nearly all nomadic empires developed over time more fixed institutions of governance and production that required at least seasonal sedentarism.⁸⁵
So too did the Comanches, although this may seem implausible at first sight.
We have been taught to see Comanches as quintessential nomads, the ever-
roaming lords of the southern plains, but they lived almost half of each year in large, nearly stationary villages. These villages were a response to the seasonal ecological riddles posed by the Great Plains environment, and they existed primarily to facilitate hunting and herding. But they had another function as well: they were seats of power and centers of production that sustained an empire.
To understand how Comanches incorporated extended village sojourns into a
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predominantly nomadic way of life—to understand, in other words, how they
combined nomadic plasticity with imperial rigidity—it is necessary to reexamine their annual cycle, its seasonal pattern of convergence and dispersal, its intricate slotting of various domestic and foreign political activities, and its creative blending of mobility and sedentarism.
The annual cycle of the Comanches began and ended at the junction of fall
and winter, which marked a shift from a season dominated by foreign politi-
cal activities to a season dominated by domestic activities. In late November, after the great fall hunt, Comanche rancherías left the open plains and took to the wooded river valleys for winter camps. This migration mirrored the habits of the bison, which retreated into the riverine forests during cold months, but it was also motivated by the exigencies of the new pastoral economy: Comanches
needed the shelter, water, grass, and cottonwood bark of the river bottoms to support their vast horse and mule herds through the cold season.
Essentially extensions of the eastern woodland environment in a semiarid
climate, the river valleys invited the Comanches to lead an existence that had little to do with the stereotyped image of horse-mounted nomads. Having settled along the streams by early or mid-December, Comanche rancherías stayed virtually immobile for several months, moving only when grasses or cottonwoods
gave out or when feces and camp refuse became a health hazard. Men divided
their time between tool manufacturing and brief but frequent hunts—the con-
gregation of the bison in river valleys saved them long excursions. One visitor noted how a camp of nine hundred lodges on the upper Arkansas consumed
roughly one hundred bison a day, which suggests that each household killed
an animal every nine days or so. Since the camps were more or less stationary, women focused on processing the thick and sumptuous winter robes for the
market. Raiding and warfare did not stop, but they now revolved around small-scale campaigns. Southern rancherías, whose horses were taxed less by the cold season than those of their more northern relatives, often launched mi
nor raiding excursions into Texas during the winters. On Comanchería’s eastern front, rancherías conducted sporadic defensive campaigns against Osage war and hunting parties through November, December, and January.⁸⁶
For most Plains Indian societies, winters were a time of social dispersal: tribes splinted into bands, and bands scattered across the land, trying to expand their resource base at a time when nature yielded little. For Comanches, however, the opposite was often true. Comanchería’s river valleys were long and fertile and could sustain massive human-animal congregations. Stretches of the Arkansas, North Canadian, Canadian, Red, Brazos, and Colorado rivers transformed in
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most winters into some of the most crowded places in the early American West.
Hosting thousands of people and animals for months at end, Comanche winter
camps resembled cities more than makeshift nomadic camps. A large village
extended for several miles along a streambed, flanked by lookout points, usually high natural peaks, and it contained various structures for political councils, religious ceremonies, household chores, and lodging. In places like Paint Rock along the Concho River, dramatic pictographs adorned bluffs and canyon walls, and there is even a report of a village that was fortified with a circular moat, picket palisades, and a “small bastion in the center.” Comanches returned to favorite sites year after year, profoundly altering local ecosystems in the process.
These villages’ voracious need for firewood left long stretches of riverine valleys treeless, and their many horses and mules often cropped grass to the ground and depleted cottonwood growths beyond repair.⁸⁷
Winter villages were an ecological innovation that helped Comanches exploit
the bison and support their horses through the cold season, but the villages also served as venues for two crucial imperial institutions: macrolevel political councils and large-volume foreign trade. Most divisional and interdivisional meetings took place in winter camps, which provided auspicious conditions for broadly based decision making and consensus building: numerous relatively immobile
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