rancherías clustered together for months constituted a unique administrative opportunity for a nation of nomads. Seen from another angle, Comanchería’s
winter camps were massive concentrations of wealth—horses, mules, robes,
meat, slaves—which attracted foreign traders. The principal wintering grounds along the upper Arkansas and Red River valleys routinely transformed into large, multiethnic trade fairs, where large quantities of commodities exchanged hands.
Many neighboring societies arranged their own seasonal migrations around
these annual winter fairs.
Comanches did not emerge from river valleys until early or mid-April, when
they entered the migratory half of their yearly round. Their main concern now was to fatten their thinned horses and mules on the sprouting short grasses, for which purpose the winter villages split into numerous small rancherías to maxi-mize foraging area. The rancherías moved frequently, seeking fresh pastures, watering places, and salt, and carefully coordinated their movements in relation to one another to avoid overlapping grazing ranges. They often burned large
patches of grassland to encourage early grass growth. These pastoral activities were punctuated by brief hunts aimed at restocking exhausted food supplies and occasional livestock raids to replace winter losses. In June, after horses had regained their strength and when the bison began to assemble for the rut, Coman-
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ches conducted the summer hunt. For a few busy weeks they focused almost
solely on hunting, butchering, skinning, tanning, and meat curing. Unlike in winters, skin processing was now largely a subsistence activity as the summer hides had little exchange value but could be turned into tipi covers, leggings, and moccasins.⁸⁸
After the summer hunt, foreign policy took precedence. Through June, July,
and early August, Comanches alternated small-scale border raids with tribute-extracting and trading visits to New Mexico and Texas, which, after the winter’s respite, suddenly became almost a Comanche possession. Early and midsummer was also the time when the dispersed rancherías came together in huge
camps to launch mass-scale campaigns against common enemies. These annual
operations were aimed at preserving neutral zones around Comanchería, but as some perceptive observers noted, extended summer campaigns into Osage and
Pawnee countries doubled as hunting excursions, which temporarily expanded
Comanches’ bison domain to the central and eastern Great Plains. Late sum-
mer saw another such temporary extension of Comanchería when Comanche
raiders swept into Mexico. Late August and September were the rainiest period in northern Mexico, which allowed Comanche war bands to support their massive herds of stolen stock during the extended forays. Comanche forays were so punctual that September became known across the Southwest as the Comanche or Mexico Moon. During that violent season, Mexicans knew to establish
chains of sentinels on hilltops to warn their villages of approaching war bands.⁸⁹
Although Comanches seemed to be all over the map during the summer
months, Comanchería itself did not lay dormant. Women, boys, and slaves ran
the subsistence and herding economies, and enough men stayed behind to
organize defense, diplomacy, and exchange. Foreign trading convoys came in
regularly, drawn by the thriving trade fairs Comanches sponsored across their realm and the fresh supplies of captives and stolen colonial stock.⁹⁰ As in winter, there were big, bustling villages, temporary urban constructions that lined Comanchería’s main riverine arteries. Finding such urban scenes in a seemingly desolate steppe landscape was often a disorienting experience to Euro-American visitors. The 1835 U.S. dragoon expedition under Colonel Henry Dodge was designed to impress the Plains Indians with its military muscle and organizational flourish, but when the troops arrived in mid-June at a large Comanche settlement along the Cache Creek near the Wichita Mountains, it was the Americans
who were left in awe. One of their members, George Catlin, left a description of the Comanche welcoming ceremony, which began as an intimidating display
of martial prowess but, seen up close, softened into a public demonstration of friendship:
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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.
15. Comanche Warriors, with White Flag, Receiving the Dragoons. Oil on canvas by George Catlin, 1834–35. Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Washington, D.C. / Art Resource, N.Y.
Several hundreds of their braves and warriors came out at full speed to wel-
come us. . . . As they wheeled their horses, they very rapidly formed a line, and
“dressed” like well-disciplined cavalry. . . . Two lines were thus drawn up, face to face, within twenty or thirty yards of each other, as inveterate foes that never had met; and, to the everlasting credit of the Camanchees, whom the world
had always looked upon as murderous and hostile, they had all come out in
this manner, with their heads uncovered, and without a weapon of any kind,
to meet a war-party bristling with arms, and trespassing to the middle of their country. . . . They galloped out and looked us in our faces, without an expression of fear or dismay, and evidently with expressions of joy and impatient pleasure, to shake us by the hand, on the bare assertion of Colonel Dodge, which had been made to the chiefs, that “we came to see them on a friendly visit.”⁹¹
The Americans had won entrance to the inner sanctum of Comanchería:
the encampment they had come upon was the principal eastern Comanche
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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.
16. Comanche Village, Women Dressing Robes and Drying Meat. Oil on canvas by George Catlin, 1834–35. Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Washington, D.C. / Art Resource, N.Y.
village, where rancherías from several divisions had congregated. Its sheer size left Catlin confounded. There were between six and eight hundred ornamented
tipis organized into long parallel lines, which gave the settlement a gridlike appearance of streets and rowhouses. A nearby streambed, “speckled with horses and mules,” had been converted into an immense grazing area. The entire complex “with its thousands of wild inmates, with horses and dogs, and wild sports and domestic occupations” hummed with action. Boys and slaves moved back
and forth between the village and the stream, taking shifts in guarding, tending, and watering the herds, while women and slaves hauled wood, gathered
seeds, picked fruit, dug roots, cured meat, and processed robes. Racks of drying meat and tanned robes ran parallel with the tipi rows, attesting to thriving domestic and market production. Some men participated in and gambled on
horse races and other communal games; others honed their fighting skills in
endless drills, reenacting the military prowess that had help expand Comanches’
imperial realm to the Tropic of Cancer and beyond. Young warriors left Catlin
“completely puzzled” by riding horizontally behind their horses’ bodies in full speed, “effectually screened from [their] enemies’ weapons,” firing arrows under the horse’s neck. But there were also things that evaded Catlin’s scrutiny. He was
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To view this image, please refer to the print version of this book.
17. Comanche Feats of Horsemanship. Oil on canvas
by George Catlin, 1834–35. Courtesy of Smithsonian American Art Museum,
Washington, D.C. / Art Resource, N.Y.
not invited to religious ceremonies that complemented large village gatherings, and he could not witness the political activities that took place behind closed tipi doors: the
nightly pipe rituals where the everyday matters of the village were discussed and the more formal councils where important political issues were resolved. Here, in short, was one of those temporary administrative and economic nerve centers that shaped and sustained the Comanche empire.⁹²
The annual cycle of the Comanches ended with a great fall hunt, which took
place in late November and early December, just before the vast bison con-
centrations splintered into riverine fragments and bears went into hibernation.
Along with winter and midsummer, this was the third time in a year that Comanches gathered into large villages. Rancherías congregated at designated places for multiband councils, where the time and location of the hunt was agreed.
The fall hunt was the nutritional pivot of the yearly cycle, the last chance to stock up on protein and fat before the lean season, and the villages took ex-
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tensive measures to ensure success. A group of distinguished warriors served as marshals who made sure that no one alarmed the prey prematurely, and a
chief hunter led mounted hunters in coordinated collective chases. Women and slaves butchered the carcasses at the site of the kill and hauled the slabs of flesh to the villages, which for a few weeks looked like meat-processing manufactories.
When enough buffalo meat, buffalo tallow, and bear oil had been processed
and stored, the rancherías headed toward the river valleys and their communal duties and challenges.⁹³
Comanchería in the early nineteenth century was not the place it had been a
century or even half a century before. There were elemental continuities in how Comanches related to the world and to one another, but the tempo and texture of their lives had changed irrevocably. An early eighteenth-century Comanche would have found the early nineteenth-century Comanchería both familiar
and eerily disorienting. The two worlds had many things in common—horses,
slaves, rich, poor, paraibos, war chiefs—but the later world was vastly magnified.
Horse herds were colossal and slaves or incorporated former slaves were everywhere. The old subsistence-oriented foraging economy had been transplanted
by a market-oriented dual economy of hunting and herding that featured such
embryonic capitalist features as concentrated ownership of the means of pro-
duction, a complex labor division geared toward market production, and a cadre of privileged individuals who used their wealth to create more wealth. The relatively egalitarian society had yielded to a configuration in which there was room for strictly gendered and ethnically segmented production groups and vast gradations in possession and privilege. Political power had become both concen-
trated and curiously divided between civil and war chiefs, and the multidivisional councils now held together both a nation and an empire.
Collectively, these changes amounted to a classic process of internal inten-
sification that most rapidly expanding societies go through: economies are recalibrated, inequalities exacerbated, social cleavages accentuated, and levers of political power realigned.⁹⁴ Such readjustments helped Comanches meet the
countless challenges of empire-building, but they came at a cost. The new economy threatened Comanchería’s ecological stability, and institutionalized slavery shook its social foundations. The yawning gap between the poor and the prosperous undermined communal solidarity and fueled a fierce male rivalry over
women and horses. Gender relations deteriorated when men began to marry
their daughters into massive polygynous households as quasi laborers. Yet the Comanche society retained its flexible cohesiveness, its capacity to absorb change without losing its core principles. Slavery remained embedded in kinship rela-
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tions and never evolved into a socially divisive chattel system. A persisting vision of generosity as a paramount social virtue helped alleviate disintegrative effects of individual aggrandizement and communitywide social hierarchization. An
ingrained warrior cult channeled aggressive male competition outside of Co-
manchería. As the nineteenth century inched toward its midpoint, it seemed
that Comanches could survive their expansion. They had no way of knowing
that the grass under their feet was about to die.
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The Mexican-American War marked the culmination of Comanche power,
the hinge on which 150 years of expansion turned toward retreat. Although few Americans acknowledged it, the war of 1846 was a display of both United States and Comanche power. Washington argued that the takeover of Mexican soil
was simply a matter of fulfilling America’s manifest destiny, but on the ground, where military power meant more than political rhetoric, the conquest seemed more propitious than predestined: the Americans who marched into Mexico
in the name of destiny and democracy did so in the footsteps of Comanches,
whose expansion had paved the way for theirs. And yet, when the dust settled and treaties were signed, the Comanches discovered that they were considered a conquered people.
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ushered in a new order in the Southwest.
The United States secured its hold on Texas and absorbed New Mexico, extend-
ing its possessions from the Nueces River to the Río Grande. In Article Eleven of the treaty, the United States agreed to police the border to prevent Indian raiders from crossing the Río Grande into Mexico. For the Comanches, this was unfathomable: their home territory had fallen squarely within the borders of a vastly more powerful nation that meant to box them in and tie them down. That pressure, meted out by the U.S. military, federal agents, and soldier-settlers, began immediately after the Mexican-American War and increased steadily until the
Civil War and its aftermath brought a short respite. But when the Americans
resumed their expansionist thrust in the late 1860s, the Comanches, along
with more than twenty other Plains Indian nations, were swiftly swept aside.
Abruptly and almost effortlessly, the United States overthrew the formidable Comanches.
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This reading of Comanche decline has certain chronological and causal sym-
metry to it, but the impression of American expansion and Comanche collapse
as connected developments is deceiving. The United States would eventually
obliterate the Comanches’ way of life and confine them to a reservation, but the American expansion did not trigger their decline. When the United States fought its way into the Southwest after 1846, the Comanches were both at the peak of their power and on the verge of collapse. For decades, and almost imper-ceptibly, several in-built economic and ecological problems had been brewing, erupting into a full-blown crisis in the closing years of the 1840s. That crisis sent the Comanches into a spiraling decline; by the time they came into critical contact with the United States in the 1850s, they had ceased to be an imperial power.
In 1849, when U.S. Army Captain Randolph B. Marcy extended his explora-
tory tour of the southern plains into Comanchería, he was struck by the Comanches’ uncompromised sense of power. They believed themselves “to be the most powerful nation in existence,” the baffled officer wrote, “and the relation of facts which conflict with this notion . . . only subjects the narrator to ridicule.” Marcy considered the Comanches fools, ignorant of such wonders as the steam engine or the telegraph, but they had every reason to be confident. They were prosperous and powerful. Although epidemics had cut into their numbers, their popu-
lation hovered near the twenty-thousand level, making them by far the most
populous Native nation of the southern and central plains. There were still an estimated six to eight hundred Mexican slaves and countless
Native captives in Comanchería. The various Comanche bands owned collectively well over one
hundred thousand horses and mules, more than all the other plains nomads
combined, and the Comanche alliance network comprised more than twenty
different ethnic groups, who sent regular trading envoys into Comanchería,
bringing in firearms, metal, food, and luxuries. Several groups were attached to the Comanches as trading partners, junior allies, and political satellites. Such facts and figures denote impressive power, but, less perceptibly, they also carry a bleaker significance. They speak of the costs of the empire, and they suggest that the Comanche economy had surpassed the limits of ecologically sustainable growth.¹
Comanchería was a land of great riches and enormous bison herds, which
provided the Comanches a seemingly bottomless reservoir of hides, protein, and fat, but that abundance rested on a shaky ecological foundation: Comanchería was a hunter’s paradise but only for a limited number of people. Calculations based on the range-use efficiency of livestock in the early twentieth-century
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southern plains suggest that the nineteenth-century Comanchería could sup-
port approximately seven million bison. These vast herds thrived on Coman-
chería’s dense and nourishing shortgrasses, but they also faced severe hazards: wolves killed huge numbers of calves, grass fires annihilated entire herds, and droves of buffalo drowned attempting to cross frozen rivers in winter. The critical gap, the difference between mortality and the bison’s ability to reproduce, was therefore rather narrow. Modern bison reproduce at an average annual rate of 18 to 20 percent, while the nineteenth-century bison’s annual losses to nonhuman causes—natural mortality, accidents, and predation—can be estimated
at 15 percent. Based on these figures, the Comanches and their allies could kill approximately 280,000 bison a year without depleting the herds.²
Although substantial on first glance, this number suggests a startling possibility: the Comanches were off balance with the bison herds for much of the
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