early nineteenth century, gradually eroding the ecological foundation of their way of life. It has been estimated that full-time plains hunters needed a yearly average of 6.5 bison per person for food, shelter, and clothing, which means that the Comanches and their allies were killing approximately 175,000 buffalos a year for subsistence alone. Moreover, although first and foremost horse traders, Comanches also produced bison robes, meat, and tallow for the market. In the early nineteenth century, their commercial harvest probably rarely exceeded
25,000 animals, but their hunting practices seriously aggravated the damage.
Like most Plains Indians, Comanches did their market hunting in winter, when the robes were the thickest and most valuable, and they preferred killing two- to five-year-old cows for their thin, easily processed skins. Since bison cows produce their first calves at the age of three or four and their gestation period usually extends from mid-July to early April, Comanches slaughtered disproportionate numbers of pregnant cows, thus impairing the herds’ reproductive capacity.³
Making matters worse, Comanches’ commercial ambitions induced them to
open their hunting grounds to outsiders. For much of the eighteenth century, Comanches had restricted outsiders’ access to their hunting ranges, but that environmental policy became increasingly difficult to maintain as their trading links multiplied. One by one, they disposed of the neutral buffer zones skirting Comanchería, inadvertently depriving the bison of their crucial sanctuaries.
Particularly inauspicious in this respect was the 1835 Treaty of Camp Holmes, in which Comanches granted the Osages and the populous immigrant tribes of
Indian Territory access to their lands in exchange for trading privileges. Discouraged by the poor lands of Indian Territory, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Creeks—all numerous groups—embarked on active bison hunting, and
many Delaware, Shawnee, and Kickapoo bands became specialized hunters.
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Together with Osages, the removed Indians did most of their hunting in the
prime bison range between the upper Canadian and Red rivers, in the heart
of eastern Comanchería. By 1841 the region’s bison populations were thinning rapidly.⁴
At the same time on Comanchería’s western edge, ciboleros, the New Mexi-
can bison hunters who had won hunting privileges in Comanchería in the aftermath of the 1786 Spanish-Comanche treaty, made annual hunting expeditions
to the Llano Estacado, harvesting an estimated 25,000 animals per season. Even more pressure fell on the bison herds with the peace of 1840 among Comanches, Kiowas, Naishans, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes, which unlocked northern
Comanchería for Cheyenne and Arapaho hunters, who embarked on a large-
scale robe trade at Bent’s Fort on the Arkansas. Cheyennes and Arapahoes de-
livered tens of thousands of robes to Bent’s Fort and probably harvested a large portion of them in Comanchería. In all, in the early 1840s tens of thousands of Comanchería’s bison died every year in the hands of people not living in the region.⁵
The combined toll of Comanches’ and their allies’ subsistence and market
hunting probably neared, and in some years exceeded, the sustainable yearly
rate of killing of 280,000, placing Comanchería’s bison herds on a precarious balance. This balance was rendered even shakier by the Comanches’ burgeoning horse herding economy. Horses and bison have an 80 percent dietary overlap and very similar water requirements, which makes them ecologically incompatible species. Even more critically, both animals could survive the harsh winters of the plains only by retreating into river valleys, which provided reliable water, shelter against the cold, and cottonwood for emergency food. But suitable riverine habitats were becoming increasingly scarce. To meet the expansive grazing needs of their growing domestic herds, Comanches had turned more
and more bottomland niches into herding range, gradually congesting Coman-
chería’s river valleys. By the mid-nineteenth century, huge winter camps and horse herds could be seen stretching for dozens of miles along key wintering sites, covering the prime foraging and watering spots, and forcing the bison to retreat to poorer areas.⁶
Most such areas were at the headwaters of major rivers and far from Coman-
ches’ principal hunting and wintering grounds, but when the bison gravitated toward these peripheral habitats, they were blocked there as well. Southern Comanchería near the Texas frontier was the home for massive herds of wild horses, which had virtually taken over the region’s river valleys and resources. On the western portion of the Llano Estacado, at the headwaters of the Canadian, Red, and Brazos rivers and their tributaries, the bison had to compete for grass, water,
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and shelter with thousands of sheep driven there each winter by New Mexican
herders, pastores. Perhaps most disastrously, freighting along the Santa Fe Trail grew into a large-scale industry in the early 1840s. A typical trade caravan consisted of some two dozen freight wagons and several hundred oxen and mules,
and each year hundreds of such caravans trekked back and forth along the Ar-
kansas corridor, destroying vegetation, polluting springs, accelerating erosion, and driving out the bison from their last ecological niches in the valley. It is also possible that the traders’ livestock introduced anthrax, brucellosis, and other bovine diseases to the bison herds.⁷
Struggling under multiple pressures, Comanchería’s bison population lost
the ability to maintain its numbers. The herds may have declined all through the early nineteenth century, first slowly and intermittently, then faster and more steadily. By the 1840s the herds had thinned perceptibly across the region. In 1843 one Mexican official in Taos warned that the bison would soon become
extinct as a species, and a few years later another observer noted, “It is a singular fact that within the last two years the prairies, extending from the mountains to a hundred miles or more down the Arkansa, have been entirely abandoned by the
buffalo.”⁸ Comanchería’s core bison population was under severe pressure, but that pressure was somewhat alleviated by the fact that the 1830s and early 1840s were unusually wet on the southern plains. The above-average rainfall sustained prolific grass growth, which mitigated the bison’s problems. But then, suddenly, the rains stopped and a full-blown crisis set in.
In 1845 a long and intense dry spell struck Comanchería. The rains resumed
briefly around 1850, but the drought returned and lasted in varying degrees until the mid-1860s. As the rains failed or came only as drizzles, springs, ponds, and creeks dried up and rivers shrank to trickles. Shortgrasses stored nutrients in their extensive root systems, producing stunted above-ground growth, and vast swathes of Comanchería’s lush grass cover turned into brownish, lifeless matter. It was a difficult time for the Comanches and a disastrous one for the bison. To protect their horses and themselves against dehydration and starvation, Comanches headed for the few spots where forage and water were available, thus blocking the bison’s access to their drought refuges. Already strained by grazing competition and human predation and now left to endure the drought without the vital resources of the river valleys, Comanchería’s bison herds collapsed. Staggering numbers of animals died, and entire herds drifted out of Comanchería, seeking relief in the moister and cooler conditions in the north and east. In 1847, reporting on the situation on the western plains of Texas, Indian agent Robert Neighbors wrote, “The buffalo and other game have almost entirely disappeared.” Two years later Captain Marcy reported that buffalo “seldom go south of Red river,
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and their range upon east and west has also very much contracted. . . . They are at present confined to a narrow belt of country between the outer settlements and the base of the Rocky mountains.” It is impossible to know exactly how many
animals perished, but it is not infeasible that the total population was reduced to 3.5 million by 1860.⁹
Although an unexpected climatic swing brought on the bison crisis, the
Comanches’ actions had contributed to the damage. By monopolizing the river
basins for their horses, by slaughtering vast numbers of bison for subsistence and for trade, and by opening their hunting grounds to outsiders, Comanches had
critically undercut the viability of the bison population, rendering it vulnerable to ecological reversals. Given the inherently unpredictable nature of the plains environment and bison ecology—the herds were always declining and bouncing
back—it would have been very difficult to tell one of the recurring fluctuations apart from a more permanent drop. Indeed, Comanches’ actions remained ecologically inconsistent even after the herds had begun to shrink rapidly in the late 1840s. They adopted steps to preserve the herds, insisting, for example, that the ciboleros take fewer pack animals on their hunting sojourns and curb the amount of robes and meat they carried back to New Mexico. At the same time,
however, Comanches continued to kill large numbers of bison for commercial
purposes. In 1855 John W. Whitfield, the Indian agent of the upper Arkansas, reported that the thirty-two hundred Comanches living in the river basin were killing 30,000 bison annually despite the fact that they were “confined to a district of country from which the buffalo has almost entirely disappeared.” That slaughter translates to an average of 9.3 bison per capita, nearly three more animals per person than subsistence hunting alone would have required. The extra animals, Whitfield noted, were killed for their robes, which were sold to American traders.¹⁰
Perhaps Comanches simply misread the ecological warning signs. The deterio-
ration of Comanchería’s bison ecology to near the breaking point was the result of so many factors and happened so gradually that the inevitability of the catastrophe is perceivable only in hindsight. Moreover, even when the bison numbers had become visibly depressed in the 1850s, Comanches may well have thought
that they were facing one of the cyclic drought-induced fluctuations that were an inherent part of the plains bison ecology and usually passed automatically when wetter conditions returned. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Comanche community had already survived several severe dry spells on the southern plains, and each time, even after the repeated droughts of the 1770s and 1780s, the bison herds had rebounded, sustained by their exceptional fertility. It appears, in fact, that the bison is such a prolific species that it was chronically liable to increase
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beyond the plains’ carrying capacity and that human predation functioned as a crucial preventive against unsustainable growth. In terms of game management, therefore, the main challenge for buffalo hunters had not necessarily been the scarcity but the overabundance of their prey. This might also explain why Plains Indian societies developed relatively few social taboos against overhunting and why the hunters, whose very way of life rested on the buffalo, routinely indulged in wasteful acts, such as taking only the choicest parts of the fattest cows.¹¹
This does not mean that Comanches sacrificed the bison for shortsighted eco-
nomic gain. Comanches’ failure to implement a systematic conservation policy also stemmed from a complex conflict of motives involving ecological, economic, and religious interests. When the herds began to dwindle in the 1840s, Comanches could not simply halt their commercial hunts to give the depleted
herds a respite. They had traded products of the hunt for products of the farm for generations and had grown utterly dependent on the arrangement. They needed
the imported maize, beans, and squash as much as they needed the buffalo, and to get them they had to keep dipping into the shrinking herds. Another hypo-thetically possible solution for Comanches would have been to reduce the size of their horse herds to allow more room for bison, but that option was rendered impossible by more pressing economic and military imperatives. Like bison, horses were crucial commodities that opened an access to a different but equally vital set of imports—guns, ammunition, powder, and metal. Around midcentury,
external pressures on Comanchería’s borders were mounting rapidly. Settlers
and ranchers from Texas, immigrant tribes from Indian Territory, and overland traders and settlers from the eastern United States were all gravitating toward the southern plains, compelling the Comanches to keep their horse herds large and their commercial system running—even if it meant depleting their resource base. Comanches needed the bison’s meat and robes for long-term survival, but in the short run it was more critical for them to have as many well-mounted and well-armed warriors as possible.
Finally, Comanches’ spiritual worldview may have prevented them from work-
ing out an ecological equilibrium. Most Plains Indians believed that the bison’s well-being was less a matter of human utilization than a sort of ritualistic herd management. Social checks against overhunting were an important part of their environmental policy, but they mattered less than the ceremonies, which alone could ensure that the bison would return and the herds would be renewed. An
integral part of this belief was a conviction that buffalos were supernatural in origin and therefore infinite in numbers. Colonel Richard Irving Dodge wrote that Plains Indians “firmly believed that the buffalo were produced in countless numbers in a country under the ground; that every spring the surplus swarmed,
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like bees from a hive, out of great cave-like openings to this country, which were situated somewhere in the great ‘Llano Estacado,’ or Staked Plain of Texas.”
Comanches believed that hunters’ success was dependent on prayers and cere-
monial smoking, and their oral histories relate how bison could take human
form, appear among starving Comanches, and lead them to large buffalo herds
and great kills.¹²
Faith in the supernatural origin and qualities of the buffalo may have had far-reaching consequences for how Comanches responded to the bison’s decline.
Although Comanches undoubtedly intimately understood the dynamics of
wildlife populations and the environmental and human-induced causes of bi-
son mortality, they could also believe that the bison’s abundance was ultimately a matter of the supernatural realm. These two sets of beliefs were at odds only superficially, for conservation meant maintaining a total relationship with the animals through ceremonies and rituals rather than by tracking actual numbers or densities of the species. The root of the disaster, then, was that Comanches may have realized that the bison herds were dwindling yet remained convinced that there would always be bison as long as the proper rituals were observed. Unable to envision the bison’s extinction, Comanches were also unable to envision a policy to conserve them.¹³
The collapse of the bison population was an ecological and economic catas-
trophe for the Comanches. In 1852 Horace Capron, special Indian agent in
Texas, found seven hundred Comanches on the upper Concho River “suffering
with extreme hunger, bordering upon starvation.” The chiefs said: “The game
our main dependence is killed and driven off, and we are forced into the most sterile and barren portions of it [the plains] to starve. We see nothing but extermination left for us, and we await the result with stolid indifference. Give us a country we can call our own, where we might bury our people in quiet.” Three years later, agent Whitfield reported that the disappearance of bison from the
“sterile wilds” of the upper Arkansas basin had forced the starving Comanches to eat so many horses and mules that their herds were shrinking at an alarming rate.
The Comanche economy was losing its most basic function: the people who had
enjoyed a century of almost continuous economic growth suddenly could not
fee
d themselves.¹⁴
The subsistence crisis fueled—and was in turn fueled by—an escalating com-
mercial crisis. Comanches struggled to hold on to their trading network, but its exchange links dissolved one by one. Discouraged by shrinking profits, American hide traders closed all posts along the Texas frontier by the mid-1850s. To the north, the Bents burned their Canadian River post in 1846, and after the 1849
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cholera epidemic devastated their Native clients, they blew up the great Arkansas fort. Clinging to his dream of a lasting plains emporium, William Bent built in 1853 yet another post in the Arkansas valley, thirty-eight miles downstream of the Old Fort, but the new post never reached the prosperity of its predecessor.
Bison populations had also declined dramatically on the central plains north of the Arkansas (and largely for the same reasons as in Comanchería), which enveloped the post in a massive animal graveyard. Moreover, escalating overland traffic and migration along the Arkansas corridor scared off game and destroyed plant life, enraging the resident Indians and undermining the commercial and diplomatic middle ground on which the Bents had thrived. With tensions between American traders and Indians mounting, William Bent closed his post in 1860 and with that ended almost 150 years of organized Comanche trade in the Arkansas valley.¹⁵
Comanches’ trading relations with their Native allies crumbled as well. Dur-
ing the late 1850s the Cheyennes and Arapahoes gradually deserted the deso-
late Arkansas valley and moved northward to the Platte and Smoky Hill river
valleys, where they tried to scrape a living by stealing livestock and extorting food from overland travelers. They stopped trading with the Comanches. Several Kiowa and Naishan bands also abandoned the southern plains for the cen-
tral plains, where they sought protection from an alliance with the Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Lakotas. The Wichitas, too, gradually disentangled themselves from the Comanche orbit. No longer able to subsist by the hunt, they settled by the mid-1850s on a reservation on the Brazos River, where they set up houses, cleared fields, and began raising hogs and cattle. Their trade with the Comanches was restricted to clandestine food and hide exchanges on the reservation’s fringes where the agents’ control could not reach them. But occasionally the impoverished Comanches also raided the reservation for maize, cattle, and horses, prompting many Wichitas to join the U.S. Army’s Comanche expeditions as
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