The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  scouts and auxiliaries.¹⁶

  Comanche relations with the removed tribes degenerated more rapidly and

  violently. As the bison herds dwindled, Comanches and their allies grew in-

  creasingly intolerant of the westbound hunting parties from Indian Territory.

  Then, in June 1854, the United States Office of Indian Affairs and immigrant Indians concluded a series of treaties, which opened the Kansas Territory for white settlement and removed thousands of Indians to the central and western Indian Territory, at the very edge of Comanchería. Full-scale conflict erupted soon after when fifteen hundred Comanches, Kiowas, Naishans, Wichitas, and

  Osages joined their forces “to ‘ wipe out’ all frontier Indians they could find on the plains.” The massive force descended the Smoky Hill River toward Indian

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  Territory but suffered a crushing defeat against a much smaller group of Sauks and Foxes, who killed more than one hundred warriors with their American

  rifles. From thereon, both the removed tribes and Comanches claimed the re-

  maining buffalo as their own, and the border zone between them—essentially

  the entire western part of present-day Oklahoma between the 98th and 100th

  meridians—became a bloody ground. By 1855, only months after their failed

  joint effort to vanquish immigrant Indians, relations between Comanches and

  Osages degenerated into violence over hunting privileges.¹⁷

  By the late 1850s, the great Comanche trading empire had dissolved. The

  comanchero trade was the only remaining facet of the once-imposing exchange

  system, and even that thread was unraveling. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo obligated the United States to prevent Indian forays into Mexico, to suppress cross-border contraband trade, and to reclaim and repatriate Mexican captives held by Indians. But policing the long border proved militarily impossible—or simply too expensive—and federal officials instead moved to remove the economic impetus behind Comanche raids by eliminating the markets for spoils. In 1850 James S. Calhoun, the Indian agent and future governor of New Mexico,

  instituted a strict license system for the comancheros, making them pay expensive fees for trade permits and prohibiting them from trafficking in munitions.

  Also, to both fulfill the United States’ treaty obligations to Mexico and cut into comanchero profits, Calhoun sent emissaries into Comanchería to buy all Mexican captives they could find. By 1851 the agents had redeemed some twenty

  Mexican captives, making a dent in comanchero business.¹⁸

  In this context of mounting uncertainty, disconcerting news reached Santa

  Fe: one of the head chiefs of the Comanche rancherías residing in northern

  Mexico had concluded a pact with the Mexican government and “appeared to

  be very solicitous of forming a League with the other wild tribes of Texas & New Mexico for the alleged purpose of uniting them with the Mexicans, to expel, or exterminate, the Americans now in this Country.” That Comanche chief, U.S.

  officials feared, was recruiting Pueblo Indians to join the coalition. The grand alliance dissolved before any action was taken, but its possibility alarmed American officials in New Mexico, who lived in constant fear of a general borderlands rebellion. Rather than a sign of broad intercultural anti-American stance, however, the aborted Comanche–New Mexican–Mexican alliance may have been

  an attempt to mend what was already crumbling.¹⁹

  In 1853 Comanches and Kiowas clashed violently with their longtime New

  Mexican allies over hunting rights on the Llano Estacado. The Indians had

  tolerated the hunting operations of the New Mexican ciboleros on their territory for generations, but the decline of the bison herds changed their attitude.

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  Comanches and Kiowas began to demand the ciboleros cut back the numbers

  of pack animals they took on their massive expeditions, which could include as many as 50 wagons; 150 men, women, and children; and 500 horses and mules.

  Considering the hunts as an ancient, undeniable privilege, the ciboleros refused to comply, and overt hostilities erupted. Several ciboleros were killed, and violence crept into comanchero trade. Tensions ran high along the Comanche–

  New Mexican border for the rest of the 1850s, nearly stifling the trade that for three generations had fastened eastern New Mexico to Comanchería.²⁰

  The decline of comanchero commerce left the Comanches weakened and

  impoverished. Their access to guns, shot, and powder was severely compro-

  mised, but even more troubling, they had lost their only reliable source of maize and other garden produce. It was a disaster for a people already suffering from serious deficiencies of protein and fat, and by the late 1850s the Comanches were vulnerable to several types of malnutrition, including kwashiorkor (protein deficiency, especially in infants), marasmus (combined protein and calorie deficiency), and ketoacidosis (severe carbohydrate deficiency, especially in pregnant women). Serious malnutrition alone would have pushed the Comanche

  population into a decline, but a combination of starvation and disease turned the decline into a veritable demographic collapse. In 1848, three years into a dry spell, smallpox ravaged Comanchería, and in 1849 a virulent cholera epidemic introduced by California-bound overlanders carried away uncounted numbers,

  including many prominent leaders. And finally in 1862, the seventeenth year of famine, smallpox struck again. In previous decades, the Comanche population

  had repeatedly rebounded from epidemic losses, but malnutrition and the con-

  sequent lowering of fertility now made such recoveries impossible.²¹

  Comanches fought desperately to avert catastrophe. They cut back their traf-

  fic in captives and instead incorporated them into their families. Slave raids into Mexico, one observer wrote in 1853, “tend to keep up the numbers of the tribe,”

  because most captives were now made “husbands of their daughters and mothers of their children.” Comanches also raided outlying frontier settlements for corn, sheep, pigs, and cattle or, alternatively, promised to refrain from plundering if New Mexicans stopped hunting buffalo on the plains. Whereas earlier the appearance of Comanche war parties on colonial frontiers had invariably meant

  livestock and captive raids, the parties now left the settlers in peace if given beef, fruit, or clothing. Comanches tried to fend off hunger by hunting large numbers of deer, elks, and bear, and some bands even began to keep sheep and goats.

  Horseflesh, previously strictly an emergency food, became a staple, and cultural norms were relaxed to broaden the subsistence base. Fish and fowl were originally considered taboo, but from midcentury on Comanches routinely ate both,

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  especially during the dietary nadir in February and March, the season “when

  babies cry for food.” Such efforts may have slowed the population decline, but they did not prevent it. In the late 1840s there may have been as many as twenty thousand Comanches, but by the mid-1850s only a half or less of that number

  remained.²²

  The 1850s, a decade defined by starvation and decline in Comanchería, was a

  period of explosive growth in the United States. Railroads, factories, mechanized agriculture, and soaring immigration ushered the nation into an era of capitalist industrialism that both demanded and supported continued expansion.

  The United States in 1850 was a continental empire stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but its vast midsection, the Great Plains and the Intermountain West, was largely beyond reach and exploitation—a seemingly disordered, uncontainable world of grasslands, deserts, buffalos, and Indians. The federal government was undecided as to what to do with this newly claimed inland empire, for expansion had by now become inseparable from the far more volatile pr
oblems of slavery, sectionalism, and states’ rights. But while their leaders wavered, Americans pressed ahead, pouring across the Mississippi valley in the search of new lands and riches.

  And so, in an hour of profound crisis, the Comanches faced an invasion they

  could neither stop nor escape. The new American wealth and power generated

  in the East seeped into the Southwest with the hundreds of thousands of settlers, ranchers, miners, merchants, traders, freighters, soldiers, and federal officials who streamed into Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas after the conclusion of the Mexican-American War. This human surge marked a dreadful

  turn for the Comanches, who were already struggling with too many problems.

  Starving and weakened, they were besieged by the encroaching frontiers of an expanding empire that wielded unforeseen military and economic power. In the space of just a few years, their hegemony over the southern plains collapsed.

  The invasion of Comanchería began with the first stage in America’s west-

  ward expansion: overland migration. In 1849 some three thousand hopefuls

  rushing to the California goldfields blazed an overland route along the Canadian River, where they found more grass, timber, and fresh water than along

  its heavily trafficked northern counterpart, the Santa Fe Trail. Weakened by a cholera epidemic, Comanches were powerless to stop the encroachment, which

  left in its wake a swathe of trodden vegetation and polluted water holes in the heart of northern Comanchería. The situation was becoming even worse in the

  Arkansas valley, where overland freighting along the Santa Fe Trail matured into a big business. In 1853, when some six hundred wagons were expected to move

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  between Missouri and New Mexico, the U.S. government dispatched Thomas

  Fitzpatrick, the famous fur trapper, guide, and Indian agent, to meet with the Comanches and their allies to secure the crucial artery with treaties.²³

  Six Yamparika and Kotsoteka rancherías were present at Fort Atkinson in

  southwestern Kansas when agent Fitzpatrick laid down demands: the Indians

  were asked to allow free travel through their territories and permit the army to mark out roads and establish military and other posts on their lands. In line with the United States’ treaty obligations to Mexico, Fitzpatrick also demanded that Comanches stop raids into Mexico and release all Mexican captives. Palpably

  appalled, the Indians retorted that forts and roads destroy timber, drive off game, and impede their mobility, and Comanches “positively and distinctly” refused to surrender any captives, insisting that they had been absorbed into their kinship networks and had “become a part of their tribe . . . identical with them in all their modes of life.” Yet, eventually, all chiefs signed the 1853 treaty, evidently to get access to the guns and other treaty inducements that brought immediate relief to their misery.²⁴

  For several years after the treaty, Comanches collected flour, rice, bread, blankets, flintlock guns, and other federal supplies along the Arkansas and traded robes and skins for food and utensils with licensed American traders. They extorted a toll, usually in bread, sugar, and coffee, from overlanders along the river valley, but generally refrained from attacking the immigrant trains. But in 1858, when gold was discovered in Colorado, the arrangement fell apart. In spring 1859

  tens of thousands of migrants poured through the Arkansas valley to the gold fields around Denver. Unlike the Santa Fe traders, who mostly took the Cimarron Cutoff to New Mexico, the goldseekers followed the Arkansas all the way

  to the Front Range, devastating the last ecologically viable section of the valley.

  The gold rush was largely over by 1860, but the upper Arkansas valley, once a haven for Comanches and their horses, had become a barren dust highway.²⁵

  Meanwhile on northern Comanchería’s eastern front, tribes from Indian Ter-

  ritory continued their hunting excursions up the Canadian, Washita, Red, and Pease rivers, pushing through the thinned Comanche-Kiowa-Naishan cordon.

  Ravaged by hunger, both sides needed the bison so desperately that the rivalry failed to create a neutral ground between them and northwestern Comanchería

  became a vast killing zone. “If the hunters of these tribes [Comanches, Kiowas, and Naishans] venture into the region of the buffalo,” U.S. Indian agent Whitfield wrote in 1855, “they are liable at any moment to come into contact with the border Indians, the Osages, Delawares, and others, who claim as their own hunting grounds all the lands over which the buffalo now roams.” Unable to hold

  back their more numerous and better-armed enemies, Comanches retreated

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  eastward, surrendering much of what today is western Oklahoma and the Texas

  Panhandle. In 1855 some Comanche bands from Texas arrived in Santa Fe,

  where they asked the governor for a refuge on the New Mexico border, for “they had been driven from their own Country by the Osages.”²⁶

  But pressure was increasing along the Comanche–New Mexico border as

  well. In the mid-1850s American newcomers established several sheep and cattle ranches along the upper Canadian and Pecos valleys, regions that Comanches

  regarded as theirs. In 1858 Comanches burned a ranch on the Canadian and sent a warning to Santa Fe that no settlements would be allowed east of the Gallinas River, the traditional eastern limit of New Mexico’s genízaro settlements. The following year, however, U.S. officials dispatched a surveying party to chart the upper Canadian valley for settlement. Comanches captured the surveyors and,

  after an aborted meeting with U.S. agents, launched a series of attacks along the Santa Fe Trail and across New Mexico’s eastern front. Unlike before, they struck indiscriminately, attacking American, Hispanic, and Pueblo ranches in New Mexico. The U.S. Army in turn sent several expeditions into northern Comanchería to chase and destroy Comanche camps. In May 1861 Comanches

  made a treaty with federal agents in New Mexico, but the armistice was only

  days old when Comanches attacked the settlements in Chaperito on the Galli-

  nas River.²⁷

  While Comanchería’s borders in the north, east, and west were becoming

  increasingly porous, its southern border with Texas burst wide open. In mid-

  century, Texas was experiencing dramatic growth, which in many ways was an

  extension of the cotton-driven economic boom in the American South. Settlers from Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, and Missouri flooded into Texas, whose population swelled from 140,000 in 1847 to 210,000 in 1850

  and more than 600,000 in 1860. A new slavery-based cotton plantation system

  flourished along the broad, muddy rivers of the coastal plains, and corn farming thrived in the rich soil of blackland prairies. The cattle industry expanded from south Texas toward the northern frontier, fueled by livestock markets in New Orleans, the West Indies, and California. This vibrant growth, most Anglo-Texans believed, was restrained only by the fact that a half of the state was still under Comanche control, beyond reach and use. A collision was inevitable.

  Texas launched a forceful northward expansion, and the boundary line Coman-

  ches and Texans had so carefully constructed in the mid-1840s to separate the two powers became a dead letter.²⁸

  The first phase of Texas expansion was led by newly arrived German immi-

  grants. In 1842 a private immigration company run by a group of Prussian entrepreneurs secured from the Republic of Texas a three-million-acre grant between

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  the Llano and Colorado rivers, all of it on Comanche range, and launched a

  vigorous recruitment campaign. By 1845 several thousand Germans had ar-

  rived on the Gulf Coast, only to find that the immigration company had gone

  bankrupt. Ravaged by hunger and typhus o
n the humid coast, the would-be

  colonists began an arduous migration to the north and in 1846 built Freder-

  icksburg within Comanchería’s southern border. Southern Comanches, whom

  Anglo-Americans knew as Penatekas (Honey Eaters), killed the first German

  surveyors, but in 1847 the colonists managed to negotiate a treaty with Penateka leaders, who opened their southern lands for settlement in exchange for three thousand dollars’ worth of presents. In the late 1840s and 1850s, as impoverished Penatekas frequented Fredericksburg to barter their meager goods for food and merchandise, thousands of Germans settled on Comanche territory. By 1860, a

  large segment of southern Comanchería had become Texas-German farming

  and grazing range.²⁹

  To the east, the Penatekas faced a more disorganized—and more threat-

  ening—invasion from central Texas. Since the annexation, Americans had

  streamed into Texas in thousands, seeking lands that the “giant arms of the

  United States” would soon vacate of Indians. Settlers began to infringe upon Comanche lands across a wide zone between the San Antonio and Trinity rivers, advancing under the protection of Texas Rangers who brought the weapons, experience, and hardiness they had acquired during the Mexican-American War

  to the Comanche frontier. To control the disorderly immigration and to shield Texas from Comanches and other plains nations, the U.S. Army built seven

  garrisons between the Trinity River and the Río Grande. Rather than keeping

  the Texans and the Indians apart, however, the protective presence of the forts encouraged settlers to press on farther to the west and north. By 1850 the frontier had pushed beyond the military cordon to the arched perimeter of the Balcones Escarpment, impinging on Penateka range.³⁰ The result was the first full-blown territorial war between Comanches and Euro-Americans.