The Comanche Empire
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enormous pressure on the Indian Office and its agents. Determined to extend
emancipation from the South to the Southwest, federal agents repeatedly de-
manded that the Comanches and Kiowas relinquish their captives. But instead
of eradicating slavery and captive trade, such interventions ended up supporting them. Comanches and Kiowas did turn numerous captives over to U.S. agents,
but only if they received handsome ransoms in cash or goods. As one agent despaired: “every prisoner purchased from the Indians amounts to the same as
granting them a license to go and commit the same overt act. They boastfully say that stealing white women is more of a lucrative business than stealing horses.”
The United States’ emancipation efforts had created a new outlet for slave trafficking for Comanches, and its punitive reconstruction policies in Texas opened a deep supply base: the demilitarized western part of the state lay wide open for Comanche slaving parties.⁵⁸
The struggle over the captives epitomized the collision between the Coman-
ches and the United States and precipitated its progression to open war. The persistence of slavery and captive traffic convinced U.S. policymakers that the Southwest was not big enough for both traditional borderland cultural economies and the new American system of state-sponsored, free-labor capitalism.
Perplexed and put off by their own involvement in the captive business, U.S.
authorities, most of them Civil War veterans, started to call for tougher policies and, if necessary, the extermination of the slave-trafficking Indians. In 1867, when presented with the case of a captured thirteen-year-old Texas boy for whom Comanches demanded “remuneration,” General William Tecumseh Sherman,
the commander of the U.S. Army, responded that the officials should no longer
“Submit to this practice of paying for Stolen children. It is better the Indian race be obliterated.”⁵⁹
The young Texan captive may have brought it to the surface, but Sherman’s
racial wrath had other, deeper causes. The Comanches, supposedly subjugated
reservation dwellers, still raided all across the American Southwest, frustrating the United States’ modernizing plans for the region. Near collapse in 1865, the Comanches had experienced a dramatic revival after the Civil War. Shedding
what had become a burden and keeping and modifying what was still usable,
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they pieced together a dynamic new economy from the fragments of the old
one. They repaired the crippled subsistence system by shifting to intensive pastoralism, by diversifying their bison-centered hunting economy, and by accepting U.S. annuities. Exploiting the general chaos around them—especially in the disarmed and disordered post–Civil War Texas—they forged a thriving transnational raiding-and-trading network that plugged them to the larger continental economy. They had lost too many people to re-create their early nineteenth-century hegemony, but the Comanches were expanding once more. That this
ascent could not continue is obvious only in hindsight.
The full extent of the devastation the Comanches were sowing did not be-
come clear until the spring and summer of 1867, when Texas Governor John W.
Throckmorton solicited data on Indian depredations across the state. As reports arrived in the governor’s office in Austin, an alarming picture emerged: the frontier was caving in across a three-hundred-mile stretch from the Red River to San Antonio, exposing the very center of Texas to destruction. Clay, Mon-tague, Cooke, Jack, Erath, Comanche, Coleman, Comal, and Medina counties
reported severe losses of population as settlers fled the Comanche attacks from the north and Lipan assaults from the south. Towns were crumbling, farms lay abandoned, and killings were becoming commonplace. “The murders that have
been Committed on our frontier,” one official despaired, “are so frequent that they are only noticed by their friends and acquainted as they would notice ones dying a natural death.” The cattle ranching industry whose prospects in 1860
had seemed so promising was nearly paralyzed: “nearly every drove of Cattle
that attempt to cross the plains are captured by the Indians which will cut off the Stock raisers of the frontiers from a market for their beef Cattle.” As a half century earlier, in the late Spanish and Mexican eras, Texas was disintegrating under Comanche pressure.⁶⁰
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When the Civil War ended, the Great Plains emerged as the most violent
place in North America. With peace, Americans once again became mobile,
swarming across the Mississippi and onto the Great Plains in the thousands.
For most of these westbound migrants, the plains were merely a barrier, a distance to cross on the way to greater riches beyond, and that was the problem.
The federal government made only token efforts to negotiate with the powerful nomadic Indian nations of the western plains for right-of-ways across their lands.
Overlanders became trespassers and killings became routine. In some instances Americans triggered the bloodshed; in others they stepped into pockets of long-existing violence.
The Comanche-Texas frontier was only one of many crisis points on the post-
bellum Great Plains. Friction between Indians and whites in eastern Colorado increased throughout the fall of 1864, erupting in November when Colonel
John Chivington led seven hundred Colorado militia troops to attack a non-
combatant group of Cheyennes and Arapahoes at Sand Creek, slaying some
130 men, women, and children. Enraged by the unprovoked massacre, Chey-
ennes and Arapahoes approached their Lakota allies and declared war on the
United States. They attacked wagon trains, stage stations, military posts, and ranches across the Platte River valley and burned the town of Julesburg. Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Lakota Dog Soldiers, a militant multitribal faction, shunned peace talks, and by winter 1866 the central plains were the scene of unrestrained violence. Lakotas, meanwhile, waged a war of their own against the U.S. Army, which had begun constructing unauthorized forts to secure the Bozeman Trail
that led from southeastern Wyoming to the gold camps of Montana, bisecting
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the Lakotas’ best hunting grounds in the Bighorn country. The escalating conflict of raids, reprisals, and futile attempts of treaty-making erupted into full-scale war in fall 1866, and in December Lakotas ambushed and killed Captain
William Fetterman and eighty soldiers near Fort Phil Kearny.¹
The sensational defeat, the army’s worst disaster in the West to date, propelled the Indian question into America’s national consciousness, forcing Washington to take cognizance of the turmoil on the plains. With the trauma of the Civil War still fresh, the American public demanded humanitarian rather than military solutions, and Congress created an Indian Peace Commission to negoti-
ate treaties with the Plains Indians. The commission, led by Commissioner of Indian Affairs Nathaniel Taylor, investigated the outstanding issues across the plains but soon focused on the middle section between the Platte and Arkansas rivers. The construction of the transcontinental railroad was well under way, and the Platte and Kansas river valleys were the projected settings for Union Pacific and Kansas Pacific trunk lines.
To clear this crucial belt for development, the commissioners set out to re-
locate Indian nations in two out-of-the-way reservations. The Lakotas, Northern Cheyennes, Northern Arapahoes, and Crows would share a reservation in the
Black Hills country of Dakota Territory, and the Comanches, Kiowas, Naishans, Southern Cheyennes, and Southern Arapahoes would be collected and confined in western Indian Territory. Once this segregation of the plains into Indian and non-Indian sectors was realized, the commission envisioned, a program of civilization and assimilation could c
ommence. Protected from the unsavory
Western influences in their isolated reservation crucibles, the Indians could be taught to live in fixed houses; till the soil on individual farms; and speak, read, and write English. As wards of the government, they could shed the trappings of their tribal identity and the burdens of their race and start their long individual journeys into the American mainstream.²
The rampant Comanche raiding in Texas and Indian Territory in 1867 and
the Cheyenne and Arapaho terror on the central plains made the southern reservation a priority. In October 1867, after weeks of aggressive promotion by government messengers, more than five thousand Comanches, Kiowas, Naishans,
Cheyennes, and Arapahoes congregated at Medicine Lodge Creek, sixty miles
south of Fort Larned, to meet with a U.S. peace commission. The Kwahadas
stayed out, but all other Comanche divisions were represented.
The council opened with mutual exchanges of pleasantries and promises of
goodwill, but when the talks began, the Americans’ determination to dismantle Indian nations as sovereign polities became immediately clear. The commis-
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sioners extended to the Comanches and Kiowas the familiar provisions of per-
petual peace but then pressured them to accept a 5,500-square-mile reserva-
tion in the Leased District of Indian Territory. Here the two groups would have access to physicians, blacksmiths, millers, engineers, teachers, and schools, all parts of an intensive civilization program aimed at transforming them into literate yeoman farmers within a generation. They could hunt within the bounds of their territory as long as the bison remained, but the nominal ownership of the off-reservation lands would shift to the United States. In exchange for surrendering their claim to more than 140,000 square miles, the commission offered the Comanches and Kiowas twenty-five thousand dollars per year for three decades.
The Cheyennes, Arapahoes, and Naishans received similar offers.³
The proposals outraged the Indian delegates, provoking several chiefs to de-
liver angry speeches. Yet within a week, all five nations had signed treaties. Standard explanations to this change of heart assert that the Indians failed to understand the treaty-making process and were overwhelmed by the government’s
inducements: the commissioners handed out $120,000 worth of presents, a sum
so large that it supposedly clouded the chiefs’ judgment. That political naiveté, it would seem, was personified in Paruasemena, the prominent Penateka leader who had visited Washington in 1863. Seventy-five-years old and spectacled now, the chief addressed the peace commission in a long and passionate speech,
which has entered American mythology as an archetype of Indian oratory, an
eloquent enunciation of a vanquished people’s grief over a doomed world. But underneath its esthetic splendor, the speech had a sophisticated political agenda that affected the final treaty to a degree that has not yet been realized.⁴
Paruasemena began his address by listing past grievances and bluntly turned
down the commission’s proposal: “There are things which you have said to me
which I did not like.” He reminded the commissioners of his powerful bargaining position, buttressed by the Comanche expansion into Texas after the Civil War, and emphasized his people’s military strength: “The Comanches are not weak
and blind, like pups of a dog when seven sleeps old. They are strong and far-sighted, like grown horses. We took their road [war with Texas] and we went on it. The white women cried and our women laughed.” He accepted government
annuities but rejected the idea that they were compensation for relinquished lands. Instead, he invoked the Comanche ideal of mutual affection: “When I get goods and presents I and my people feel glad, since it shows that he [the president of the United States] holds us in his eye.” Paruasemena explicitly rebuffed the reservation policy on which the land transfers rested: “You said that you wanted to put us upon a reservation, to build us houses and make us medicine lodges. I do not want them. . . . I want to die there [on the plains] and not within
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walls.” To underpin his stance, he reminded the commission of the earlier agreements that secured Comanche claims to all of the Great Plains below the Arkansas River and emphasized his people’s long tenure in the region: “I know every stream and every wood between the Rio Grande and the Arkansas. I have lived
and hunted over that country. I live like my fathers before me, and, like them, I have lived happily. When I was in Washington the Great Father told me that all the Comanche land was ours and that no one should hinder us living upon
it. So, why do you ask us to leave the rivers and the sun and the wind and live in houses.”⁵
Having rejected territorial transfers, Paruasemena made a counterproposal.
As in previous treaties, Comanches would permit limited right-of-ways across their lands in exchange for annuities: “I want no more blood upon my land to stain the grass. I want it all clear and pure, and I wish it so that all who go through among my people may find peace when they come in and leave it when they
go out.” Paruasemena’s proposal, in short, stemmed from the position that had guided Comanche policies with the United States since the early 1850s: he was willing to make minor concessions to secure annuities but categorically rejected demands that could have jeopardized the traditional Comanche way of life.
Marred by obscure meanings, mutual misconstructions, and uneasy com-
promises, the final agreement was a typical U.S.–Indian treaty. Some of the
stipulations were familiar and unambiguous. Comanches pledged to refrain
from slave raiding and attacking U.S. travelers, allow the construction of military posts, and permit the building of railroads along the Platte and Smoky Hill rivers. The question of the use and ownership of land, however, remained deeply problematic. The way the commissioners intended and interpreted the treaty,
Comanches, by accepting a reservation, had given up all claims to the lands
that had been determined as their reservation in the 1865 Little Arkansas Treaty.
On those lands they retained only a temporary hunting privilege, which would remain in effect “so long as the buffalo may range thereon in such numbers as to justify the chase.” But for Comanches, that hunting privilege was ownership.
Whereas Americans made a clear distinction between the use and ownership of
land, Comanches regarded them as inexorably linked; they saw themselves as
custodians, looking after the land for their future generations simply by living on it. As long as there were Comanches residing on a piece of land, the generational cycle would continue, and the land would remain theirs.⁶
By guaranteeing Comanches’ right to hunt and dwell on the open plains below
the Arkansas valley, the treaty seemed to sanction rather than alter the existing territorial status quo. Moreover, the treaty explicitly prohibited all white settlements “on the lands contained in the old [1865] reservation,” and Indian signa-
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tories later maintained that the commissioners had made oral promises to keep American hunters from entering the southern plains below the Arkansas River; from Comanches’ viewpoint, this must have further strengthened the notion
that the treaty secured their territorial rights. Indeed, except for Chief Tosawa, who had lived in Indian Territory since 1859, all Comanche chiefs refused to accept houses in the reservation, which suggests that they expected the reservation to be not a place of residence but a seasonal supply base. Eager to conclude the talks and move to the north to deal with the Lakotas, Northern Cheyennes, and Northern Arapahoes, the commissioners did not press the issue. The treaty articles mentioned only a “dwelling-house” for Tosawa; the other chiefs were merely expected to make the “reservation
their permanent home and . . . make no permanent settlement elsewhere.”⁷
Whatever hopes U.S. agents had entertained about Comanche submission,
they vanished almost immediately. In winter 1867–68 several thousand Coman-
ches and Kiowas visited a temporary agency in the Eureka valley near Fort Cobb in western Indian Territory to collect annuities, but only a fraction of the Indians stayed to start new lives in the reservation. The majority of the Comanches and Kiowas set out to the plains, where they spent the summer and fall raiding cattle and horses from Texas, Bosque Redondo, and Indian Territory and trading with comancheros. Losses in Texas were described as “almost incredible.” Meanwhile, Cheyenne Dog Soldiers continued their raiding war against the Americans in
Colorado and Kansas, threatening railway construction along the Platte and
Kansas valleys. With the peace process in tatters, the Senate appointed General William Tecumseh Sherman to administer Indian policy and suppress the violence. In fall 1868 Sherman authorized General Philip H. Sheridan to launch a winter campaign to drive all Cheyennes south of the Kansas line. In late December, a month after George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry destroyed a Cheyenne vil-
lage on the Washita River, the Third Cavalry attacked a Comanche camp at the Soldier Spring, killing twenty-five people. Sherman ordered the Comanche and Kiowa agency moved from Fort Cobb thirty-five miles south to Cache Creek,
where the army built a new soldier town, Fort Sill, to oversee the Indians.⁸
Then, the U.S. Indian policy shifted unexpectedly. In 1869 newly elected
President Ulysses S. Grant introduced his Peace Policy, which advocated Christian education over coercion and brought Protestant missionaries to oversee the reservation programs. Lawrie Tatum, a stanch Iowa Quaker, was put in charge
of the Comanche and Kiowa agency, and the army was removed from the reser-
vation. Troops continued to police the southern plains, but they were authorized to attack and make arrests only if the Indians had been positively identified as hostile. No arrests were allowed inside reservations without Indian agents’ ex-