The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  But favorable geography is just potential, a historical opportunity that could be transformed into tangible power by human initiative. Among the Indians of the Great Plains, Apaches, Caddos, Wichitas, and Osages enjoyed roughly the

  same geopolitical advantages as Comanches, but they never turned those ad-

  vantages into sustained, all-pervading dominance. The main difference was cultural. As newcomers to the southern plains and immigrants used to modifying

  their lifestyles, Comanches were able to integrate innovations with less difficulty than the semi-sedentary Apache, Caddo, Wichita, and Osage agriculturists. The long migration from the central plains to the southern Rockies forced Comanches to reshape their economic strategies and social traditions, and they entered the southern plains with an elastic cultural system to which new elements could be added with relative ease.

  The most important of those elements was the horse. Spanish-introduced Barb

  horses found a nearly ideal habitat on the shortgrass southern plains—a circumstance that was not repeated anywhere else on the continental grasslands—and Comanches took full advantage of that singular fact. They colonized the entire region, expelling the Apaches to the west and south, and turned themselves into the richest horse owners of the Great Plains. That animal wealth was the foundation of Comanches’ imperial ascendancy. Horses enhanced their ability to move

  Conclusion

  347

  about and wage war, enabling them to eliminate Spain’s military edge and turn the tables on colonial expansion. Serving as both transport vehicles and valuable commodities, horses allowed the Comanches to dominate long-distance trade

  networks and extend their raiding sphere hundreds of miles south of the Río

  Grande, far beyond the grasslands, which were the natural core area of North America’s hunting-pastoral societies. With horses, Comanches could transfer information more effectively, spread out more widely, and come together more

  frequently. The equine revolution, in short, compressed time and distance, reducing the daunting expanses of the Great Plains, the Southwest, and northern Mexico to a size a single polity could manage and dominate.

  Economic ramifications were equally profound. An innovation with unfore-

  seen and unpredictable transformative power, the horse both simplified and diversified the Comanche economy. Inspired by the efficiency and sheer drama

  of mounted hunting, and encouraged by a favorable climate of mild winters

  and a long growing season, Comanches scaled down their gathering system and

  switched to specialized bison hunting and systematic horse herding. The resulting dual economy of hunting and pastoralism was the most energy-intensive production system the Great Plains had ever seen. On the simplest level, Coman-

  ches used horses as hunting tools to harness the enormous biomass stored in

  the bison herds; on a more profound level, they used the horses’ ability to convert plant life into muscle power to tap more directly into the seemingly inexhaustible pool of thermodynamic energy stored in grasses. The horse-bison-grass economy also supported a flourishing exchange economy, which gave access to

  two other crucial forms of energy: human-digestible plant energy (vegetables and cereal grains) and the products of the Europe’s mineral and chemical economy (guns, gunpowder, and metal).

  By realigning the streams of energy around them, Comanches redefined the

  realm of the possible, and the repercussions went broad and deep. The eco-

  nomic bottleneck of nomadism, the need to concentrate on a few subsistence

  activities, burst wide open. Comanches instituted a nuanced labor division that saw women specializing in food and hide production; boys in animal herding;

  and adult men in raiding, trading, and hunting. They became large-scale slave owners, who relied on forced labor to support a burgeoning market economy,

  and they reallocated labor resources in the Southwest. Horses set in motion a cycle of sustained growth, which in the end manifested itself in an exceptional demographic development. Comanche population multiplied tenfold in the

  early eighteenth century, reaching forty thousand before the first smallpox epidemic in the early 1780s, after which it hovered between twenty and thirty thousand for more than sixty years. The repeated waves of epidemics did not cut

  348

  Conclusion

  severely into Comanche numbers until the late nineteenth century, decades

  later than among the other Native nations of the southern plains.

  A large population denotes a potential for both expansive and staying power, but it could also become a liability, pushing the polity’s subunits farther apart from one another and toward independent action. Such a propensity toward fis-sure was in fact the critical weakness of many powerful Native American nations, which in the end failed to unite their many subgroups and factions against Euro-American invaders. Examples range from the late seventeenth-century Iroquois to the early nineteenth-century Cherokees, to the late nineteenth-century Cheyennes and Lakotas, to the early twentieth-century Navajos.⁶

  Comanches, too, struggled with strong centrifugal forces. The ecological constraints of nomadic pastoralism and bison hunting compelled them to live in

  relatively small bands, and the strategic challenge of defending a vast territory forced the bands to spread out across the southern plains; by the late eighteenth century, there must have been some one hundred rancherías dispersed around

  Comanchería. Yet, linked into wider associations by kinship, sodalities, and common culture, Comanches never lost their ability to operate as a community. Following a carefully synchronized yearly cycle, the scattered rancherías gathered each year for inclusive political meetings, which inserted cohesiveness into Comanche foreign policy. Local bands came together to form regional divisions, and Kotsoteka, Jupe, Yamparika, and Tenewa headmen met periodically

  in multidivisional gatherings to make strategic decisions on issues concerning the whole nation. Development toward centralized government may have remained embryonic, but Comanche leadership managed time and again to co-

  ordinate trade and diplomacy, build broad consensuses behind treaties, mobi-

  lize large interdivisional military operations, and neutralize the manipulative interferences of Euro-American state powers. Comanche chiefs were local and

  regional actors first, but periodically they also ran a larger political entity, the Comanche confederacy.

  That hybrid political organization may well have been the elemental factor

  that set the Comanches apart. Blending centralizing impulses with local pluralism, the Comanche political system was both formal and loose. It allowed co-

  ordinated decision making at the national level without compromising social

  and strategic plasticity on the local level. The numerous Comanche rancherías could react rapidly and creatively to the constantly changing circumstances

  around the expanding Comanchería, for the only internal check on their poli-

  cies was that they could be defended at the divisional and interdivisional councils. And even those grand councils, the seat of the confederacy, were lithely adaptable. They always strove toward consensus—and not through coercion but

  Conclusion

  349

  through careful (and often lengthy) mediation. Allowing for centralization without bureaucratization, local freedom without national fragmentation, and disagreement without dissolution, the Comanches’ political system largely escaped the internal disputes that disrupted or paralyzed many of the more rigidly organized Native American powers.⁷

  Taken together, Comanches possessed several of those crucial assets that gave Europeans competitive advantage and allowed them to conquer and colonize

  much of the globe after 1400. Indeed, during the eighteenth and early nine-

  teenth centuries, Comanches routinely held a strategic, tactical, technologic
al, economic, demographic, and organizational edge over their main colonial rival, New Spain. Their flexible unity, vast horse herds, cavalry skills, abundant fire-power, and ability to muster thousands of warriors were sources of dread and envy to Spanish administrators whose options were curtailed by stifling mercantilist regulations, grueling bureaucracies, an acute lack of high-quality weapons and soldiers, and uncooperative subject peoples.

  But even though Comanches managed to reverse Europe’s material, tech-

  nological, and organizational superiority, they did not try to use that advantage to create a mirror image of European imperialism. Rather than single-minded

  conquerors, they were strategic pluralists who achieved widespread dominance with policies that defy easy categorization. They relied on strategies and operations that can be easily recognized as expansionist and exploitative, but the geopolitical order they created was at once distinctly imperialistic and distinctly indigenous in nature. But what exactly was imperial and what was not about the Comanche power complex? And what accounts for the differences?

  The parallels between the Comanches and other imperial powers are compel-

  ling. The Comanche empire was built on conquest—its rise marked the obliteration of the centuries-old Apache civilization from the Great Plains—and at its peak it was a prodigious creation with an enormous, at times hemispheric reach.

  Comanches operated a trade and alliance network that spanned and integrated

  several ecological, economic, and political spheres, and they reduced many of their bordering societies and regions to tributary client states, captive markets, and extractive raiding domains. They transformed Comanchería into an ethnic

  melting pot that had spaces for a diverse array of incorporated peoples—junior allies, slaves, adopted kinfolk, and naturalized Comanches—and they projected penetrating cultural power out of their home range. Distant peoples spoke their language and emulated their economic innovations and lifestyle, and their

  norms of war, peace, violence, exchange, and retribution largely governed the negotiation of the intersocietal space on what historians have called the Spanish

  350

  Conclusion

  borderlands. A bird’s-eye view of the early nineteenth-century Southwest would have revealed an expanding Comanchería that was bustling with economic

  activity and diverse peoples, a wasting Spanish Texas that was seeping vital resources to the north through tribute payments and plunder, and a Spanish New Mexico whose eastern front was slowly dissolving into Comanchería. It would

  have revealed a sprawling continental economic network anchored to Coman-

  chería; a constant flow of animals, slaves, and technology from Spanish colonies to Comanche rancherías and trade channels; and an immense, diverging plains

  hinterland where Comanches’ power, prosperity, and products functioned as a

  gravitational cultural force.

  Staggering geographical range, core-periphery hierarchies, vast hinterlands of extraction, systematic incorporation of foreign ethnicities, dynamic multiculturalism, and penetrating cultural influence—these are the traits of an imperial power. But the Comanche power complex differed from full-blown empires in

  several important respects. Those differences were a matter of both capacity and choice, and eventually they can be traced to the very impulses that set off Comanche expansion in the first place.

  The southern plains the Comanches entered in the early eighteenth cen-

  tury was a world already destabilized by colonial intrusions. Locked into a bitter rivalry over the grasslands that separated them, the French in Louisiana and the Spaniards in New Mexico and Texas vied to chain the region’s Indians into their respective orbits through force and strategic alliances. They provided new technologies of violence—guns, iron weapons, and horses—and new stimuli for

  aggression—trade and slave markets—which turned the southern plains into a

  volatile, militarized place where violent social action was often a necessity. In this atmosphere of chronic conflict, Comanche newcomers struggled to carve

  out an existence, and their survival and eventual rise to power grew out of a series of adaptations to external pressures and perils.

  Indeed, their first imperial act, the conquest of the southern plains, was a two-front war against both the Apaches and the Spaniards, who formed a series of alliances to curb Comanche expansion and at times posed grave threats to Coman-

  che interests. Comanches’ raiding industry was fueled by the failure of colonial powers to make livestock, guns, and necessities readily available through trade, and the very heart of their empire, the great trade and alliance network, allowed Comanches to neutralize Spain’s attempts to induce dependence through monopolistic trade policies and helped them stabilize their borders at a time when the ripple effects of U.S. expansion—tribal removals, political chaos, disease—

  were beginning to destabilize the Southwest. Finally, Comanches’ explosive

  thrust into northern Mexico in the 1830s and 1840s was in part propelled by the

  Conclusion

  351

  relocation of eastern tribes across the Mississippi, the establishment of the expansionist Republic of Texas, and the need to offset disease-induced population losses with captive raiding. It often seemed that Comanches could protect their borders only by extending them.

  But the Comanche empire was more than a sum total of creative adapta-

  tions to external forces: it also originated from powerful internal dynamics, the most important of which was a new and thriving pastoral economy. Indeed, had Comanches remained specialized bison hunters, it is unlikely that they would have developed the expansionist foreign political agenda they did. The kind of intense pastoralism practiced by Comanches hinged on the availability of three resources—forage, carbohydrates, and labor—and their imperial policies were

  to a large extent an exercise in guaranteeing secure access to each of those resources. Because domestic horse and mule herds required extensive grazing

  areas, the growing pastoral economy created a voracious need for territorial expansion, which ultimately drove Comanches to colonize all the shortgrass

  plains below the Arkansas River, the ecological fault line north of which horse herding became increasingly difficult. Pastoralism also entangled Comanches

  in antagonistic relations with bordering agricultural societies. As specialized hunter-pastoralists, they needed to have a steady access to imported carbohydrate products from Spanish, Mexican, and Wichita villages, an access that often had to be secured through violent action or the threat of such action.

  But the resource Comanche pastoralists desired most was labor. They needed

  a constant supply of herders and other pastoral laborers to maintain their herds, which eventually spurred them to create several successive slaving frontiers: Apachería, New Mexico, Texas, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Durango, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosí were all at one point or another subjected to systematic Comanche slaving. Beyond overt enslavement, moreover, Comanches acquired coerced labor indirectly. By pillaging Spanish and

  Mexican settlements for domesticated, ready-to-sell horses and mules, they enforced a new, macrolevel division of labor: they specialized in the high-profit, low-labor investment activities of livestock raiding and trading and reassigned the menial task of raising the animals to other peoples. In this sense, Comanche imperialism was pronouncedly an economic enterprise. It was fueled by large-scale market production of livestock and aimed at exploiting the labor force of the surrounding urban-based societies.

  Pastoralism also gave rise to internal social dynamics that fueled external expansion. Like many other powerful pastoral societies, Comanches developed

  into a rank society in which men amassed material possessions, especially horses and slaves, to increase their family wealth and to enhance their personal pres-

  352 />
  Conclusion

  tige and political influence through gifting and advantageous marriages. Since pillage provided the fastest and broadest avenue to horses and slaves, status competition generated a forceful incentive for external aggression; in this respect, the livestock-and-slave raiding economy, a key component of the Comanche

  power complex, was a social institution. It would be an exaggeration to say that Comanches became an imperial power because of internal social pressures, but it would also be impossible to understand their expansion without acknowledg-ing the motivational thrust of those pressures.

  But while stimulating Comanches’ expansion, pastoralism also posed limita-

  tions on their power. As hunters and pastoralists reliant on a mobile and diffuse social organization, Comanches lacked both the capacity and the desire to subject other societies to direct political rule. Having built an equestrian culture that was beautifully adapted to the plains environment, they could not effectively control lands beyond the grasslands without abandoning their way of life.

  Thus, like the Mongols and other nonsedentary imperial powers, Comanches

  did not seek to absorb other polities into a single imperial framework. On the contrary, to flourish as hunters and pastoralists, they needed viable agricultural societies on their borders to guarantee a secure access to carbohydrates, livestock, and other imports through trade, theft, or tribute. That structural dependence is the key to the history of the colonial Southwest, for it explains why Comanches, even at the height of their power, preferred parasitical exploitation over replacement and incorporation.⁸

  Comanches were not, therefore, self-conscious imperialists, following a pre-

  meditated expansionist agenda, nor were they all-conquering militarists bent on subjugating other societies. They established their preeminence in stages, responding often in an ad hoc fashion to circumstances that on first inspection seem to have little to do with imperial power politics. Their actions were shaped by the political maelstrom released by European colonialism, as well as by such ostensibly nonpolitical matters as pastures, water, and social prestige. The re-sultant imperial system reflected that eclecticism. It was based on loose domination and articulated through an intersecting set of coercive and cooperative intersocietal networks aimed at keeping Comanchería protected, prosperous,