The Comanche Empire
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and powerful. Comanches exercised power on an imperial scale, but they did so without adopting an imperial ideology and without building a rigid, European-style empire.⁹
Yet the Comanche empire was not merely a notional entity, a latter-day con-
cept imposed on people who did not know or identify with it. Although Coman-
ches did not think of themselves as an imperial power (at least not in the sense the term is understood today), it does not mean that we should not recognize
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them as one. Like the Atlantic world, ecological imperialism, or the French-
Algonquian middle ground on the Great Lakes, the Comanche empire was a
historical phenomenon so complex and abstract in nature and so vast in scope that contemporaries were able to grasp, at best, only fragments of it. All at once, however, Comanche imperialism was a tangible social fact with distinct genesis, demonstrable inner logic, and far-reaching influence. For the people living in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Southwest it would have been as impossible to perceive the depth and expanse of Comanche imperialism as it
would have been to escape its embrace and effects.
As it is traditionally told, the history of colonial North America is a story of European metropolitan expansion. Jamestown, Boston, Quebec, New Orleans,
and Santa Fe, themselves products of European metropolitan visions, are the engines of history, the seats of imperial imposition that dispatch agents of change—
soldiers, traders, technology, germs, weeds—from the fringes of the continent to its interior, repeatedly entangling new regions and new peoples into an expanding transatlantic web. Recent studies have corrected that picture by emphasizing the role of Native peoples in the making of the continent’s manifold frontiers, but they have not yet reenvisioned the basic story line itself: power flows in only one direction, from the imperial edges toward the indigenous interior, which merely responds to these outside forces. How does the story of the Comanche
empire fit into that model? To what extent it is it possible to create a counternar-rative of colonial America in which governing historical forces emanate from the continent’s center, Comanchería, and spread toward its margins?
Components for such a narrative are most visible on Comanchería’s southern
and western fringes, where the Comanches scraped and pounded against the
Spanish empire. Historians generally consider Spain’s colonial enterprise in the far north as an economic and religious failure that nevertheless became a geopolitical success. According to this view, New Mexico and Texas failed to deliver the minerals and neophytes that Spanish administrators expected from them,
but they did achieve their strategic objectives of shielding northern Mexican mining districts from foreign assault and supplying the empire’s more vital areas with foodstuffs and livestock.¹⁰
This interpretation is patently Eurocentric and incomplete. Northern New
Spain may have escaped European invasion, but Comanches held New Mexico
and Texas in a state of siege for decades, reducing the colonies to financial pits that drained, rather than replenished, the economic veins of the Spanish empire. Worse still, New Mexico and Texas failed utterly in their mission of protecting Mexico’s mining districts from foreign encroachments. France, Britain,
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Russia, and the United States never looted northern New Spain, but Apaches,
aggressively removed from the plains by Comanches, pillaged the silver districts of Nueva Vizcaya and Coahuila virtually at will. Gran Apachería, which in the late eighteenth century covered an enormous segment of the interior provinces, was essentially a spin-off of Comanche expansion. Then, in the early nineteenth century, Comanches themselves extended their raiding economy south of the
Río Grande, inflicting severe damage on the silver districts of San Luis Potosí, Parral, and Zacatecas. In the arena of Euro-American imperial rivalry, Texas and New Mexico were moderate strategic successes; outside of it, they were dismal failures.
The economic structure of the Spanish Far North, too, was heavily shaped
by Comanche policies. The arrested economic development of Texas and New
Mexico is often seen as an outcome of their status as peripheral provinces in the Spanish imperial system, but a more exact explanation is that Texas and New
Mexico were peripheries of two core regions. One, central Mexico, furnished them with men and money—but not enough to lift them to the imperial heights
of, say, the Río de la Plata region. The other, Comanchería, drained them
through theft and tribute, but only to the extent that their survival was not jeopardized. It was this position as dual peripheries that gave Texas and New Mexico their distinctive mixed character of underdevelopment and resilience. Similarly, any hopes of prosperity in the Spanish Far North were contingent on attaining the support of both the central Mexican and the Comanche cores. The most
dramatic example of this is late Bourbon-era New Mexico. A vigorous crown
program of economic and administrative reforms revitalized the damaged prov-
ince by easing its tax load and by promoting transprovincial commerce, but New Mexico’s recovery had another, equally important, source: the colonists established a peace with Comanches, which, after decades of paralyzing violence, allowed New Mexicans to channel their energy into state-building, long-distance trade, craft production, and animal herding.¹¹
Comanche influence was more than macroscale economic abstractions; the
people of northern New Spain felt it in their everyday lives, for the very fabric of their societies bore an indelible stamp of Comanche power. Texas, with its access to arable lands circumscribed by Comanche raiders, did not develop a
broad-based agricultural economy until the mid-nineteenth century, evolving
instead into a socially stratified ranching economy dominated by a handful of elite families. New Mexico, both dependent on and exploited by Comanches,
found itself on a trajectory that was in many ways unique among Spain’s North American colonies. Its social composition grew increasingly volatile in the eighteenth century as people shifted around the province, struggling to find respite
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from Comanche raids or, alternatively, to secure access to Comanche markets.
The feudal tradition of New Spain, embodied by powerful local landlords, dissolved in the war-ridden kingdom, where the access to arable land was restricted by the fear of Comanche raids, where haciendas remained relatively small, and where officials continuously issued new village grants to resettle lands vacated by war.
The overwhelming presence of Comanches also promoted widespread ethnic
mixing and social democratization in New Mexico. Pulled together by shared
anxieties over Comanche power politics, Spanish colonists and Pueblo Indi-
ans embraced in the eighteenth century a mode of coexistence that manifested itself in an increasing number of intermarriages and (officially forbidden) mixed settlements. That incipient ethnic accommodation crumbled during the security and prosperity of the late Bourbon era, when Spanish settlers distanced themselves from Pueblo Indians, and yet efforts to Hispanize all of New Mexico were destined to fail: the peace with the Comanches spawned numerous genízaro villages on New Mexico’s eastern perimeter, and these communities began to
gravitate away from Santa Fe’s orbit and toward Comanchería. Struggling under Comanchería’s shadow, the Spaniards failed in their endeavors to build a new Mexico, a centralized Spanish-controlled colonial society, in New Mexico.¹²
If looked at closely, Comanche influence extended far beyond the confines of New Mexico. In the late seventeenth century, before the arrival of the Comanches, it seemed that the Utes were poised to be the dominant Native people
in the Southwest as
they had obtained horses early and gained a military edge over neighboring communities. Utes’ prospects rose further after 1700 when
they allied with Comanche newcomers and expanded onto the southern plains,
but that arrangement backfired at midcentury when the increasingly powerful
Comanches turned against their allies, banished them from the plains, and drove them back into the mountains. Dislodged and vulnerable, Utes courted another group threatened by Comanche expansion, the Spaniards, and drew them into
a tight union that lasted through the Spanish colonial era. A century after Iroquois expansion had forced Algonquin Indians and the French to enter a middle ground in the Great Lakes region, Comanche expansion spawned an embryonic common ground between the Utes and northwestern New Mexico. Pushed
together by common fear of the Comanches, who had rendered them in a state
of roughly equal weakness, Utes and Spaniards fashioned a consensual alliance based on ritualistic diplomacy, active trade, and mutual accommodations. The alliance became the cornerstone of New Mexico’s stability in the northwest and boosted Ute fortunes, but it had a darker side. Denied access to the plains and its marketable resources by the emergent Comanche empire, Utes embarked
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on vigorous slave raiding across the Great Basin, capturing and commodifying countless Paiute and Shoshone women and children whose labor, souls, and
flesh were in high demand in New Mexico. This slave raiding-and-trading sys-
tem, which endured well into the nineteenth century, is one of the most trau-matic corollaries of Comanche imperialism.¹³
If the histories of northern New Spain or the Intermountain West cannot be
properly understood without Comanches at their center, neither can that of
North America’s continental grasslands. If Comanches changed the history of
the Southwest, northern Mexico, or the Great Basin by rocking the foundations of Spain’s colonial project, they altered the history of the Great Plains through their cultural ingenuity and drawing power. Facing northward, Comanchería was the cradle of the Plains Indian horse culture, the rise of which marked a watershed event in the history of the early West. The three-thousand-mile northward spread of horses and horse use from central Mexico to the Canadian Shield has often been cited as the prime example of Spanish colonialism’s deep transforming influence in the Americas.¹⁴ What has been less clearly understood is how profoundly the spread of equestrianism was altered and amplified by Comanches, who, by virtue of their location near Spanish livestock depots, pioneered a horse-centered way of life that swept the North American grasslands in the eighteenth century.
The horse’s spread across the Native American Great Plains was not simply
a story of people eagerly embracing an innovation of exhilarating possibilities; it was also a process of conscious imitation under duress. When Comanches
reinvented themselves as mounted hunters and nomadic pastoralists in the early years of the eighteenth century, they set a new standard for military strength and material wealth on the plains, triggering an extended sequence of cultural replication and reinvention. As horses and the knowledge of their use spread northward from Comanchería, each plains tribe in its turn was forced to become mounted to avoid military and economic marginalization. Equestrianism
exploded across the grasslands, revolutionizing existing economic, social, political, and ecological patterns and deflecting the region’s history onto a new path.
By 1800, the western shortgrass plains had become a stage for a new and wide-ranging civilization, a spectrum of variously successful equestrian societies that were all replicas of the model established by the Comanches. The most powerful and enduring of those societies, the Lakotas, repressed many Native groups of the northern plains under their rule and resisted the United States’ conquest of the northern plains until the 1880s.¹⁵
In the north, south, and west, then, the Comanche sphere of influence ex-
tended, with varying degrees, from the Canadian plains to New Mexico, Texas,
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and northern Mexico. On the eastern front, in contrast, the impact would seem have been much shallower. Comanches’ raiding sphere did not extend east of
Nacogdoches, and they did not visit Louisiana for commerce or diplomacy.
For the eighteenth-century French and Spanish colonists along the Mississippi valley, Comanches were a rather abstract source of livestock, slaves, and bison robes; their goods may have moved eastward, but their historical influence did not. This is consistent with our tendency to view American history as a westward-flowing process, which makes anything coming from the west—people, commodities, historical influences—seem irrelevant or misguided at best. Early
American history moves latitudinally and in only one direction: from eastern power and dynamism toward western weakness and passivity.
Seen from Comanchería, such a view appears wildly skewed. Before 1800
Comanches formed a daunting barrier against westward expansion—not of
European colonial powers but of Osages, the most dominant Native people of
the eastern Great Plains. Empowered by their privileged access to the French markets along the Mississippi valley, Osages launched in the early eighteenth century a vigorous conquering campaign to expand their territory and hunting grounds beyond a core region between the lower Missouri and Arkansas rivers.
In the west, however, that campaign crashed against the rising Comanche em-
pire, which stopped Osages in their tracks and forced them to redirect their territorial ambitions from the west to the south and north. This compression and reorientation of Osage expansion turned the southeastern prairies, the long but narrow belt between the Mississippi valley and the ninety-seventh meridian,
into a congested and contested ground, where Osage policies often determined the form and content of relations and where European colonists found little
maneuvering space.¹⁶
By confining the expansionist Osages to the east, the Comanche empire pro-
foundly shaped the history of European colonialism along the Mississippi valley.
Yet all of this would seem to lose significance in 1803, when the Louisiana Purchase launched the United States’ expansion into the Southwest. From then on, we assume, the history of the Southwest is defined by the overpowering westward thrust of the United States and the futile resistance and gradual retreat of Spain and Mexico. But again, the first impression is deceptive. The United States did not push into a power vacuum in the Southwest but rather into the expanding
imperial realm of the Comanches. In fact, United States and Comanche expan-
sions intersected in complex and unexpected ways. New Mexico’s reorientation toward the United States economy after 1821 was accelerated by the simultaneous deterioration of north-south economic lifelines under Comanche attacks in northern Mexico; cut off from the south by Indian aggression, New Mexico
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turned its back on Mexico City and looked to the east for profits and protection.
This sweeping reorientation was not a new development but the intensification of a much older one. New Mexico had gravitated toward the east, toward the dynamic economic and political power of Comanchería, since the late eighteenth century when Bourbon officials opened the province for Comanches’ commerce
and, as it turned out, their political and cultural influence. By the time the United States began to exert its economic influence over New Mexico in the early 1820s, its inhabitants had already began to question their loyalties to Mexico.
If Mexico City was losing its hold on New Mexico by the time of Mexico’s
independence, to all intents and purposes it lost Texas in 1825, when the state of Coahuila y Texas opened its borders to American immigrants. That momentous
decision was influenc
ed by several factors, but key among them was an acute
need to recolonize the border regions of Texas that had become almost vacant under Comanche raiding during the early nineteenth century. It was a desperate act aimed at turning the westering Americans from imperial forerunners into
Mexican subjects and shielding the decaying frontier against Comanche vio-
lence, and it failed on both accounts. Texas was flooded by Anglo-Americans
who stayed clear of Comanche raiding routes but used Mexico’s failure to suppress the raids as a political pretext for declaring the department an independent republic.
Mexico City’s failure to restrain Comanches also thwarted its hopes to reconquer Texas. During the years following the Texas revolt, Comanches extended
their stock-and-slave raiding operations deep into northern Mexico, wreaking havoc in seven departments. Not only did the recapture of Texas become impossible, but the entire northern part of the nation began to slip out of Mexico City’s grip. Citizens across all the north were perturbed by the federal government’s inability—and apparent unwillingness—to curb Comanche raids, and
they grew increasingly alienated from Mexico City and its nation-building
project. The linkages between American and Comanche expansions climaxed
in the Mexican-American War. When the U.S. Army marched south of the Río
Grande in 1846, Comanches had already turned vast segments of Mexico’s
heartland into an economically underdeveloped, politically fragmented, and
psychologically shattered world that was ripe for conquest by Americans, who, in a sense, came to occupy what was a vanquished hinterland of Greater Comanchería. In northern Mexico, U.S. imperialism was the direct heir to Comanche imperialism.¹⁷
The notion that Comanche imperialism paved the way for the United States’
takeover of the Southwest forces us not only to rethink the process of American expansion but also to reconsider what that expansion meant and how it should