The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  20, 1849, 31st Cong., 1st sess., H. Ex. Doc. 45, 16, 45; and John W. Whitfield to Charles E. Mix, Jan.

  5, 1856, LR:OIA, Upper Arkansas Agency, 878:107. The figures are averages. If only the number of tipis is given in the source, the number of people has been derived by multiplying the number of lodges by ten. For minimum requirements, see John H. Moore, “The Dynamics of Scale in Plains Indian Ethnohistory,” Papers in Anthropology 23 (Summer 1982): 234.

  2. For horse eating, see Juan Antonio Padilla, Report on the Barbarous Indians of the Province of Texas, Dec. 27, 1819, in “Texas in 1820,” trans. Mattie Austin Hatcher, SHQ 23 (July 1919): 54; José Francisco Ruíz, Report on Indian Tribes of Texas in 1828, ed. John C. Ewers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 8; Victor Tixier, Tixier’s Travels on the Osage Prairies, ed. John Francis McDermott, trans. Albert J. Salvan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1940), 266; and Randolph B.

  Marcy, Adventure on Red River: Report on the Exploration of the Headwaters of the Red River by Captain Randolph B. Marcy and Captain G. B. McClellan, ed. Grant Foreman (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1937), 175. For losses caused by climatic and weather conditions, see Gary Clayton Anderson, The Indian Southwest, 1580–1830: Ethnogenesis and Reinvention (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 227; and James Sherow, “Workings of the Geodialectic: High Plains Indians and Their Horses in the Region of the Arkansas River Valley, 1800–1870,”

  Environmental History Review 16 (Summer 1992): 61–84.

  3. For an imaginative analysis of the dynamics and dilemmas of hunting and herding, see Elliott West, The Way to the West: Essays on the Central Plains (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), chs. 1 and 2. Also see Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” JAH 90 (Dec. 2003): 833–62.

  Notes to Pages 242–247

  421

  4. Sibley, Report, 78; Padilla, Report, 54; and Rachel Plummer, “Narrative of the Capture and Subsequent Sufferings of Mrs. Rachel Plummer, Written by Herself,” in Held Captive by Indians: Selected Narratives, 1642–1836, ed. Richard VanDerBeets (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973), 355. Quotes are from “Declaration of Felipe de Sandoval,” PT, 3:324; Pedro Vial and Francisco Xavier Chaves, Diary, in “Inside the Comanchería, 1785: The Diary of Pedro Vial and Francisco Xavier Chaves,” ed. Elizabeth A. H. John, trans. Adán Benavides, Jr., SHQ 88 (July 1994): 49; Glass, “Winter Hunt,” 67–68; John P. Sherburne, Through Indian Country to California: John P. Sherburne’s Diary of the Whipple Expedition, 1853–1854, ed. Mary McDougall Gordon (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 91; and Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, The Missions of New Mexico: A Description by Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, trans. and ed. Eleanor B. Adams and Angélico Chávez (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1956), 111.

  5. Sherow, “Workings of the Geodialectic,” 69; and West, Way to the West, 21–22.

  6. For the size of Comanche rancherías, see Vial and Chavez, Diary, 49; Report of G. W. Bonnell, reprinted in 30th Cong., 1st sess., S. Rpt. 171, 42; D. G. Burnet to H. R. Schoolcraft, Sep. 29, 1847, IPTS, 3:87; and Thomas W. Kavanagh, Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 42.

  7. Athanase de Mézières to Juan Maria Vicencio, barón de Ripperdá, July 4, 1772, ADM, 1:297.

  8. Marcy’s Route, 45. Also see Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel, The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 55–57.

  9. Marcy, Adventure, 60–61 (quote is from p. 61); and Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 263.

  10. Quote is from Sibley, Report, 79. For labor division between sexes, see Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 92–96.

  11. Marcy, Adventure, 159–60; Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the Prairies, ed. Max L. Moorhead (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), 437–38; David G. Burnet, “David G. Burnet’s Letters Describing the Comanche Indians with an Introduction by Ernest Wallace,” West Texas Historical Association Year Book 30 (1954): 132; and Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 250–67. Quote is from Berlandier, Journey to Mexico, 2:345.

  12. Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 46; and Sibley, Report, 77. Quotes are from de Mézières to the viceroy, Feb. 20, 1778, ADM, 2:175; Telegraph and Texas Register, June 16, 1838; and Theodore Ayrault Dodge, “Some American Riders,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (May 1891): 862.

  Comanche lore states that Comanches began to breed their own horses almost immediately after they had acquired their first animals. See Alice Marriott and Carol. K. Rachlin, Plains Indian Mythology (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975), 93.

  13. Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 46–50; Anderson, Indian Southwest, 227–28; and Dan Flores, Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 106.

  14. George Catlin, Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, 2 vols. (1844; reprint, New York: Dover, 1973), 2:62; and John C. Ewers, The Horse in the Blackfoot Indian Culture: With Comparative Material from Other Western Tribes, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 159 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1955), 341–42.

  15. For such tensions, see West, Way to the West, 20–37; and Dan Flores, “Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” JAH 78 (Sep. 1991): 481.

  16. Contrary to the conventional view, the bison did not migrate in large masses over great distances along established trails but instead moved short distances from one source of grass to another.

  422

  Notes to Pages 248–251

  See Frank Gilbert Roe, The North American Buffalo: A Critical Study of the Species in Its Wild State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 84, 188. Comanches seem to have been unique among other Plains Indian tribes, which typically organized only one great hunt, in the summer.

  See the various articles in Raymond J. DeMallie, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, vol.

  13, The Plains (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2001).

  17. Domingo Cabello y Robles, Responses Given by the Governor of the Province of Texas to Questions Put to Him by the Lord Commanding General of the Interior [Provinces] in an Official Letter of the 27th of January Concerning Various Conditions of the Eastern Comanches, Apr. 30, 1786, BA 17:418; H. Bailey Carroll and J. Villasana Haggard, trans., Three New Mexico Chronicles: The Exposición of Don Pedro Bautista Pino 1812; the Ojeada of Lic. Antonio Barreiro 1832; and the additions by Don José Agustín de Escudero, 1849 (Albuquerque: Quivira Society, 1942), 130; Padilla, Report, 54; Gregg, Commerce, 433–34; and Robert S. Neighbors, “Na-Ü-Ni, or Comanches of Texas; Their Traits and Beliefs, and Divisions and Intertribal Relations,” IPTS, 3:355.

  18. Manuel Merino y Moreno, Report on the tribes of pagan Indians who inhabit the borderlands of the Interior Provinces of the kingdom of New Spain . . . , in “Views from a Desk in Chihuahua: Manuel Merino’s Report on Apaches and Neighboring Nations, ca. 1804,” ed. Elizabeth A. H.

  John, trans. John Wheat, SHQ 85 (Oct. 1991): 171; Burnet, “Letters,” 128–29; and Jean Louis Berlandier, The Indians of Texas in 1830, ed. John C. Ewers, trans. Patricia Reading Leclercq (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1969), 36.

  19. José María Sánchez, “A Trip to Texas in 1828,” trans. Carlos E. Castañeda, SHQ 29 (Apr. 1926): 262; and Burnet to Schoolcraft, Sep. 29, 1847, IPTS, 3:91.

  20. Gregg, Commerce, 434; Burnet to Schoolcraft, Sep. 29, 1847, and Neighbors, “Na-Ü-Ni,” IPTS, 3:91, 355; Marcy, Adventure, 167; and Richard Irving Dodge, Our Wild Indians: Thirty-three Years’

  Personal Experience among the Red Men of the Great West (1882; reprint, New York: Archer House, 1959), 216. For sororal polygyny, see Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 138. Quote is from Berlandier, Indians, 118.

  21. Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 47, 141, 225–26, 241; Lila Wistrand Robinson and James Armagost, Comanche Dictionary and Grammar (Arlington: University of Texas at A
rlington, 1990), 76; Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State or Recollections of Old Texas (Austin: Gammel, 1900), 178; Thomas James, Three Years among the Indians and Mexicans, ed. Milo Milton Quaife (1846; reprint, New York: Citadel, 1966), 227–28; and E. Adamson Hoebel, The Political Organization and Law-ways of the Comanche Indians, American Anthropological Association Memoir 54 (Menasha, Wis.: American Anthropological Association, 1940), 49, 73. Quote is from Gregg, Commerce, 436.

  22. The cultural and ideological underpinnings of indigenous and colonial slave systems in the Southwest borderlands have been explicated most forcefully by James Brooks, who draws on the works of Claude Meillasoux, Suzanne Miers, Igor Kopytoff, and Patricia Albers. See James F.

  Brooks, “‘This Evil Extends Especially . . . to the Feminine Sex’: Negotiating Captivity on the New Mexico Borderlands,” Feminist Studies 22 (Summer 1996): 218, 300; and James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2002), 16–18, 30–37.

  23. Quotes are from Ruíz, Report, 9; “Delegation from the Comanche Nation,” in Papers Concerning Robertson’s Colony in Texas, comp. and ed. Malcolm McLean, 18 vols. (Austin: University of

  Notes to Pages 251–255

  423

  Texas Press, 1974–93), 4:428–29; Berlandier, Indians, 76; George Archibald McCall, New Mexico in 1850: A Military View, ed. Robert W. Frazier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 103; George E. Hyde, Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters, ed. Savoie Lottinville (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 69; and Waddy Thompson, Recollections of Mexico (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 172. Also see James, Three Years, 244.

  24. Berlandier, Indians, 76; and Michael L. Tate, “Comanche Captives: People between Two Worlds,”

  CO 72 (Fall 1994): 242–44. Quote is from Ruíz, Report, 13.

  25. Quotes are from Berlandier, Indians, 75–76.

  26. Plummer, “Narrative,” 340; Sarah Ann Horn, An Authentic and Thrilling Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Horn, and Her Two Children, with Mrs. Harris, by the Camanche Indians (1851; reprint, New York: Garland, 1977), 22–23; Bianca Babb, A True Story of My Capture by, and Life with the Comanche Indians, in “Every Day Seemed to be a Holiday: The Captivity of Bianca Babb,” ed. Daniel J. Gelo and Scott Zesch, SHQ 107 (July 2003): 60; Theodore Adolphus Babb, In the Bosom of the Comanches: A Thrilling Tale of Savage Indian Life, Massacre, and Captivity Truthfully Told by a Surviving Captive (Dallas: Hargreaves, 1923), 39–40; and Hugh D. Corwin, Comanche and Kiowa Captives in Oklahoma and Texas (Lawton, Okla.: Cooperative, 1959), 7.

  Quotes are from Gregg, Commerce, 436; and Marcy’s Route, 44. For resistance to disease, see Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 70.

  27. For literate captives, see Berlandier, Indians, 83. For slaves used in special industries, see Ralph Linton, “The Comanche Sun Dance,” American Anthropologist 37 (July–Sep. 1935): 421. Quotes are from Berlandier, Indians, 75; and Hyde, Life of George Bent, 69.

  28. Tixier, Travels, 270; and Plummer, “Narrative,” 340.

  29. Quotes are from Berlandier, Indians, 75–76. Also see Smithwick, Evolution, 176; Berlandier, Journey to Mexico, 2:345; Wilson T. Davidson, “A Comanche Prisoner in 1841,” SHQ 45 (Apr. 1942): 336–38; Ole T. Nystel, Lost and Found, or Three Months with the Wild Indians (Dallas: Wilmans Brothers, 1888), 6–7; Horn, Authentic and Thrilling Narrative, 15; Anderson, Indian Southwest, 240; Tate, “Comanche Prisoners,” 239; and Berlandier, Indians, 76n76. For natal alienation, see Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), esp. 5.

  30. Here I am in perfect accordance with James Brooks, who sees borderlands slavery as a fluid and multifaceted social institution embedded in kinship networks and economies. Where my view differs from Brooks’s is the emphasis on economic motives. Whereas Brooks is more interested in captives as cultural and social persons than as workers, I see Comanche slavery primarily (although not exclusively) as a system of labor exploitation geared around exchange-oriented surplus production. See Brooks, Captives and Cousins, esp. 6, 180–81. Quote is from Burnet, “Letters,”

  130.

  31. For blood bondsmen, see Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 241. For Is-sa-keep, see Marcy’s Route, 46. See also Corwin, Comanche and Kiowa Captives, 39; Tate, “Comanche Captives,”

  237–41; and Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 188–90. Comanche slavery was a distinctively patriarchal institution, but some Comanche women could gain possession of slaves as gifts from men.

  See Curtis Marez, “Signifying Spain, Becoming Comanche, Making Mexicans: Indian Captivity and the History of Chicana/o Performance,” American Quarterly 53 (June 2001): 282. Quotes are from Smithwick, Evolution, 183; and Horn, Authentic and Thrilling Narrative, 23.

  32. Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 241–42; Robinson and Armagost, Comanche Dictionary, 39;

  424

  Notes to Pages 257–263

  and Thomas Gladwin, “Comanche Kin Behavior,” American Anthropologist 50 (Jan.–Mar. 1948): 82.

  33. For Hekiyan’i, see Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 260–63 (quote is from p. 262). For captive Euro-American women considered as pure Comanches, see John Sibley, “Character of the Hietan Indians,” in Journal, ed. Flores, 81. Quotes are from Gregg, Commerce, 436; Neighbors, “Na-Ü-

  Ni,” 355; Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 187; and Berlandier, Indians, 76, 83.

  34. Berlandier, Indians, 83; Neighbors, “Na-Ü-Ni,” 356; Corwin, Comanche and Kiowa Captives, 168; and Brooks, “‘This Evil Extends,’” 284, 290. Quotes are from Berlandier, Indians, 76; and Ruíz, Report, 15.

  35. For kin terminology, see Robinson and Armagost, Comanche Dictionary, 68. For the legal rights of slaves, see Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 241. Quotes are from Burnet, “Letters,” 130; Tixier, Travels, 270; and Berlandier, Indians, 119–20.

  36. Quotes are from Burnet, “Letters,” 130; Berlandier, Indians, 76; and Sánchez, “Trip to Texas,” 263.

  Also see Hyde, Life of George Bent, 69; Burnet to Schoolcraft, Sep. 29, 1847, IPTS, 3:87; John Holland Jenkins, Recollections of Early Texas: Memoirs of John Holland Jenkins, ed. John Holmes Jenkins III (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958), 231; and Corwin, Comanche and Kiowa Captives, 105–6.

  37. Quotes are from Gregg, Commerce, 249–50. More theoretical distinctions can be slippery when applied to the Comanche slavery. For example, the early nineteenth-century Comanches seemed to be in the process of slowly transforming themselves from a “society with slaves,” where slavery was one of many labor sources, into a “slave society,” where the slavery institution formed the very core of economic production, but such possible trajectory was aborted by the collapse of Comanche power in the 1850s and 1860s.

  38. Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 39–40; Catlin, Letters, 2:67; J. C. Eldredge to Sam Houston, Dec. 8, 1843, IPTS, 1:267; Marcy, Adventure, 164; and Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 147.

  Also see Sibley, Report, 80.

  39. Quotes are from Burnet to Schoolcraft, Sep. 29, 1847, IPTS, 3:87; and Marcy, Adventure, 158. Also see Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 39; and Ralph Linton, The Study of Man: An Introduction (New York: D. Appleton, 1936), 297.

  40. For horse names, see Robinson and Armagost, Comanche Dictionary, 88; and Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 284. For bride price, see Ruíz, Report, 14; and Berlandier, Indians, 118. See also Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 177–78.

  41. For slave numbers, see Lester G. Bugbee, “The Texas Frontier, 1820–1825,” Publications of the Southern History Association 4 (Mar. 1900): 119n35. Quote is from Marcy, Adventure, 159.

  42. Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 134; and Jane Fisburne Collier, Marriage and Inequality in Classless Societies (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 32–43.

  43. For clothing and ador
nments, see Francisco Amangual, “Diary of Francisco Amangual from San Antonio to Santa Fe, March 30–May 19, 1808,” PV, 482; and Gregg, Commerce, 435. Quote is from Sibley, Report, 79–80.

  44. In piecing together these strategies of distinction, I have relied especially on Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 146–47; and Collier, Marriage and Inequality, 35–43.

  45. Ortiz to Anza, May 20, 1786, FF, 322; and Antonio Elozúa, Affidavit, Mar. 3, 1829, BA 120:513. For band names, see Burnet, “Letters,” 124.

  Notes to Pages 263–272

  425

  46. Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 131, 255, 272; and Ruíz, Report, 13.

  47. Collier, Marriage and Inequality, 32–34.

  48. Ibid., 38; Robinson and Armagost, Comanche Dictionary, 124; Anderson, Indian Southwest, 237; Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 132–33, 145; and Babb, True Story, 57.

  49. Quote is from Marcy, Adventure, 157. Gregg noted that although chiefs often had eight to ten wives, three was considered the “usual number” for “common warriors.” See Gregg, Commerce, 433–34.

  50. Quote is from Neighbors, “Na-Ü-Ni,” 353. Also see Hoebel and Wallace, Comanches, 211. For sons following their fathers to leadership positions, see Gregg, Commerce, 433.

  51. For the uncertainty of male status, see Collier, Marriage and Inequality, 48–57; and Marcy, Adventure, 158–59. For well-off polygynous former slaves, see, e.g., Corwin, Comanche and Kiowa Captives, 95, 101; and Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 261.

  52. Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 225–28, 234; Ruíz, Report, 14; Berlandier, Indians, 118; Neighbors, “Na-Ü-Ni,” 355; and Robinson and Armagost, Comanche Dictionary, 56. Face challenging can be seen as an example of what some historians have called cultural strategies of navigating or managing emotions. See, e.g., William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for a History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). More broadly, the practice of face challenging illustrates how the Comanches balanced between conflict and consensus on a societal level: their society had deep in-built contradictions and conflicts that were offset—but never eliminated—by enduring and partly reinvented traditions of social bonding and solidarity.