The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  41. For the cancellation of annuities, see Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 394. For new military policy, see D. E. Twiggs to L. Thomas, July 6, 1858, 35th Cong., 2d sess., S. Ex. Doc. 1, pt. 2, 258. For the Battle of Little Robe Creek, see Ford to Runnels, May 22, 1858, 35th Cong., 2d sess., H. Ex. Doc. 27, 17–20.

  42. Earl Van Dorn, Report, Oct. 5, 1858, 35th Cong., 2d sess., S. Ex. Doc. 1, 272–74; and Utley, Frontiersmen in Blue, 134–35.

  43. William Bent, Report, Oct. 5, 1859, 36th Cong., 1st sess., S. Ex. Doc. 2, pt. 2, 506. For the merger, see Charles Bogy and W. R. Irvin to Lewis Bogy, Dec. 8, 1866, Documents Relating to the Negotiation of Ratified and Unratified Treaties with Various Tribes of Indians, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, T494, NAMP, 7:709–12.

  44. Anderson, Conquest of Texas, 307–24. For campaigns to exterminate the reservation Indians in Texas, see George Barnard to Runnels, May 4, 1859, TSA:RR, box 301–29, folder 18; and Southern Intelligencer, May 25, 1859.

  45. For the spread of Texas ranching, see Terry G. Jordan, North American Cattle-Ranching Frontiers: Origins, Diffusion, and Differentiation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 218–20. That the removal of Texas reservations so obviously overlapped with the expansion of the ranching system was not a coincidence; some army officers who were involved with the oblitera-tion of Texas reservations were also involved in ranch development along the Brazos valley. See, e.g., Ty Cashion, A Texas Frontier: The Clear Fork Country and Fort Griffin, 1849–1887 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 50–52.

  46. Anderson, Conquest of Texas, 327–42; Kenner, Comanchero Frontier, 141–44, 147–49, 155–56; Nicholas S. Davis to James H. Carleton, Oct. 30, 1864, Carleton to Michael Steck, Oct. 29, 1864, and Compact made and entered into between the Confederate Indian tribes and the Prairie tribes of Indians, made at Camp Napoleon, on Washita River, May 26, 1865, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 70 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1880–1901), series 1, vol. 41, pt. 1, 212–13, pt. 4, 319–20, vol. 48, pt. 2, 1102–4.

  47. For climate, see Stahle and Cleaveland, “Texas Drought History,” 65.

  48. John B. Sanborn, Report, Oct. 16, 1865, ARCIA, 1865, 528–35 (Eagle Drinking’s statement is from p. 535); and “Treaty with the Comanche and Kiowa, 1865,” in Indian Affairs, ed. Kappler, 2:892–

  95. The two Penateka signatories, Potsanaquahip and Tosawa, had only fleeting attachments to the supposedly ceded lands: Potsanaquahip’s band had been shifting toward northern Comanchería since the late 1850s, while Tosawa already resided in a reservation in Indian Territory.

  436

  Notes to Pages 314–319

  49. Richard White, “Animals and Enterprise,” in The Oxford History of the American West, ed.

  Clyde A. Milner II, Carol A. O’Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 252–53; and Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 307–8.

  50. A. B. Norton to D. N. Cooley, Sep. 28, 1866, ARCIA, 1866, 151; J. W. Throckmorton to E. M. Stanton, Aug. 5, 1867, IPTS, 4:235–36; Lorenzo Labadi to Norton, Aug. 28, 1867, in U.S. Department of the Interior, Report of the Secretary of the Interior communicating . . . information in relation to the Indian tribes of the United States, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1867), 2:214; and LaVere, Contrary Neighbors, 177–82.

  51. For pastoralism, see Whitfield to Mix, Jan. 5, 1856, LR:OIA, Upper Arkansas Agency, 878:107; and Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” JAH 90 (Dec. 2003): 844–45. For Labadi’s account, see Labadi to Norton, Aug. 28, 1867, U.S. Department of the Interior, Report, 2:214–15 (quote is from p. 215).

  52. For beef eating, see Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 69. Quote is from Hyde, Life of George Bent, 37.

  53. For Texas longhorns, see Don Worcester, The Texas Longhorn: Relic of the Past, Asset for the Future (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1987), 3–24.

  54. For American and rico involvement, see Kenner, Comanchero Frontier, 156–61, 173–74; and Brooks, Captives and Cousins, 317–18, 321.

  55. Quotes are from Philip McCusker to Thomas Murphy, Sep. 7, 1866, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 375:391; and Norton to Cooley, July 31, 1866, ARCIA, 1866, 151.

  56. For comanchero trade, see J. Evetts Haley, “The Comanchero Trade,” SHQ 38 (Jan. 1935): 161–

  64; Kenner, Comanchero Frontier, 178–79; Norton to Cooley, Sep. 28 and July 31, 1866, ARCIA, 1866, 145, 151; Patrick Henry Healy to Cooley, July 31, 1867, LR:OIA, New Mexico Superintendency, reel 554 (no frame number); Carter, On the Border with Mackenzie, 32; and Michael L.

  Tate, “Comanche Captives: People between Two Worlds,” CO 72 (Fall 1994): 250. Quote is from Vicente Romano, “Los Comanches,” interviewed by Lorin W. Brown, Apr. 6, 1937, WPA Federal Writers’ Project Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

  57. For rituals, see Romano, “Los Comanches”; and Jonathan H. Jones, A Condensed History of the Apache and Comanche Indian Tribes for Amusements and General Knowledge: Prepared from the General Conversation of Herman Lehmann, Willie Lehmann, Mrs. Mina Keyser, Mrs. A. J. Buckmeyer and Others (San Antonio: Johnson Brothers, 1899), 38 (quote is from pp. 198–99). For inflated prices, see J. Marvin Hunter, The Boy Captives: Life among the Indians (1927; reprint, New York: Garland, 1977), 58; and Rafael Chacon, Legacy of Honor: The Life of Rafael Chacón, a Nineteenth-Century New Mexican, ed. Jacqueline Dorgan Meketa (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 105–6.

  58. For annuities, see Jesse Leavenworth to Cooley, June 5, 1866, Leavenworth to L. V. Bogy, Feb.

  26, 1867, and Leavenworth to N. G. Taylor, June 18, 1867, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 375:250–51, 505–6, 604–5; and H. Douglas to assistant adjutant general, Jan. 13, 1867, 40th Cong., 1st sess., S. Ex. Doc. 13, 52–54. For ransoming and the controversy over the practice, see Throckmorton to Cooley, Nov. 5, 1866, M. Walker to C. McKeever, May 14, 1867, and G. Salmon to J. P. Newcomb, June 23, 1867, IPTS, 4:124–25, 209, 314–15; Leavenworth to Murphy, Dec. 14, 1866, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 375:398–401; Labadi to Norton, Aug. 28, 1867, U.S. Department of the Interior, Report, 2:214–15; John DuBois to Cyrus H. De Forrest, July 12, 1867, Letters Received by Headquarters, District of New Mexico, RG 393, Records of United States Army Continental Com-

  Notes to Pages 319–324

  437

  mands, M1088, NAMP, 5:356–57; and Leavenworth to Taylor, May 21, 1868, 41st Cong., 2d sess., H. Misc. Doc. 139, 6. Quotes are from J. B. Barry to Throckmorton, Mar. 16, 1867, IPTS, 4:177; and I. C. Taylor to Cooley, Sep. 30, 1866, ARCIA, 1866, 281.

  59. William Tecumseh Sherman’s endorsement on M. Walker’s report, June 25, 1867, IPTS, 4:210. For the clash between the captive trade and slave economies of the Southwest and U.S. moderniza-tion policies, see Brooks, Captives and Cousins, ch. 8.

  60. For the retreat of the Texas frontier, see W. Fanning to Throckmorton, Feb. 7, 1867, H. I. Richards to Throckmorton, Feb. 25, 1867, Barry to Throckmorton, Mar. 16, 1867, Richards to Throckmorton, Mar. 19, 1867, H. Secrest to Throckmorton, Apr. 8, 1867, I. Mullins to Throckmorton, Apr. 20, 1867, Throckmorton to Stanton, Aug. 5, 1867, and Jones to Pease, Aug. 7, 1867, IPTS, 4:154–55, 167, 177–80, 183–84, 196, 236–38. Quotes are from Barry to Throckmorton, Mar. 16, 1858, and W. C. Billingsly to D. R. Curley, June 24, 1867, IPTS, 4:177, 224.

  C H A P T E R 8 . C O L L A P S E

  1. For Sand Creek and the central plains, see Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), 290–310. For Lakotas, see Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846–1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 103–5.

  2. For the Peace Commission’s work and designs, see Francis Paul Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians, 2 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 1:488–92; and Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Front
ier, 4th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 570–71.

  3. William T. Hagan, United States–Comanche Relations: The Reservation Years (1976; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 27–43; and “Treaty with the Kiowa and Comanche, 1867,” in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, ed. Charles J. Kappler, 5 vols. (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1904), 2:977–82.

  4. For traditional interpretations, see, e.g., Billington, Westward Expansion, 571; Hagan, United States–Comanche Relations, 37; and Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970; reprint, London: Vintage, 1991), 241–42, 258.

  5. All quotes of Paruasemena’s speech are from “Proceedings of Council with the Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, and Apaches at Medicine Lodge Creek, Kansas,” Oct. 19, 1867, in Nathaniel G.

  Taylor, John B. Henderson, Samuel F. Tappan, John B. Sanborn, William S. Harney, Alfred H.

  Terry, William T. Sherman, and Christopher C. Augur, Papers Relating to Talks and Councils Held with the Indians in Dakota and Montana in the Years 1866–1869 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1910), 59–60.

  6. For the stipulations, see “Treaty with the Kiowa and Comanche,” 977–81 (quote is from p. 980).

  For Native American ideas of territoriality and land ownership in general, see Patricia Albers and Jeanne Kay, “Sharing the Land: A Study in American Indian Territoriality,” in A Cultural Geography of North American Indians, ed. Thomas E. Ross and Tyrel G. Moore (Boulder: Westview, 1987), 47–91. For Comanches in particular, see Daniel J. Gelo, “‘Comanche Land and Ever Has Been’: A Native Geography of the Nineteenth-Century Comanchería,” SHQ 103 (Jan. 2000): 273–

  307. Arrell Morgan Gibson provided a traditional—and typical—interpretation that the Medicine Lodge Treaty became, in the end, an unqualified American victory. “Despite these rhapsodic utter-

  438

  Notes to Pages 325–329

  ances” by Paruasemena and Satanta, he wrote, “the will of the commissioners prevailed, and before the council closed, the chiefs had assented to drastically reduced ranges.” See Gibson, The West in the Life of the Nation (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1976), 433. The Commission’s interpretation was also complicated by the fact that Kwahadas, who controlled most of the “ceded” lands, were not represented at the talks. Here, however, the commissioners departed from the standard U.S. agenda of denying Indians’ external sovereignty and treated Comanche signatories as representatives of sovereign polities who could negotiate for the whole of the Comanche community.

  7. Quotes are from “Treaty with the Kiowa and Comanche,” 980–81. See also Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 124; and Henry M. Stanley, “A British Journalist Reports the Medicine Lodge Council of 1867,” Kansas Historical Quarterly 33 (Autumn 1967): 289.

  8. O. H. Browning to Nathaniel G. Taylor, Dec. 19, 1867, Leavenworth to Taylor, May 21, 1868, Philip McCusker to Leavenworth, Apr. 10, 1868, McCusker to Taylor, June 5, 1868, Taylor to Browning, July 1, 1868, and L. S. Walkley to W. B. Hazen, Dec. 28, 1868, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 375:476, 859–62, 866–71, 873–75, 376:525–28; and Hagan, United States–Comanche Relations, 52–55. Quote is from McCusker to Hazen, Dec. 21, 1868, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 376:520.

  9. Prucha, Great Father, 1:479–606; and Utley, Indian Frontier, 129–55, 164–65.

  10. For reservation and off-reservation bands and relations between them, see Benjamin Grierson to W. G. Mitchell, Apr. 12 and July 10, 1870, and Lawrie Tatum to Enoch Hoag, Feb. 11, 1870, LR: OIA, Kiowa Agency, 376:572–74, 612–13, 798–99; Tatum to Hoag, May 20 and July 13, 1871, Tatum to Grierson and Ranald Mackenzie, Aug. 4, 1871, and Tatum to Francis A. Walker, May 1, 1872, RCS 34:418, 471–72, 486–87, 41:592–97; and Tatum to Hoag, Sep. 1, 1871, ARCIA, 1871, 503.

  11. For intertribal bands, see George Getty to C. McKeever, Mar. 13, 1869, Letters Sent by the 9th Military Department, the Department of New Mexico, and the District of New Mexico, RG 393, Records of United States Army Continental Commands, M1072, NAMP, 4:455–56; Grierson to assistant adjutant general, Department of the Missouri, June 14, 1870, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 376:591–92; George E. Hyde, Life of George Bent: Written from His Letters, ed. Savoie Lottinville (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 137; and Thomas W. Kavanagh, Comanche Political History: An Ethnohistorical Perspective (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 429.

  12. For Tatum’s policies, see Lawrie Tatum, Our Red Brothers and the Peace Policy of President Ulysses S. Grant (1899; reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 38–45. For Comanche strategies, see J. Marvin Hunter, The Boy Captives: Life among the Indians (1927; reprint, New York: Garland, 1977), 57–58; Tatum to Hoag, May 20, 1871, and Oct. 10, 1872, RCS 41:611, 779; and Hagan, United States–Comanche Relations, 68–73. When the governor of Texas demanded that stricter measures be adopted to suppress Comanche raiding into Texas, he specifically insisted that Comanche men should be forced to collect their annuities personally rather than through chiefs. See “Negotiations Concerning Big Tree and Satanta,” Oct. 6, 1873, IPTS, 4:352. For ransoming, see Tatum to Hoag, Aug. 19, 1870, and Mar. 31, 1873, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 376:995–

  96, 378:235–36; and Tatum to Hoag, May 12, 1871, RCS 34:410–11.

  13. Utley, Indian Frontier, 164–66; and Tatum, Our Red Brothers, 33–34. Quote is from P. H. Sheridan to E. D. Townsend, Nov. 1, 1869, 41st Cong., 2d sess., H. Ex. Doc. 1, pt. 2, 38.

  14. See Tatum to E. S. Parker, July 24, 1869, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 376:291–94; and Hagan, United States–Comanche Relations, 63–67.

  Notes to Pages 329–336

  439

  15. Quotes are from Rupert Norval Richardson, The Comanche Barrier to South Plains Settlement: A Century and a Half of Savage Resistance to the Advancing Frontier (Glendale, Calif. Arthur H.

  Clark, 1933), 352; and Cyrus Beede to Hoag, Aug. 13, 1872, LR:OIA, Central Superintendency, 61:760.

  16. Charles L. Kenner, The Comanchero Frontier: A History of New Mexican–Plains Indian Relations (1969; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 167–69, 174; William Steele, “Report of Indian Depredations,” Nov. 1, 1875, IPTS, 4:388–91; Hagan, United States–Comanche Relations, 75; Tatum to Hoag, Mar. 31, 1873, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 378:240; and C. C. Augur to assistant adjutant general, Aug. 14, 1872, 42d Cong., 3d sess., S. Ex. Doc. 7, 1.

  17. Kenner, Comanchero Frontier, 183–87; and Vicente Romano, “Los Comanches,” interviewed by Lorin W. Brown, Apr. 6, 1937, WPA Federal Writers’ Project Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. Quotes are from Herman Lehmann, Nine Years among the Indians, 1870–

  1879: The Story of the Captivity and Life of a Texan among the Indians, ed. J. Marvin Hunter (1927; reprint, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), 92; and John Hatch to assistant adjutant general, Apr. 15, 1872, cited in Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 469.

  18. Quote is from “Proceedings of Council with the Comanches,” 60.

  19. For estimates of Comanche population, see Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 471–73.

  20. For the situation in Kansas, see West, Contested Plains, 323–26.

  21. For federal officials and slave traffic, see, e.g., William L. Cady to Hoag, Sep. 9, 1870, cited in Carl Coke Rister, Border Captives: The Traffic in Prisoners by Southern Plains Indians, 1835–1875 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1940), 175. For military elite and Peace Policy, see James L.

  Haley, The Buffalo War (1976; reprint, Austin: State House, 1998), 99–100; and Utley, Indian Frontier, 164–65.

  22. Utley, Indian Frontier, 143–48; Hagan, United States–Comanche Relations, 76–77; and Tatum to Grieson and Mackenzie, Aug. 4, 1871, RCS 34:486–87.

  23. For the post–Civil War U.S. Army and its strategic options on the plains, see Sherry Marker, Plains Indian Wars, 2d ed. (New York: Facts on File, 2003), 72–79; and David D. Smits, “The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo, 1865–18
83,” Western Historical Quarterly 25 (Autumn 1994): 314–18.

  24. For the distinctiveness of the Anglo-American frontier among the expanding colonial frontiers in the West, see John Mack Faragher, “Americans, Mexicans, and Métis,” in Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 90–105.

  25. For the situation in Texas, the 1871 campaign, and the patrol system, see T. R. Fehrenbach, Comanches: The Destruction of a People (New York: Da Capo, 1974), 496–513, 518. For the September 1872 attack, see Mackenzie to assistant adjutant general, Oct. 12, 1872, LR:OIA, Central Superintendency, 62:110–14; and Tatum, Our Red Brothers, 134–35. For the Comanche move onto the reservation, see Tatum to Hoag, Dec. 9, 1872, RCS 41:839–40; Tatum to Hoag, Jan. 11, 1873, LR: OIA, Kiowa Agency, 378:129–31; and Hagan, United States–Comanche Relations, 89–90.

  26. Kenner, Comanchero Frontier, 192–202.

  27. Thomas C. Battey, The Life and Adventures of a Quaker among the Indians (1875; reprint, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 82, 105, 114, 138, 161–62 (quote is from p. 164); Hagan, United States–Comanche Relations, 93–94; and Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 434–37.

  28. “Negotiations Concerning Big Tree and Satanta,” 352–57.

  440

  Notes to Pages 336–343

  29. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 216–17; Isenberg, Destruction, 130–34; and Smits, “Frontier Army,” 326–27. Quote in the following paragraph is from Smits, “Frontier Army,” 332.

  30. Smits, “Frontier Army,” 328–32; Ty Cashion, A Texas Frontier: The Clear Fork Country and Fort Griffin, 1849–1887 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 157–76; Haley, Buffalo War, 23–28, 35–36; and Lehmann, Nine Years, 171.