The Comanche Empire

by Pekka Hämäläinen

  31. For Isatai, see J. M. Haworth to Hoag, May 6, 1874, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 379:218–19; Battey, Life and Adventures, 302–3; and Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 319.

  32. For reservation problems, see E. P. Smith to Haworth, Nov. 24, 1873, Letters Sent by the Office of Indian Affairs, RG 75, Records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, M21, NAMP, 114:474; Haworth to Beede, Dec. 8, 1873, and Haworth to C. Delano, Dec. 15, 1873, RCS 47:1062–69, 1080–96; and Beede to Smith, Mar. 10, 1874, and Haworth to Hoag, Mar. 10, 1874, LR:OIA, Central Superintendency, 63:1110–11. For the Elk Creek gathering, see James Mooney, Calendar History of the Kiowa Indians (1898; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1979), 201–3; Battey, Life and Adventures, 307–8; and Wallace and Hoebel, Comanches, 319–25.

  33. For internal disputes, see Haworth to Hoag, June 8, 1874, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 379:297–99; Haworth to Smith, Sep. 1, 1874, 43d Cong., 2d sess., H. Ex. Doc. 1, pt. 5, 527–28; Kavanagh, Comanche Political History, 49–51; and William T. Hagan, Quanah Parker, Comanche Chief (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 12.

  34. G. Derek West, “The Battle of Adobe Walls,” Panhandle-Plains Historical Review 36 (1963): 16–

  29; and Mooney, Calendar History, 203.

  35. For raids, see Haley, Buffalo War, 78; and Richardson, Comanche Barrier, 382–83. For Fort Griffin, see Smits, “Frontier Army,” 332; and Isenberg, Destruction, 138. For drought, see Hagan, Quanah Parker, 13.

  36. G. K. Sanderson to post adjutant, Aug. 5 and 8, 1874, LR:OIA, Kiowa Agency, 379:856–57, 870–

  73. For the U.S. Army attacks, which later became known as the Red River War, see William H.

  Leckie, “The Red River War: 1874–1875,” Panhandle-Plains Historical Review 29 (1956): 83–91.

  37. For the battle of the Palo Duro Canyon, see Robert G. Carter, On the Border with Mackenzie, or Winning West Texas from the Comanches (New York: Antiquarian, 1961), 487–95; and Mooney, Calendar History, 210–11.

  38. Haley, Buffalo War, 181; and Haworth to Smith, Sep. 20, 1875, ARCIA, 1875, 275.

  39. J. W. Davidson to assistant adjutant general, Oct. 10, 1874, Augur to W. D. Whipple, Nov. 17, 1874, Davidson to Augur, Dec. 23, 1874, and Nelson A. Miles, “Report,” Mar. 4, 1875, in “The Indian Campaign on the Staked Plains, 1874–1875: Military Correspondence from War Department, Adjutant General’s Office, File 2815–1874,” ed. Joe F. Taylor, Panhandle-Plains Historical Review 34 (1961): 69–73, 106–7, 141, 209–13; Hagan, Quanah Parker, 14; and Hagan, United States-Comanche Relations, 112–14.

  C O N C L U S I O N . T H E S H A P E O F P O W E R

  1. The best study of the envisioning and realization of this new American empire in the West is William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), esp. 41–93.

  2. See Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Plains (Boston: Ginn, 1931); and Rupert Norval Richardson,

  Notes to Pages 344–354

  441

  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).

  3. Walter Prescott Webb, “History as High Adventure,” American Historical Review 64 (Jan. 1959): 274; and Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West (New York: Random House, 1985), 54.

  4. T. R. Fehrenbach, Comanches: The Destruction of a People (New York: Da Capo, 1974), xiv, 191, 496.

  5. For Iroquois, see Daniel K. Richter’s incisive analysis in The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), esp. 2–3; and Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 2005), esp. 3–7.

  6. See, e.g., Richter, Ordeal, 133–61; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 51–56; Tom Hatley, The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 217–18; John H. Moore, The Cheyenne Nation: A Social and Demographic History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 191–204; and Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 250–314.

  7. The most telling example of such paralyzing internal divisions is, once again, the Iroquois, who splintered in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries into three contending factions: Anglophiles, Francophiles, and neutrals. See Richter, Ordeal, 105–213.

  8. For Mongol frontier strategies, see Thomas J. Barfield, “The Shadow Empires: Imperial State Formation along the Chinese-Nomad Frontier,” in Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, ed. Susan E. Alcock, Terence N. D’Altroy, Kathleen D. Morrison, and Carla M. Sinopoli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 15–17, 24–28. For broader discussions of nomadic empires and their limitations, see Thomas D. Hall, “Role of Nomads in Core-Periphery Relations,” in Core/Periphery Relations in Precapitalist Worlds, ed. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Thomas D. Hall (Boulder: Westview, 1991), 212–39; and Nikolay N. Kradin, “Nomadism, Evolution, and World-Systems: Pastoral Societies in Theories of Historical Development,” Journal of World-Systems Research 8 (Fall 2002): 368–88.

  9. This view corresponds with Michael Mann’s notion that imperial powers are better understood as intersecting, often shifting networks of power than as rigidly structured polities. It is also compatible with Terence N. D’Altroy’s observation of empires: “The outstanding feature of preindustrial empires was the continually metamorphosing nature of relations between the central powers and the societies drawn under the imperial aegis.” See Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); and Terence N. D’Altroy, “Empires in a Wider World,” in Empires, 125.

  10. For an illuminating treatise of this historiographical tradition, see Gerald E. Poyo and Gilberto M.

  Hinojosa, “Spanish Texas and Borderlands Historiography in Transition: Implications for United States History,” JAH 75 (Sep. 1988): 393–402.

  11. For Texas’s and New Mexico’s peripheral status in the Spanish imperial system as a function of their retarded economic development, see, e.g., Thomas D. Hall, “The Río de la Plata and the Greater Southwest,” in Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern

  442

  Notes to Pages 355–360

  Edges of the Spanish Empire, ed. Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), 156–57. My argument here has been strongly influenced by Ross Frank, From Settler to Citizen: New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of Vecino Society, 1750–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), esp. 119–39.

  12. These social dynamics in New Mexico have been touched upon in the first three chapters of this book. For the dreams and failures of New Mexico’s elite, see also Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846

  (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 101–8, 176–206, 303–6; and Oakah L. Jones, Jr., Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979), 163–65.

  13. For the first in-depth study of Spanish-Ute relations and the Great Basin slave system, see Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

  14. David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 305–11; and Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–

  1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 182–84.

  15. I have made this point of Lakotas’ exceptional durability befo
re. See Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,” JAH 90 (Dec. 2003).

  16. For Osages, see Willard H. Rollings, The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992); and Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

  17. Two profoundly important studies have retold the story of the U.S. expansion into the Southwest through the reactions and choices of local communities, thus challenging the conventional top-down models and showing how the identity choices, loyalty decisions, and active and passive resistance of ordinary frontier residents influenced the process of annexation. See David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982); and Andrés Reséndez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). The role of Native peoples in the Americanization of the Southwest, by contrast, has received only meager coverage.

  18. The fallacy of thinly occupied, semi-empty North America informs even Niall Ferguson’s much-debated Colossus, which is explicitly framed as an antidote to the myth of American exceptionalism. See Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (London: Penguin, 2004), esp. 35–41.

  19. For a brilliant analysis of these dynamics, see Curtis Marez, “Signifying Spain, Becoming Comanche, Making Mexicans: Indian Captivity and the History of Chicana/o Performance,” American Quarterly 53 (June 2001): 267–307.

  20. Dan Flores, The Natural West: Environmental History of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 53. The still persisting academic and nonacademic tendency to gloss over the negative effects of Native Americans’ actions on their environments and economies generates similar distortions as the tendency to depict the Indians as victimized inno-cents of European aggression. By granting Indians only partial agency, both lines of reasoning

  Note to Page 361

  443

  oversimplify the historical experience of American Indians and, by extension, deny their histories and cultures. For a similar argument, see Richard White and William Cronon, “Ecological Change and Indian-White Relations,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 4, History of Indian-White Relations, ed. Wilcomb E. Washburn (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1989), 417.

  21. For national consolidation, see D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 3, Transcontinental America, 1850–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pts. 2 and 3; and Elliott West, “Reconstructing Race,” Western Historical Quarterly 34 (Spring 2003): 7–26.

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