Pilgrims sat in the shade of the tent eating tacos and menudo. Nuns had set up tables and were selling trinkets and rosaries and crucifixes, small icons of saints and pamphlets proclaiming that the cult of Santa Muerte, a figure of veneration among the gangs and the desperately poor inhabitants of the colonias, is not a true Catholic cult. The bishops of El Paso and Las Cruces gathered their processions under colorful standards and set out to walk the Vía Crucis, the Way of the Cross. Everyone prayed and sang en el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo, lingering at the shrine of Saint Anthony of Padua, and slowly proceeded through the stations, past the Vía Matris and Our Lady of Fatima, reverently reversing the course of my earlier descent, in a formal peripatetic Mass, ending finally at the high altar of Cristo Rey, where two profane angels make eternal love under six coats of white paint.
—
The day after I came down from the high altar at Mount Cristo Rey, I met up with Agent Jake Nuñez for a tour of the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector. Nuñez took me to Monument 3, on the mesa looking down at Colonia Anapra, just across from Mount Cristo Rey. As we drove, he told me about the sector, with its twenty-seven hundred agents monitoring 125,500 square miles. I asked about surveillance systems, and he told me that RVSS cameras were used only in the urban areas. Field agents also carried handheld and tripod-mounted night vision equipment, more or less the same kit I’d encountered in the Rio Grande valley. We talked about response times and how agents reacted to incursions. Responses in the city were measured in seconds and minutes. Border runners could scale the fences in about a minute using ladders or screwdrivers and hurry toward shops and crowds, hoping to quickly blend in. Out in the rural areas, and in the remote portions of the sector, the agents relied on ground sensors to alert them to incursions. Smugglers or migrants could walk for hours or days, in extreme temperatures, before they reached their destinations, and sometimes they got into trouble, from exposure or accidents, such as falling down a mine shaft. Nuñez described the Border Patrol Search, Trauma, and Rescue teams and how they operate. He spoke of ultralight aircraft that fly across the border and drop two-hundred- to three-hundred-pound bundles of drugs. It’s so dark out there, he said, sometimes you just hear a buzz and know it’s an ultralight. We talked about mobile surveillance systems, the most advanced scope trucks, with their ground radar, and the radar-equipped aerostats that try to detect low-flying aircraft so that agents in the field can intercept the trucks that hurry to pick up the contraband they drop.
We stood next to the new border fence, and Nuñez pointed out that not too many years ago the only barrier here had been two strands of barbed wire strung along crooked fence posts. For more than a hundred years that was all we really needed. Remnants of the old wire rusted in the thick powdery dust. Monument 3, covered with graffiti, was just out of reach, on the other side of the fence. We drove back to Monument 1, in Madero Plaza. Rudy Garcia had brought me here once before, and I had stepped briefly across the international boundary. This time, accompanied by a Border Patrol agent, I stayed firmly on the U.S. side. We talked about ASARCO and Smeltertown, and Nuñez told me his great-grandfather had worked at the smelter and lived in Smeltertown. Two of his grandparents were buried in the Smeltertown cemetery.
Later we drove along the river and the irrigation canals that radiate out from it, and Nuñez pointed out the sites of gun battles between the cartels and Mexican forces and told of stray bullets striking buildings at the university and El Paso’s city hall. We walked through a processing center, and young men in cells stared blankly at me as I walked past. They were migrants, not smugglers, and had been apprehended within the last few hours, trying to escape from the war zone that had been created by decades of blinkered drug war policies in the United States and the rivers of cash that flowed south to the cartels. At that time, the Sinaloa Cartel had not yet won the war with its rival cartels, and Juárez still felt like a ghost town. Nuñez spoke about the small businesses that had closed because the owners couldn’t afford to pay protection money. He said that in the last year Juárez had recorded thirty-one hundred murders.
Former border fence, near Monument 3, Sunland Park, New Mexico
We stopped in a small control room and watched as a sector enforcement specialist named Willie Acosta monitored cameras and sensors covering about fourteen miles of the border. Two large screens dominated the wall, and a bank of lights represented the status of a host of ground sensors. Most of them showed activity. Every hit was a “definite possible maybe.” Acosta said that 99.9 percent of the hits were false alarms, set off by birds, wind, weather, seemingly nothing at all. Each active sensor had to be cleared. He maintained constant contact with field agents who called in to report the disposition of their sensors. I could feel the stress in the room as Acosta barked into his mic, acknowledging clearances from agents, impatiently explaining to them they might have thought they’d transmitted but they hadn’t, saying to me that the agents get upset but it’s not personal. “It might be personal for them, but it’s not for me.” He complained that some people just weren’t trained right, and talked about the spotters, the kids on bikes or the guys just standing around, who work for the cartels and keep them informed. He told me that the cartels know if a camera goes down long before we do, because they watch them 24/7. We have so many blind spots, and they have none of this expensive technology, but they know far better what’s happening along every segment of the line. Your technology is only as good as your people. It gets difficult in here, he said. There should be more than one person on these monitors. He laughed and said he’d been known to say his piece.
I asked how long he’d been on the job. “I was an agent for twenty-four years,” he said, “then I had a little accident. In 1985, I got shot in the chest with a machine gun. I did therapy and came back. In ’06, I had to retire, so I made them give me a new job. This is where I’ve been since ’06.”
CHAPTER 5
TEN GUNS, TEN HORSES, TEN WIVES
The Wilson brothers and the other Texans who pushed west into the grasslands of the Red River valley and beyond had little conception of where they were trespassing. They weren’t the first to make that mistake. Most of what we now call Central and West Texas was Comanche territory, and Perry Wilson spent much of his life on the borderlands of what we now recognize as the Comanche empire. Two hundred miles to the southeast, on May 19, 1836, in year one of the Republic of Texas and less than a month after a ragged army of Texans defeated Mexico at the Battle of San Jacinto, a large group of mounted Indians rode up to the gate of Parker’s Fort, near present-day Mexia, east of Waco. The Parker clan had arrived on the extremities of the Texas frontier three years before with thirty oxcarts of belongings and a religious zeal that was anything but missionary. By 1835, six of the Parker families, three of whom had received grants of forty-six hundred acres, built a heavily fortified cedar stockade that covered an acre of land; it contained six log cabins and four blockhouses and was riddled with gun ports. The Parkers had fought Indians in Illinois, Tennessee, and Georgia, and they obviously expected to fight them in Texas as well. These land-hungry Anglos probably did not realize that their grant from the Mexican government had placed them deep in Comanchería, or that their presence had been intended by policy makers in Mexico City to create a human shield between the Comanches and their traditional raiding grounds farther south, but it is unlikely they would have passed up the free land in any case. The Parkers were devout and aggressive hard-shell Baptists who believed that God had empowered them to make the barbarian deserts bloom. “The elect are a wrathful people,” according to Elder Daniel Parker, “because they are the natural enemies of the non-elect.”
When the Indians arrived, ten of the Parker men were working their fields about a mile away. Six men, including James and Silas Parker, both Texas Rangers, remained at the fort, along with eight women and nine children. The heavily armored gate was open. The Comanches (along with some Kiowa allies and probably Shoshones) we
re apparently taking advantage of the disorder caused by the Texas Revolution to carry out raids among settlements that had penetrated too deeply into their hunting grounds. Estimates of their number range from one to five hundred. Their horses painted for war, the Indians approached the fort with a white flag. Benjamin Parker walked out of the open gate and spoke with the warriors, who asked for a cow; Parker refused, though he offered other supplies, and thus abandoned whatever hope he and his family had of surviving the encounter.
Comanches were accustomed to accepting tribute from Euro-Americans, and gift giving was integral to Comanche political culture, so the frequent refusal of Texans “to share” was considered insulting and hostile. The Spanish had learned that lesson early in the previous century. While Benjamin spoke to the Indians, other members of the Parker family were fleeing out the fort’s back door. Rachel Parker Plummer, who survived twenty-one months of Indian captivity (probably among the Shoshones in southwestern Wyoming, rather than the Comanches, as she believed), watched as the “work of death” commenced and her uncle Benjamin was surrounded by the warriors, clubbed, impaled with lances, shot with arrows, then scalped. Rachel took her little boy James and ran, but, as she wrote years later, “a large sulky looking Indian picked up a hoe and knocked me down.” Silas Parker went for his bag of shot and soon died, as did the other men who remained in the fort, attempting to protect the women and children. Some of those who fled were caught, mutilated, and killed. Granny Parker was raped and stabbed but survived. Taken captive, along with Rachel, were Elizabeth Kellogg and Silas Parker’s children John and Cynthia Ann. John grew up to be a Comanche warrior, perhaps ending his life as a rancher in Mexico; Elizabeth was ransomed; Cynthia Ann became the wife of the war leader Peta Nocona and the mother of Quanah Parker, often called the last chief of the Comanches. It might be more accurate to call him the first chief, but that would diminish the mythological attraction.
Such attractions are undeniable, as the long bibliography of works on the Comanches attests, though Quanah’s prominence among popular Comanche narratives probably owes as much to his condition as the half-breed child of a captive white woman as to his prowess as a war leader. The romance of unvanquished and defiant noble savages was not so popular as long as the Indian wars still raged. For much of the last 175 years it was Cynthia Ann who received the literary attention. The story of her abduction and the slaughter at Parker’s Fort was told and retold in newspapers, magazines, and romantic novels that imagined love among the prairie flowers between a lovely pale white squaw and a darkly handsome young buck—all with the encouragement of her uncle James Parker, whose determined quest to retrieve his captured relatives was eventually given cinematic treatment in The Searchers, with John Wayne as James and Natalie Wood as his missing niece. Cynthia Ann’s son Quanah was largely unknown, except to the soldiers and rangers who pursued him along the cliffs and plains of the Llano Estacado. It was not until Quanah finally surrendered in 1875 and presented himself to his former opponent Colonel Ranald S. Mackenzie at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, that his parentage became known and the slow work of fashioning his legend began.
Since then, dozens of books have been written about Quanah and the tragic life of his mother, whose Comanche name, Naudah, means “someone found.” No other story of frontier hardship can quite compare. Cynthia Ann was abducted twice, once by Noconi Comanches and once by Texas Rangers. Twice she lost everything she knew and loved; twice she lost her family. Whether or not Sul Ross killed Naudah’s husband, Peta Nocona, at the Battle of Pease River (Quanah always claimed his father died years later), she never saw him or her sons again. She did everything she could to escape from her white family before she died in 1870. When Coho Smith, himself a former captive, visited Naudah in East Texas and spoke to her in Comanche, she screamed and threw herself at his feet, begging to be taken home. When Smith refused, she told him that her heart was always crying out for her boys, that she knew where they could steal some first-rate horses, and that she would reward him with “ten guns, ten horses, ten wives.”
—
The Comanches entered written history in 1706, when residents of the Taos pueblo complained to their Spanish governor about attacks from Utes and a previously unknown tribe of “very barbarous” Indians. They called themselves Numunu, the People. Spanish officials, who had been preoccupied with Apache raiders, knew nothing about this new tribe of mounted Indians, whose given name probably derived from the Ute word kumantsi, which historians have generally interpreted as meaning “anyone who wants to fight me all the time,” or simply “enemy.” A recent reinterpretation, however, endorsed by Pekka Hämäläinen in his magisterial The Comanche Empire, suggests that the word actually meant something closer to “newcomer” and carried the further meaning of “a people who were considered related but different,” which accords with the current scholarly consensus that the Utes and Comanches were both Numic peoples, speaking variants of Uto-Aztecan, who took different migratory routes out of the Sierra Nevada. One group, in the first wave of the Numic expansion, traveled south and founded the Aztec Empire; another was the Shoshones, the parent group of the Comanches, some of whom migrated into the Great Plains by the sixteenth century. The Plains Shoshones employed sophisticated communal hunting techniques and used dogs to haul their hide teepees and other belongings on travois; the archaeological record, including hundreds of bison jumps found throughout their former territories, suggests that they enjoyed a flourishing economy and a relatively prosperous existence. At some point in the late seventeenth century, the Shoshones broke into two groups. One of them became the Comanches, who went south in search of game and Spanish ponies.
The early alliance with the Utes was highly profitable for both groups; the Utes, who had inhabited the Spanish borderlands for some time, introduced the Comanches to European goods, including guns and metal tools. More important, the Utes shared their knowledge of horses. The Comanches in turn assisted the Ute in their wars with the pueblo Indians, the Navajo, and the Apaches. Together they terrorized the more settled inhabitants of New Mexico.
It was as if the Comanches had been waiting for the arrival of the horse. Within a generation, they had revolutionized their culture; within two generations, they were fully mounted. Life on the plains would never be the same, especially for the Spaniards’ old enemy the Apaches, against whom the Comanches waged a brutal campaign. The Apaches were horsemen, but they were also farmers, thus vulnerable to raiding, and they had not mastered the arts of mounted warfare. Like the Europeans, they typically fought on foot and thus were no match for the Comanches, who all observers agreed formed the finest light cavalry in history.
The Comanche invasion of the southern plains was not simply a matter of military conquest. The horse enabled the Comanches to raid widely among the Spanish pueblos and ranches of New Mexico, but it also greatly expanded their economic opportunities. By the mid-1720s, the Comanches had established control of the Arkansas valley, which had long been a center of trade among the peoples of the plains. Soon a process of reverse colonization began to take place as the Comanches entered into complex and lucrative trade relations all across the Spanish borderlands, stealing horses along the lower Rio Grande and trading them in New Mexico, or with the Comanchero traders who passed unmolested into the Comanche rancherías, or with French, British, and American traders in the east. The mid-eighteenth century saw a lucrative trade alliance develop with the French and the Taovaya in the eastern Arkansas valley. The Comanches tanned buffalo hides and prepared bear grease and traded these goods—as well as slaves they captured in raids—for guns, ammunition, metal tools and other implements (often refashioned into arrow points), swords (which became the points of lances), textiles, pottery, iron cookware, blankets, candles, maize, flour, bread, tobacco, vegetables, beads, and clothing. The Comanches demanded, and received, political gifts from those who wished to trade with them, and access to such highly desirable objects (uniforms, medals, flags, colored capes, and other trinkets)
was an important component of their political economy.
Comanche chiefs were men who through a combination of kinship ties, patronage, courage in battle, and personal charisma were able to persuade other men to do as they suggested. War leaders were frequently young men who had little control over civic affairs, such as hunting, trade, or the frequent need to move a ranchería, or local residential band, to find new pastures for the horses. Comanche politics was radically democratic, if also radically constrained by custom, and all important decisions were made in council. Women, who performed most of the community’s manual work (tanning hides, drying meat, preparing meals, breaking down or setting up camp), were not consulted, though they did have considerable influence over the economy of honor and martial prestige; the esteem or contempt of women was a potent political force. Chiefs, or paraibos, were only leaders so long as they had followers, which made relations with European colonial empires somewhat fraught, because the men who signed treaties often had little means of enforcing their provisions. But when the Spanish, French, Mexicans, Texans, or Americans provided resources to leading men, leaders were generally able to justify peaceful relations. When trading opportunities became scarce and tribute payments were not forthcoming, ambitious young men soon commenced raiding and pillaging, which often led to a cycle of revenge and warfare.
Historians who wrote in the first half of the twentieth century tended toward the view that the Comanches lacked any politics, properly speaking, that their social organization never rose above the level of the hunting party or war band. More recently, however, scholars such as Thomas W. Kavanagh and Pekka Hämäläinen have marshaled considerable evidence of a sophisticated if highly decentralized politics. Unlike the rigid hierarchies familiar to Europeans, Comanche political organizations were typically fluid and consensual. They were composed of alliances of local groups, based on kinship, trade, and mutual interests, and were centered on the exploitation of nutritional and economic resources. Despite their fundamental anarchism, the Comanches were clearly capable of coming to general points of consensus in matters of warfare, foreign policy, and trade. Treaties with the Comanches were not exactly worthless, and were often followed by long periods of relative calm, and alliances with other peoples such as the Utes, the Taovayas, the Kiowas, and the Pawnees took shape, prevailed for years, and then broke down as collective interests changed. Likewise, general policies of war, especially against the Apaches and the Osage, were broadly recognized. Huge multidivisional gatherings were recorded, especially by the Spanish, and war leaders such as Cuerno Verde appeared from time to time who quite obviously exercised broad civic authority.
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