The first period of Comanche expansion began in the 1720s, when they pushed east into the plains and took control of the Arkansas valley. In the 1750s, several bands of Kotsoteka Comanches pushed south from the Red River and established their dominion over the Texas plains. Comanchería by that time stretched from eastern New Mexico to the Arkansas valley, from the Red River in the north to the Balcones Escarpment in the southeast, a domain of a quarter million square miles. They raided along the lower Rio Grande and deep into the northeastern provinces farther south. New Mexico was increasingly dependent on trade with the Comanches yet continued to suffer depredations. Governor Tomás Vélez Cachupín attempted to solve the Comanche problem by seeking peace through trade. He also perceived that close ties with the Comanches might discourage the French from infiltrating Spanish territory. A treaty was signed in 1752, the first of many, though the Comanches never stopped raiding entirely, and that peace did not last long. Meanwhile, the Ute-Comanche alliance collapsed, and war returned to the southern plains. Another treaty followed in 1762, followed by more warfare.
After Cachupín retired in 1767, his successor failed to understand the importance of Comanche diplomacy, and as a result his colony was nearly destroyed by almost unceasing raids. Spanish authorities in New Mexico recorded 106 attacks by Comanches between 1767 and 1777; nearly two hundred New Mexicans were killed in 1777 and 1778 alone. Officials in Santa Fe complained that the Comanches would raid one day and then appear a few weeks later eager to trade. Largely ignored by Mexico City and Madrid, the New Mexicans had little choice but to submit. “The alternate actions of this nation at the same time, now peace, now war, demonstrate their accustomed faithlessness,” wrote Governor Pedro Fermín de Mendinueta in 1771. “Since it is impossible to…limit their freedom so that they do not do as they fancy, I have adopted the policy of admitting them to peace whenever they ask for it and come with their trade goods and of waging war whenever they assault our frontiers and commit plunder. From war alone, all that results is loss of life and property, but from the alternate this poor citizenry gains some good.”
Authorities in Spanish Texas made attempts at peace but were somewhat less successful. During the years after the American Revolution, Texas was overrun by Comanche raiders, and its population dropped from 3,103 to 2,828. The Comanche population during this period might have reached 40,000. Meanwhile, the Comanches began supplying horses to northern plains peoples such as the Pawnee, Cheyenne, and Kiowa, who traveled to the Comanche bazaars along the Arkansas. The French and British supplied guns, agricultural tribes to the east supplied carbohydrates, and in return the Comanches supplied horses, slaves, and buffalo hides, which were of unsurpassed quality.
Other treaties were signed in 1785 and 1786, following the Bourbon reforms, which revitalized the Spanish Empire’s administration of its northern frontier. New Mexico’s new governor, Juan Bautista de Anza, pursued the Comanches into the plains and killed the great chief Cuerno Verde, then made a peace that lasted, more or less unbroken, until the Mexican Revolution of 1821. Spain thought it was pursuing a policy of “peace through deceit,” hoping to bind the Comanches to the empire through relations of dependency and cultural assimilation, and the Numunu played along, keeping the raiding to a minimum and assisting the Spanish militarily in their Apache extermination policy. The Spanish saw the Comanches and other friendly Indians as a buffer against the territorial ambitions of the Americans, yet trade with the Americans, contrary to Spain’s wishes, merely intensified. With the collapse of the Spanish Empire, trade ceased to be so lucrative along the southwestern margins of Comanchería; in Mexico City, the government was preoccupied with internal matters, and the Comanches were still expanding their reach.
The early nineteenth century was the acme of the Comanche empire’s power; disease and environmental pressures soon began to undermine its foundations. Eastern Indians were being driven west, and that created both opportunities and conflicts. Trade with the Americans was flourishing, and the Comanches looked to Mexico for plunder. The commercial heart of the Southwest was no longer Santa Fe but Comanchería itself, because most trading now took place in the rancherías along the Arkansas, Red, and Brazos Rivers. In desperation, the Mexican government permitted empresarios such as Stephen F. Austin to bring American settlers into Texas, hoping to use the Anglos as a buffer against the Comanches. It didn’t work; in fact, the policy had the opposite of its intended effect. Raiding south of the Rio Grande only intensified; the zone of Comanche depredations, dotted with desolate smoking ruins, at times extended nearly to Mexico City. Nor was Texas spared. In 1832, five hundred Comanches rode right into San Antonio and had their way with the citizens of the provincial capital without apparent concern for a local garrison of Mexican troops, who did nothing to interfere. Lacking funds for gifts thereafter, San Antonio suffered raids for the next two years until the flow of tribute resumed. Purchasing peace in this way disgusted Anglo Texans such as Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, who when he succeeded Sam Houston as president of the Texas Republic pursued a policy of extermination toward all Indians.
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For more than one hundred years, the Comanches presided over a vast indigenous empire of the southern plains. They largely dictated the terms of their relations, both military and commercial, with New Spain, England, France, Mexico, Texas, and the United States, not to mention the many Native peoples who dwelled in their orbit. New Mexico for much of its history was nothing less than a Comanche colony. If trading in Taos, Pecos, Santa Fe, or Bexar became difficult or unprofitable, they turned to the Wichita or the Pawnee, the French or the Americans, who were always willing to trade guns, powder, flour, or tobacco for Comanche horses, whether or not they carried brands.
The Comanches were buffalo hunters, but they were very far from being primitive hunter-gatherers simply following the herds and making raids in the spring and summer. The same adaptability that led them to adopt the horse so enthusiastically enabled them to create a hybrid market-based culture, combining their original nomadism with pastoralism as they bred enormous herds of horses and mules, both of which produced substantial surpluses for trade. In a way, the Comanches were hunter-capitalists whose enormous wealth was accumulated above all in the form of horses.
Nor did their society cease to develop once they were mounted. Between the 1730s and the 1830s, as their wealth, population, and power grew, Comanche society became more hierarchical, with greater material disparities between those who were horse-rich and those who were horse-poor. Their rising wealth did not come without costs; the growing herds of Comanche horses competed with the buffalo for food, and in sharp contrast to the romantic image of the ecologically virtuous natives who took only what they needed, the Comanches killed far more buffalo than they required for subsistence. Long before the railroad brought the white hunters with their Sharps rifles to the plains, the Comanches in the middle decades of the nineteenth century were already causing the bison population to crash. They themselves were slaughtering far too many of the animals for hides, which they had traded for Spanish goods and groceries since the early eighteenth century.
When drought came in 1845, the Comanche empire began to crumble along with the dead grass; economic collapse swiftly followed the ecological crisis. By the 1850s, Indian agents were discovering large groups of Comanches near starvation, and raids became more desperate.
Although the Civil War gave them a brief respite, the Comanches’ power was in terminal decline by the time Quanah came of age as a war leader in 1869. He would be on the reservation within six years.
Some writers have seen the Comanche decline in terms of cultural contamination. The Comanches, according to this line of reasoning, grew weak and decadent from their promiscuous adoption of the white man’s ways—his whiskey, his iron pots—and abandoned their austere, stripped-down hunting culture. But the Comanches were never “pure” in any sense. Their extraordinary rise was predicated on a European import, the horse, and they were intimately
exposed to European crafts and manufactured goods from the early eighteenth century onward. Syncretism in religion and dress—their adoption of elaborate warbonnets and the Kiowa Sun Dance—was the rule among Comanches rather than a decadent affectation. The emergence of the Kwahada band is revealing. The Kwahadas coalesced as a political group very late in Comanche history, probably the 1860s, after the resources on which their society was based had been lost. They first enter the written record in 1872. The Kwahadas’ primary economic resource was stolen Texas cattle, hardly the basis of a traditional Numunu lifestyle.
Quanah, Texas
Thomas Kavanagh’s exhaustive sifting of the documentary record pertaining to Comanche political organization provides overwhelming evidence that the various Comanche bands or divisions—such as Kotsoteka (Buffalo Eaters), Penateka (Honey Eaters), Kwahada (Antelope Eaters), Yamparika (Yap Eaters), Jupe (People of Timber), Tenewa, Hois, and Noconi—were contingent political organizations, rather than static tribal entities, that shifted and evolved with the vagaries of geography, natural resources, and political alliances. The Comanche people were highly mobile both within their territory and among themselves. Individuals and families frequently moved from one to another social or political grouping. Major divisions appeared and disappeared over time as groups dispersed or emerged from one another. Quanah, for example, was born among the Noconi but spent much of his adulthood with Kotsotekas and Kwahadas.
As the larger material basis of the Comanche economy collapsed and most Comanches submitted to demographic and military inevitability, the bellicose Kwahadas seem to have formed as a kind of end-times movement, complete with a charismatic cult leader named Isatai (Wolf’s Vulva) who convinced his followers that his puha, or medicine power, was so powerful that it would protect them from the American soldiers’ bullets. It was Isatai who was most influential in the ill-fated decision of Quanah’s Kwahadas to attack the Adobe Walls trading outpost in 1874, and it was Isatai who initially made the decision in 1875 that it was time to surrender to Colonel Mackenzie at Fort Sill. Quanah’s concurrence came the following day. Once the Kwahadas arrived at the reservation and Quanah announced that he was the son of Cynthia Ann Parker, his transformation into Quanah Parker, the first principal chief of the Comanches, was rapid. Not everyone among the Numunu was ready to accept Quanah’s ascendancy, but the Americans, perhaps because he was half-white, made their preferences clear. On most accounts, however, Chief Quanah was a just and decent leader who did his best to protect his people from the white man’s perpetually forked tongue.
The Comanches have long been seen as a buffer to American settlement, and of course they were in a superficial sense. But by lashing the Spanish and Mexican frontiers with raids for more than a century, the Comanches unintentionally prepared the way for the American conquest of northern Mexico. By destabilizing the borderlands, which their empire of fear had made as broad and porous as possible, the Comanches fostered the conditions that led to the Texas Revolution and the Mexican War and the collapsed horizons of a thin brown borderline along the Rio Grande. Moreover, the Comanches’ highly lucrative trade in buffalo hides helped create the market that impelled the American buffalo hunters westward, resulting in the permanent collapse of that most important resource. The lesson to be learned from the rise and fall of the Numunu is not so different from that of the British or the Romans: the Comanche empire, like most expansionist and aggressive powers, contained within itself the logic of its own undoing.
CHAPTER 6
OVERLAND
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During the first few years after Perry and Welmett came to Texas, Perry was running cattle along the Red River, in what soon became Clay County, along the western frontier with the Comanches. I followed them out there, sticking as close to the Red River as I could.
The road to Clay County was typical North Texas farmland, big round bales in the fields that were under cultivation, herds of cattle nosing along the lush pastures, broken occasionally by red banks of thick sediment. Dusk set in as I drove along the monotonous highway, and Henrietta, the county seat, appeared dreary and dull. I stayed the night at a Best Western, and the pretty young clerk told me to keep an eye out for the hotel ghost, but it made no appearance.
I had an appointment around noon at the local history museum, so I set out to explore the countryside. I had a vague idea, based on land records, of where the Wilson ranch might have been. By this time, Perry’s brother Levi was in Texas, or maybe he had set out with them from Missouri in the beginning, I really don’t know, but I do know they were running cattle together along the Red River by the middle 1850s. Clay County turned out to be beautiful, excellent cattle country, a rolling prairie dotted with the occasional stands of hardwoods. Red and purple and white wildflowers were scattered abundantly, lovely under a blue sky and puffy white clouds. Darla, pulling morning duty at the hotel, had directed me to the old cemetery, which I found with little difficulty, though the maze of all-weather caliche roads spidering across the prairie was slightly confusing. I pulled off at a rusty metal gate, as instructed. I could see about a mile distant what appeared to be a fenced-in graveyard, but I feared that my rental might get stuck out in the field, because I could see a shallow rain-fed pond nearby. I drove a short distance, parked, and walked along the narrow track. A tall metal sign over the gate to the cemetery confirmed that I was in the right place, as did a discreet metal plaque erected by the state historical commission: Cambridge Cemetery, established circa 1852. Inside were a variety of stones in various states of decay. One stone simply said “sister.” Others were eroded beyond recognition. Sometimes they were simply stones placed around the outline of a notional grave. I saw no one I recognized. It was a beautiful spot to spend eternity.
I walked back to my car and drove to meet with Lucille Glasgow, who had kindly agreed to open the town’s museum, situated in an old jail from the 1890s, and show me around. Most of the artifacts were from the second period of settlement in Clay County, after the Civil War, but I was interested in the 1850s. I found a display titled “Clay County’s Beginnings,” listing the Indian tribes that wandered across this prairie—Wichita and Comanche among them—and then the Spanish explorers who passed through in 1759 (Diego Ortiz Parrilla) and 1789 (Pedro Vial), and the Anglo explorers Dr. Henry Connelly in 1840, on his surprisingly uneventful expedition from St. Louis to Chihuahua via La Junta in the Big Bend; the Santa Fe expedition of 1841; the Snively expedition of 1843; Randolph Marcy in 1849; also mentioned was Major Enoch Steen, in 1855, and General Albert Sidney Johnston in 1855. All these people were just passing through, hoping to keep scalps on their heads.
Under the heading “Early Ranchers” was a list of people who had lived, it said, in Montague County and grazed their herds in Clay County but suffered heavy losses to Comanche depredations. Among them were Perry and Levi Wilson.
In 1858, Perry and Welmett loaded up their wagons and set out again. Perhaps they were discouraged by the Comanche raids. Why else would they abandon these fertile and gorgeous prairies, cattle country without equal, for a trail filled with certain peril? Maybe they had other hopes and dreams. Perry, like many other Texas cattlemen, could have been lured by the promise of high prices in California for cattle, horses, and mules. He had been down such roads before, but now he had two children. Thomas was the older, born in 1856, and William, called Bud, was born a year later. By 1859 his family would be one less; by 1863 they were down to two.
The destination was California, and they took the southern route through West Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Perry and Welmett probably had livestock with them on this new California expedition. He might have had partners, possibly including Levi, though I’ve found no evidence that Levi joined him on this journey. They might have simply joined up with other emigrant families or a cattle drive. It’s unthinkable that Perry would make such a trip alone with his young wife and two baby sons.
John Butterfield’s Overland Mail Company went into service the same
year, 1858, and that celebrated stagecoach, from its point of departure in Tipton, Missouri, took a relatively direct route across the western extremes of Texas, skirting and then passing over the dreaded Llano Estacado, through unsettled and perilous Indian country, from the crossing at Colbert’s Ferry on the Red River to stations at intervals of thirty to more than a hundred miles. The longest stretch in Texas was between the Pecos River and Pope’s Camp, 113 miles. Paying passengers were welcome; the ride was swift but not comfortable. Indian attacks were always a danger; during the roughly two and a half years that Butterfield’s contract was active, the company lost more than fifty men to the Indians, though the stage itself was never attacked. Emigrant trains and cattle drives did attempt to cross the Llano Estacado, but this was country firmly under the dominion of the Comanches, and the white men didn’t know where to find water.
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