by S. C. Gwynne
The next day the Indians and their captives once again headed north, pushing at the same brutal pace.
Three
WORLDS IN COLLISION
THE PARKER RAID marked the moment in history when the westernmost tendrils of the nascent American empire touched the easternmost tip of a vast, primitive, and equally lethal inland empire dominated by the Comanche Indians. No one understood this at the time. Certainly, the Parkers had no notion of what they were dealing with. Neither the Americans nor the Indians they confronted along that raw frontier had the remotest idea of the other’s geographical size or military power. Both, as it turned out, had for the past two centuries been busily engaged in the bloody conquest and near-extermination of Native American tribes. Both had succeeded in hugely expanding the lands under their control. The difference was that the Comanches were content with what they had won. The Anglo-Americans, children of Manifest Destiny, were not. Now, at this lonely spot by the Navasota River, the relentless American drive westward had finally brought them together. The meaning of their meeting, and the moment itself, became completely clear only in hindsight.
Though the idea would have astonished Texas settlers of the time, the Comanche horsemen who rode up to the front gate of Parker’s Fort that morning in May 1836 were representatives of a military and trade empire that covered some 240,000 square miles,1 essentially the southern Great Plains. Their land encompassed large chunks of five present-day states: Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. It was crossed by nine major rivers, stair-stepped north to south across six hundred miles of mostly level plains and prairie. In descending order, they were: the Arkansas, Cimarron, Canadian, Washita, Red, Pease, Brazos, Colorado, and Pecos. If you counted the full reach of Comanche raiding parties, which ranged deep into Mexico and as far north as Nebraska, their territory was far bigger than that. It was not an empire in the traditional sense, and the Comanches knew nothing of the political structures that stitched European empires together. But they ruled the place outright. They held sway over some twenty different tribes who had been either conquered, driven off, or reduced to vassal status. In North America their only peers, in terms of sheer acreage controlled, were the western Sioux, who dominated the northern plains.
Such imperial dominance was no accident of geography. It was the product of more than 150 years of deliberate, sustained combat against a series of enemies over a singular piece of land that contained the country’s largest buffalo herds. Those adversaries included the colonial Spanish, who had driven north into New Mexico in 1598 and later into the Texas territory, and their Mexican successors. They included a host of native tribes, and a dozen tribes who contested for supremacy on the buffalo ranges, among them Apaches, Utes, Osages, Pawnees, Tonkawas, Navajos, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes. The empire was not based solely on military supremacy. The Comanches were diplomatically brilliant, too, making treaties of convenience when it suited them and always looking to guarantee themselves trade advantages, particularly in that most tradeable of all commodities on the plains, horseflesh, of which they owned more than anyone. One sign of their domination was that their language, a Shoshone dialect, became the lingua franca of the southern plains, much as Latin had been the commercial language of the Roman Empire.
Considering all of this, it is just short of amazing that the Anglo-Americans, in the year 1836, knew so little about the Comanches. The Spanish, who fought them for more than a century,2 knew a great deal, though even they did not suspect the full scope of the empire. As late as 1786, the Spanish governor of New Mexico still believed that the Comanche stronghold was in Colorado, when in fact they had established supremacy as far south as the San Saba country of Texas, some five hundred miles away.3 This is partly because the European mind simply could not comprehend the distances the average Comanche could travel. The nomadic range of their bands was around eight hundred miles. Their striking range—this confused the insurgent populations as much as anything—was four hundred miles.4That meant that a Spanish settler or soldier in San Antonio was in grave and immediate danger from a Comanche brave sitting before a fire in the equivalent of modern-day Oklahoma City. It took years before anyone understood that the same tribe that was raiding on the plains of Durango, Mexico, was also riding above the Arkansas River in modern-day Kansas. But by 1836, of course, the Spanish were long gone, replaced by Mexicans who had even less success dealing with Comanches, who contemptuously referred to them as their “stock-keepers.”5 It is one of history’s great ironies that one of the main reasons Mexico had encouraged Americans to settle in Texas in the 1820s and 1830s was because they wanted a buffer against Comanches, a sort of insurance policy on their borderlands. In that sense, the Alamo, Goliad, San Jacinto, and the birth of the Texas republic were the product of a misguided scheme to stop the Comanches. No one knew this, either. Certainly not settlers like the Parkers who were, in effect, being offered up as meat for Comanche raiders.
Still, encounters at that point between whites and Comanches had been extremely rare. Lewis and Clark knew the tribe only by hearsay. Lewis wrote about the “great Padouca nation” (Padouca was believed to be another name for Comanche) that “occupied the country between the upper parts of the River Platte [present Nebraska] and the River Kanzas.” He goes on to say that “of the Padouca there does not now even exist the name.”6 They were thus just a rumor, and perhaps not even that. In 1724 the French trader Étienne Véniard de Bourgmont visited the Padoucas and described them as “not entirely wandering—[they] are partially sedentary—for they have villages with large houses and do some planting.”7 Since there was never such a thing as a sedentary, village-dwelling Comanche, it is likely that the Padoucas were something altogether different (quite possibly plains-dwelling Apaches, though it is impossible to prove).
In the 1820s, Stephen F. Austin and his first group of Anglo Texas settlers encountered the Comanches, and Austin was even briefly held captive by them. They seemed otherwise friendly enough, and nothing came of it. The first pack trains moved down the Santa Fe Trail in 1821, connecting Missouri to New Mexico with a route that crossed Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma. Total traffic, however, averaged only about eighty wagons a year. Some were attacked by Indians, but in those years white people moving down a trail were not to be confused with settlers who actually wanted to hold land. The trail was merely a thin ribbon of commerce that jeopardized neither hunting grounds nor traditional lands, and reports of Comanche attacks were probably exaggerated.8 Contact was minimal, and in any case the traders found it hard to tell one Indian from another.
In 1832, Sam Houston, then working as a trader with the Cherokees, made an unsuccessful trip to Texas to try to make peace among Comanches, Osages, and Pawnees.9 In 1834, a troop of two hundred fifty mounted dragoons under Colonel Richard Dodge made contact with them above the Red River. According to the description of George Catlin, a well-known artist and chronicler of the west who was with Dodge, the Americans were dazzled by Comanche horsemanship, their prowess from horseback with a bow and arrow, and their ability to break wild mustangs. Catlin even speculated—hilariously, in retrospect—that “it is probable that in a few days we will thrash them.”10 He had no clue what he was talking about. In battle, the Comanches would have likely cut the heavily mounted and musket-firing dragoons to ribbons. (W. S. Nye wrote that the soldiers “were attired in costumes better suited to comic opera than to summer field service in Oklahoma.”)11 But these encounters offered little or no information about the true nature of the tribe. “Their history, numbers, and limits are still in obscurity,” wrote Catlin at the time. “Nothing definite yet is known of them.”12 Just how obscure they were, as late as 1852, is apparent in the account of an expedition to the headwaters of the Red River by Captain Randolph Marcy, published in 1853. He describes the country—which was at the time the core of the Comanche empire, fully sixteen years after Parker’s Fort—as a completely unexplored place “no white man [had] ever ascended”13 and as unknown to Americans
as unexplored regions of Africa.
It should be noted that the Comanches and Kiowas who raided Parker’s Fort were mounted. Indians riding horses may seem obvious enough to us now, but to Americans in the early nineteenth century the phenomenon was quite new. In spite of the indelible image of whooping, befeathered savages on horseback, most Indians in the Americas were footbound. There were no horses at all on the continent until the Spanish introduced them in the sixteenth century. Their dispersal into wild mustang herds was exclusively a western event, confined to the plains and to the southwest, and accruing almost entirely to the benefit of the aboriginal inhabitants of those areas. This meant that no soldier or settler east of the Mississippi, going back to the first settlers, had ever encountered a mounted Indian warrior. There simply weren’t any. As time went by, of course, eastern Indians learned to ride horses, but that was long after they had surrendered, and no eastern, midwestern, or southern Native American tribe ever rode into battle.
The first settlers ever to see true horse Indians were the Texans, because it was in Texas where human settlement first arrived at the edges of the Great Plains. The Indians they encountered were primitive nomads and superb riders, nothing at all like the relatively civilized, largely agrarian, village-dwelling tribes of the East who traveled and fought on foot and presented relatively easy targets for white militias and armies. The horse Indians lived beyond the forests in an endless, trackless, and mostly waterless expanse of undulating grass that was itself terrifying to white men. They resembled less the Algonquins or the Choctaws than the great and legendary mounted archers of history: Mongols, Parthians, and Magyars.
They came from the high country, in the place we now call Wyoming, above the headwaters of the Arkansas River. They called themselves “Nermernuh,” which in their Shoshone language meant, simply, “People.” They were of the mountains: short, dark-skinned, and barrel-chested. They were descendants of the primitive hunters who had crossed the land bridge from Asia to America in successive migrations between 11,000 and 5,000 BC, and in the millennia that followed they had scarcely advanced at all. They grubbed and hunted for a living using stone weapons and tools, spearing rodents and other small game and killing buffalo by setting the prairies on fire and stampeding the creatures over cliffs or into pits. They used the dog-travois to travel—a frame slung between two poles, pulled by a dog—lugging their hide tipis with them. There were perhaps five thousand of them, living in scattered bands. They squatted around fires gorging themselves on charred, bloody meat. They fought, reproduced, suffered, and died.
They were in most ways typical hunter-gatherers. But even among such peoples, the Comanches had a remarkably simple culture. They had no agriculture and had never felled trees or woven baskets or made pottery or built houses. They had little or no social organization beyond the hunting band.14 Their culture contained no warrior societies, no permanent priest class. They had no Sun Dance. In social development they were culturally aeons behind the dazzlingly urban Aztecs, or the stratified, highly organized, clan-based Iroquois; they were in all ways utterly unlike the tribes from the American southeast, who in the period from AD 700 to 1700 built sophisticated cultures around maize agriculture that featured large towns, priest-chiefs, clans, and matrilineal descent.15 To the immediate east were tribes—including the Missouris, Omahas, Pawnees, and Wichitas—who excelled at pottery and basketry, spun and wove fabric, practiced extensive agriculture, and built semipermanent houses covered with grass, bark, or earth.16 The Nermernuh knew none of those things. From the scant evidence we have, they were considered a tribe of little or no significance.17 They had been driven to this harsh, difficult land on the eastern slope of the Rockies by other tribes—meaning that, in addition to everything else they were not good at, the Comanches were not very good at war, either.
What happened to the tribe between roughly 1625 and 1750 was one of the great social and military transformations in history. Few nations have ever progressed with such breathtaking speed from the status of skulking pariah to dominant power. The change was total and irrevocable, and it was accompanied by a complete reordering of the balance of power on the American plains. The tribes that had once driven the Comanches into the mountains of Wyoming would soon be either dim memories (Kansas, Omahas, Missouris) or, like the Apaches, Utes, and Osages, retreating to avoid extermination. The Nermernuh were like the small boy who is bullied in junior high school then grows into a large, strong, and vengeful high schooler. Vengeance they were good at, and they had extremely long memories for evils done to them. It should be noted that the dull boy became suddenly very clever, too, and he went from being the least clever boy to the cleverest of all.
The agent of this astonishing change was the horse. Or, more precisely, what this backward tribe of Stone Age hunters did with the horse, an astonishing piece of transformative technology that had as much of an effect on the Great Plains as steam and electricity had on the rest of civilization.18
The story of the Comanches’ implausible ascent begins with the arrival of the first conquistadors in Mexico in the early sixteenth century. The invaders brought horses with them from Spain. The animals terrified the natives, provided obvious military superiority, and gave the Spaniards a sort of easy mobility never before seen by the inhabitants of the New World. The Spanish horses were also, by the purest of accidents, brilliantly suited to the arid and semiarid plains and mesas of Mexico and the American West. The Iberian mustang was a far different creature from its larger grain-fed cousin from farther north in Europe. It was a desert horse, one whose remote ancestors had thrived on the level, dry steppes of central Asia. Down the ages, the breed had migrated to North Africa by way of the Middle East, mixing blood with other desert hybrids along the way. The Moorish invasions brought it to Spain.19 By that time it had become, more or less, the horse that found its way to America: light, small, and sturdy, barely fourteen hands high, with a concave Arabian face and tapering muzzle. This horse didn’t look like much, but it was smart, fast, trainable, bred to live off the grasses of the hot Spanish plains and to go long distances between watering holes. Possessed of great endurance, the animal could forage for food even in winter.20
Thus the mustang immediately prospered in Mexico and enabled the Spanish, in haciendas around Mexico City, to become horse breeders on a grand scale. Barely twenty years after Cortés landed, Coronado was able to amass fifteen hundred horses and mules for his great northern expedition.21 As the Spanish conquest spread, so did their horses. Since they were fully aware of what might happen if indigenous tribes learned to ride, one of the very first ordinances they passed prohibited natives from riding any horse. They could not enforce such laws, of course. Ultimately they needed Indians and mestizos to work their ranches. This meant that knowledge of how to groom, saddle, bridle, and break horses gradually passed from Spanish control into the hands of the locals. This transmission of Spanish horse culture began in Mexico in the sixteenth century and continued steadily as the Spaniards drove north to New Mexico in the seventeenth century.
That was the first part of the horse revolution. The second was the dispersal of the horses themselves. This happened very slowly at first. The first real herd of horses in North America arrived with the expedition of Don Juan de Oñate to New Mexico in 1598. He brought with him seven hundred horses. The Spanish defeated, converted, and then enslaved the local Pueblo Indians, who built their forts and missions for them. The Indians also tended the horses, though they never showed any interest in using them for anything besides food.
But the Pueblos were not the only Indians in New Mexico. By giving shelter and aid to them, the Spanish had incurred the wrath of local Athapaskan bands—Apaches—who had conducted raids against settlements almost since they began. Now something quite interesting and, in the Spanish history of the Americas, unprecedented happened. The Apaches began to adapt themselves to the horse. No one knows exactly how this happened, or precisely how they came into possession of the elaborate S
panish understanding of horses. But it was an amazingly swift transfer of technology. The Indians first stole the horses, then learned how to ride them. The horse culture was entirely copied from the Spanish. Indians mounted from the right, a practice the Spanish had taken from the Moors, and used crude replicas of Spanish bits, bridles, and saddles.22
The horse gave them astounding advantages as hunters. It also made them doubly effective as raiders, mainly because it afforded them an immediate and swift method of escape. According to Spanish records, mounted Apaches were conducting raids into New Mexican settlements as early as the 1650s. In spite of this auspicious start, the Apaches were never a great horse tribe: They did not fight on horseback, and never learned the art of breeding or particularly cared to learn it. They used their Spanish mustangs mainly for basic travel and had an inordinate fondness for cooked horseflesh, eating most of the ones they had and saving only the choicest for riding.23 They were also, always, a semiagricultural tribe, which meant that their applications of the horse would always be limited—in ways that would later accrue entirely to the benefit of their greatest foes, the Comanches. But for now they had what no other tribe in the Americas had.
And they managed to cause an enormous amount of trouble. They began a relentless and deadly series of raids against the peaceful Pueblos, who were scattered in settlements from Taos to Santa Fe and south along the Rio Grande. The Apaches would attack and then disappear quickly into the western landscape, and the Spanish could neither stop them nor track them down. With each raid, too, they became richer in horses. In one raid alone in 1659, they took three hundred.24 It became clear to the Pueblos, eventually, that the Spanish could not protect them. This was very likely the main reason for the great Pueblo revolt in 1680. There were other reasons, too, like the forced labor, the imposition of Catholicism, and the suppression of Pueblo culture and tradition. Whatever the cause, the Pueblos rose, and in a grisly, blood-soaked rebellion drove the Spanish out of New Mexico. For ten years. Their imperial nemesis gone, the Indians lapsed into their old ways, which included pottery-making and farming but not horses, for which they had no use. Abandoned by the Spanish, thousands of mustangs ran wild into the open plains that resembled so closely their ancestral Iberian lands. Because they were so perfectly adapted to the new land, they thrived and multiplied. They became the foundation stock for the great wild mustang herds of the Southwest. This event has become known as the Great Horse Dispersal. The dissemination of so many horses to a group of thirty plains tribes permanently altered the power structure of the North American heartland. The Apaches had been the first North American Indians to understand what hunters and raiders could do with a horse; the other tribes would soon learn.