by S. C. Gwynne
What explains such a radical difference in the moral systems of the Comanches and the whites they confronted? Part of it has to do with the relative progress of civilizations in the Americas compared to the rest of
the world. The discovery of agriculture, which took place in Asia and the Middle East, roughly simultaneously, around 6,500 BC, allowed the transition from nomadic, hunter-gatherer societies to the higher civilizations that followed. But in the Americas, farming was not discovered until 2,500 BC, fully four thousand years later and well after advanced cultures had already sprung up in Egypt and Mesopotamia. This was an enormous gap. Once the Indians figured out how to plant seeds and cultivate crops, civilizations in North and South America progressed at roughly the same pace as they had in the Old World. Cities were built. Highly organized social structures evolved. Pyramids were designed. Empires were assembled, of which the Aztecs and Incas were the last. (As in the Old World, nomadism and hunter-gatherer cultures persisted alongside the higher civilizations.) But the Americas, isolated and in any case without the benefit of the horse or the ox, could never close the time gap. They were three to four millennia behind the Europeans and Asians, and the arrival of Columbus in 1492 guaranteed that they would never catch up. The nonagrarian Plains Indians, of course, were even further behind.
Thus the fateful clash between settlers from the culture of Aristotle, St. Paul, Da Vinci, Luther, and Newton and aboriginal horsemen from the buffalo plains happened as though in a time warp—as though the former were looking backward thousands of years at premoral, pre-Christian, low-barbarian versions of themselves. The Celtic peoples, ancestors of huge numbers of immigrants to America in the nineteenth century, offer a rough parallel. Celts of the fifth century BC were described by Herodotus as “fierce warriors who fought with seeming disregard for their own lives.”21 Like Comanches they were savage, filthy, wore their hair long, and had a hideous keening battle cry. They were superb horsemen, inordinately fond of alcohol, and did terrible things to their enemies and captives that included decapitation, a practice that horrified the civilized Greeks and Romans.22 The old Celts, forebears of the Scots-Irish who formed the vanguard of America’s western migrations, would have had no “moral” problem with the Comanche practice of torture.
To their enemies, the Comanches were implacable buffalo-horned killers, grim apostles of darkness and devastation. Inside their own camps, however, where Rachel Parker Plummer, Cynthia Ann Parker, and the others now found themselves, they were something entirely different. Here, wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, one of the first Americans to observe them closely, the Comanche “is a noisy, jolly, rollicking, mischief-loving braggadoccio, brimful of practical jokes and rough fun of any kind . . . rousing the midnight echoes with song and dance, whoops and yells.”23 He loved to gamble and would bet on anything—absolutely anything—but especially on horses and games of chance, and would happily wager his last deerskin. He loved to sing. He especially loved to sing his personal song, often written expressly for him by a medicine man. He often woke up singing and sang before he went to bed. He adored games of any kind, but more than anything else in the world he liked to race horses. He was vain about his hair—often weaving his wife’s shorn tresses in with his own to create extensions, as modern women do. He would roll those extensions in beaver or otter skin. He was an incurable gossip and had, according to Dodge, a “positive craving to know what is going on around him.”24
He would dance for hours, or days. He doted on his family, especially on his sons, and spent winters snug and indolent, wrapped in thick buffalo robes by the fire in his tipi, a brilliant piece of architectural design that required only a small fire to keep him warm even during the frigid, wind-lashed plains winters. And he loved to talk. “He will talk himself wild with excitement,” wrote Dodge, “vaunting his exploits in love, war, on the chase, and will commit all sorts of extravagances while telling.”25 His fellow tribe members had names like “A Big Fall by Tripping,” “Face Wrinkling Like Getting Old,” “Coyote Vagina,” “Gets to Be a Middle-aged Man,” “Always Sitting Down in a Bad Place,” “Breaks Something,” and “She Invites Her Relatives.”26 To others, they were the personification of death. To themselves, they were simply “People.”
They were in most ways typical Plains Indians. The culture of all true plains tribes was built around the buffalo, which provided life’s essentials: food, lodging (tipis made of hides), fuel (dried dung), tools (bone implements, water pouches made from the paunch), tack (bridles, thongs, and saddles made of hide), ropes (from twisted hair), clothing (buckskins, moccasins, and fur robes), and weapons (bowstrings made from sinews and clubs). Before the arrival of the buffalo hunters in the 1870s, the huge, swift animals were literally too numerous to count. The larger part of this population lived on the southern plains—Comancheria. They were the reason the newly mounted tribe had fought for that land in the first place.
The buffalo was a dangerous creature to hunt. A healthy buffalo could run nearly as fast as an ordinary horse for two miles. Because it was the Indian practice to ride up on it from behind, shooting or lancing it, the wounded buffalo was thus an immediate threat to the rider. The danger, as Texas Ranger Rip Ford wrote, was “to be caught and lifted, horse and all, upon the horns of so huge a beast, tossed like a feather so many feet in the air, to fall all mixed up with your four-footed companion.”27 Indian ponies were trained to turn instantly away from the buffalo at the twang of the bowstring.
Buffalo was the food the Comanches loved more than any other. They ate steaks cooked over open fires or boiled in copper kettles. They cut the meat thin, dried it, and stored it for the winter and took it on long trips. They ate the kidneys and the paunch. Children would rush up to a freshly killed animal, begging for its liver and gallbladder. They would then squirt the salty bile from the gallbladder onto the liver and eat it on the spot, warm and dripping blood. If a slain female was giving milk, Comanches would cut into the udder bag and drink the milk mixed with warm blood. One of the greatest delicacies was the warm curdled milk from the stomach of a suckling calf.28 If warriors were on the trail and short of water, they might drink the warm blood of the buffalo straight from its veins. Entrails were sometimes eaten, stripped of their contents by using two fingers. (If fleeing pursuers, a Comanche would ride his horse till it dropped, cut it open, removed its intestines, wrap them around his neck, and take off on a fresh horse, eating their contents later.)29 In the absence of buffalo, Comanches would eat whatever was at hand: dry-land terrapins, thrown live into the fire, eaten from the shell with a horned spoon;30 all manner of small game, even horses if they had to, though they did not, like the Apaches, prefer them. They did not eat fish or birds unless they were starving. They never ate the heart of the buffalo.
The Comanches were also true Plains Indians in their social structure. Nermernuh were organized in bands, a concept white men never quite understood. They insisted on looking at the Comanches as a tribe, meaning a single political unit with a head chief and, presumably, a cadre of civil and military subchiefs to do his bidding. This was never true. Nor was it true of the Cheyennes or the Arapahoes or anyone else on the plains. Comanches all spoke the same language, dressed roughly in the same way, shared the same religious beliefs and customs, and led a common style of life that distinguished them from other tribes and from the rest of the world. That life, however, according to ethnographers Wallace and Hoebel, “did not include political institutions or social mechanisms by which they could act as a tribal unit.”31 There was no big chief, no governing council, no Comanche “nation” that you could locate in a particular place, negotiate with, or conquer in battle. To whites, of course, this made no sense at all. It resembled no governing system they recognized. Across the plains, they insisted on making treaties with band headmen—often very colorful, strong-willed, and powerful ones—assuming incorrectly that the headmen spoke for the entire tribe. They would make this mistake again and again.
The bands were
always difficult for outsiders to understand. It was difficult to distinguish between them, or even to know how many bands there were. They occupied different, vaguely defined pieces of Comanche territory, and were distinguished by small cultural nuances that eluded the unpracticed eye: one liked a particular dance, another an item of clothing, one liked to eat pemmican, another pronounced its words more slowly than the other bands. The Spanish, seeing the world from the far western edge of Comanche country, thought there were three bands. They were wrong, though they were right that they had probably had contact with only three. Texas Indian agent Robert Neighbors, one of the keenest observers of the tribe, said in 1860 he thought there were eight. Other observers counted as many as thirteen, some of which eventually disappeared, were absorbed, or were exterminated.32
Historians generally agree that there were five major bands at the turn of the nineteenth century. Most of the discussion in this book will focus on them. Each contained more than a thousand people. Some perhaps had as many as five thousand. (At its zenith, the entire nation was estimated at twenty thousand.) They were: the Yamparika (Yap Eaters), the northernmost band, who inhabited the lands to the south of the Arkansas River; the Kotsoteka (Buffalo Eaters), whose main grounds were the Canadian River valley in present-day Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle; the Penateka (Honey Eaters), the largest and southernmost band, whose territory stretched deep into Texas; the Nokoni (Wanderers), “middle” Comanches, who occupied the lands in north Texas and present-day Oklahoma between the Penateka and the northern bands; finally, the Quahadis (Antelopes), Quanah’s band, which haunted the headstreams of the Colorado, Brazos, and Red rivers in far northwest Texas. Each band played a different part in history. The Penatekas were the ones largely responsible for driving the Lipan Apaches into the Mexican borderlands and fought most of the first battles against the Texans; the Kotsotekas were the main raiders of the Spanish settlements in New Mexico; the Yamparikas battled the Cheyennes and Arapahoes on the northern borderlands of Comancheria. The Nokonis attacked Parker’s Fort; the Quahadis fought the last battles against the U.S. Army. All cooperated with one another on the friendliest of terms. All had, almost invariably, the same interests at heart. They hunted and raided together on an informal, ad hoc basis, and frequently swapped members. They never fought one another.33 They always had common interests, common enemies, and in spite of their decentralization acted with remarkable consistency when it came to diplomacy and trade. (Other tribes had band structures that were even harder for whites to understand. Sitting Bull, for example, was a member of the Sioux tribe, but his affiliation was with the Lakota, or western division, also known as Teton, and his specific band was Hunkpapa.)
The Comanches, as a tribe, were thus without a center. But even within the band, their political structures were remarkably nonhierarchical, and their headmen wielded only limited power. There were usually two main chiefs in each band, one peace or civil chief, and one war chief. Though the former was usually superior to the latter, he exercised nothing like absolute control over individual band members, and there was nothing institutional about his power. There were indeed some very strong Comanche chiefs who commanded great allegiance, but they retained their power only so long as people went along with them. The civil chief’s main job was that of a billeting officer—the man who said when the tribe would move and where it would go.34 He sat with a council that would rule on individual cases of theft, adultery, or murder, or whatever crime might come before them. But there was no consistent body of traditional law, no police, and no judges. It was, in effect, a system of private law. If a wrong was committed, then it was up to the wronged party to litigate it. Otherwise there would be no enforcement. Payment for damages usually came in the form of horses.35
The head war chief, meanwhile, was a grand and glorious warrior but was not actually in charge of many of the war or raiding parties that went out, nor could he determine who joined them or where they went. These were gathered by individual warriors with individual notions about where they wanted to go. In Comanche society, anyone could be a war chief; it meant simply that you had an idea to raid, say, Mexican ranchos in Coahuila, and were able to gather a sufficient number of warriors to do it. Head war chiefs got that way because they were good at recruiting war parties. They would inevitably lead the most important sorties, and would lead the most important expeditions against powerful enemies. But they did not control, nor would they have wanted to, the martial plans of individual braves.
Since discipline and authority were lacking at the tribal and band levels, one might expect that the power of the families or clans made up for this. But here, too, the Comanche was remarkably free of the usual social fetters. Though the family unit was the clearly the basis of the band, the bands were never organized around a family group, nor were families even the main force in the regulation of marriage. There were no clan organizations of any kind. A family could not prevent a daughter or son from marrying outside his or her band, and could not even prevent a family member from leaving the band.36 There was no principle of heredity in leadership, which was based entirely on merit.
The Comanche male was thus gloriously, astoundingly free. He was subject to no church, no organized religion, no priest class, no military societies, no state, no police, no public law, no domineering clans or powerful families, no strict rules of personal behavior, nothing telling him he could not leave his band and join another one, nothing even telling him he could not abscond with his friend’s wife, though he certainly would end up paying somewhere between one and ten horses for that indulgence, assuming he was caught. He was free to organize his own military raids; free to come and go as he pleased. This was seen by many people, particularly writers and poets from James Fenimore Cooper onward, as a peculiarly American sort of freedom. Much was made of the noble and free life of the American Savage. It was, indeed, a version of that freedom, especially from onerous social institutions, that drew many settlers west to the primitive frontier.
This was the culture in which Rachel Plummer found herself. If there was much joy, laughter, singing, and gaming among the men, there was little left for her. As a woman, she was a second-class citizen, a member of a caste whose lot it was to do most of the hard work, including herding, skinning, butchering, drying beef, making clothing, packing and repairing tipis. And of course tending to children and all family matters. As a captive woman she had even fewer rights, and having been taken as an adult, she was never likely to get any more than she had. She bore the scars of her initial captivity and from punishments she had received. (Those who saw her later said she was quite visibly scarred.) She was the sexual slave of her master and of anyone he chose to share her with, which would have included members of his family. Considering what else she put up with, including the torture of one child and the murder of another, this would have been among the least of her worries. She was, as we have seen, the maltreated servant of her master’s women.
In other ways, Rachel became entirely Comanche. She shed her pioneer clothing for Indian buckskins, and, though she does not comment on it, would have been as filthy and bug-ridden as any of the Comanches, who were notable even among Indians for their lack of hygiene. She would have chopped off her long, lovely red hair. In addition to buffalo meat, which she loved, she developed a taste for prairie dogs (“fat, and fine to eat”), beaver (“the tail only”), and bear (“very fat and delicious food”). It is doubtful that she participated in the universal Comanche habit of picking lice off themselves and cracking them with their teeth, a practice that disgusted white observers. Like other women, she probably served the men during the entertainments, fetching water for them while they danced. If she played any of the games that women and children played (shinny, double-ball), she does not mention it. She knew that she was no longer in danger of being killed. She also knew that, if she remained with the tribe, her life would never change.
Having failed in her plan to goad the Indians into killing her, she resolved now
to persuade someone to purchase her from her captor. On the high plains she encountered a group of Mexicans. “I tried to get one of them to buy me,” she wrote. “I told him that even if my father and husband were dead, I knew I had enough land in Texas to fully indemnify him; but he did not try to buy me, although he agreed to do it.”37 She did not give up hope. Later, while she was tending the band’s horses, she encountered what she called “Mexican traders”—almost certainly Comancheros from New Mexico. They asked her to take them to her master, which she did. Then, in her presence, they asked him if he would sell her. Her master’s shocking answer: “Sí, señor.”
Five
THE WOLF’S HOWL
THE UNHERALDED ARRIVAL of mounted Comanche warriors in Spanish New Mexico in 1706 marked the beginning of their first long war against white men. The fight took place entirely on the Indians’ terms. The Comanches did not defeat a Spanish army on a broad field of battle in a single, final combat, or see its imperial ranks reeling in inglorious retreat across the Rio Grande. Massed armies in ceremonial formations fighting pitched battles on open ground were not the way of the American West. Instead there were raids and counterraids and a sort of bedouin warfare people would later call guerrilla, conducted by small, mobile forces in a gigantic landscape that swallowed human beings as though they had never existed. What happened to the Spanish at the hands of the Comanches was not conventional military defeat but a century and a half of brutal, grinding aggression that soaked their northern frontier in blood and left them, ultimately, with an empire emptied of meaning. They had arrived in the New World as conquistadors, powerful beyond measure, triumphantly secure in their own peculiar style of militarized Catholicism. In the north they ended up as virtual prisoners in their own missions and presidios, trapped inside a failed system that neither attracted colonists nor succeeded in converting Indians, and in any case could not protect either group from the horse tribes. The Comanches did not beat the Spanish so much as render them irrelevant—onlookers in an immense struggle for control of the center of the North American continent in which they no longer played a decisive role.