The Comanche Empire Page 2
Indeed, the fact that Comanche territory, Comanchería, was encircled throughout its existence by Euro-American settler colonies makes the Comanches an
unlikely candidate for achieving regional primacy. But as the Comanches grew in numbers and power, that geopolitical layout became the very foundation of their dominance. Their overwhelming military force, so evident in their terror-inspiring mounted guerrilla attacks, would have allowed them to destroy many New Mexico and Texas settlements and drive most of the colonists out of their borders. Yet they never adopted such a policy of expulsion, preferring instead to have their borders lined with formally autonomous but economically subservi-ent and dependent outposts that served as economic access points into the vast resources of the Spanish empire.
The Comanches, then, were an imperial power with a difference: their aim
was not to conquer and colonize, but to coexist, control, and exploit. Whereas more traditional imperial powers ruled by making things rigid and predictable, Comanches ruled by keeping them fluid and malleable.⁵ This informal, almost
ambiguous nature of Comanches’ politics not only makes their empire diffi-
Introduction
5
cult to define; it sometimes makes it difficult to see. New Mexico and Texas existed side by side with Comanchería throughout the colonial era, and though often suffering under Comanche pressure, the twin colonies endured, allowing Spain to claim sweeping imperial command over the Southwest. Yet when
examined closely, Spain’s uncompromised imperial presence in the Southwest
becomes a fiction that existed only in Spanish minds and on European maps,
for Comanches controlled a large portion of those material things that could be controlled in New Mexico and Texas. The idea of land as a form of private, revenue-producing property was absent in Comanche culture, and livestock
and slaves in a sense took the place of landed private property. This basic observation has enormous repercussions on how we should see the relationship
between the Comanches and colonists. When Comanches subjected Texas and
New Mexico to systematic raiding of horses, mules, and captives, draining wide sectors of those productive resources, they in effect turned the colonies into imperial possessions. That Spanish Texas and New Mexico remained unconquered
by Comanches is not a historical fact; it is a matter of perspective.
In this book I examine the Comanche power complex as part of an emerg-
ing transatlantic web that had not yet consolidated into an encompassing world economy. Seen from this angle, the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
Southwest and Mexican North emerge as a small-scale world-system that existed outside the controlling grip of Europe’s overseas empires. Comanchería was its political and economic nucleus, a regional core surrounded by more or less
peripheral societies and territories whose fortunes were linked to the Comanches through complex webs of cooperation, coercion, extortion, and dependence.
The world-system approach to history has often been criticized for being overly strict and mechanistic, which it is. I have used its spatial language and metaphors selectively but also advisedly, fully aware that they convey a certain kind of rigidity and permanence. Viewed against the backdrop of constantly shifting frontiers of North America, the intersocietal space the Comanches occupied
and eventually dominated was marked by unusually hard, enduring, and distinctive power hierarchies.⁶
This Comanche-centric world was by no means self-contained; it was an-
chored from its inception to the broader colonial world through the strong
administrative and economic networks among New Mexico, Texas, northern
Mexican provinces, and Mexico City. But these institutional linkages often
had less impact on the colonies’ internal development than Comanche policies did; the troubled and convoluted history of New Mexico, Texas, Coahuila, and Nueva Vizcaya may have had as much to do with the Comanches as with the
ebbs and flows of New Spain’s imperial fortunes. In fact, the systemic connec-
6
Introduction
tions between Comanchería and northern New Spain gave the Comanches a
modicum of exploitative power over the Spanish empire as a whole. When New
Mexico was founded at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was expected to fuel Spain’s imperial veins with raw materials and laborers, but by the eighteenth century the colony was leaking so much wealth into Comanchería that it could survive only by continuous financial backing from Mexico City. Texas functioned through much of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a money-draining, often tributary defensive province against Comanche expansion. By subsidizing its far northern frontier, then, the Spanish empire in effect drained itself to feed and fend off an indigenous empire.
Although I focus on a particular place in time in this book, my arguments engage in the broader debates about colonialism, frontiers, and borderlands in the Americas. Over the past three decades, historians have conceived entirely new ways of thinking about Native Americans, Euro-Americans, and their tangled
histories. Moving beyond conventional top-down narratives that depict Indians as bit players in imperial struggles or tragic victims of colonial expansion, today’s scholarship portrays them as full-fledged historical actors who played a formative role in the making of early America. Rather than a seamless, preordained sequence, the colonization of the Americas is now seen as a dialectic process that created new worlds for all involved. Indigenous societies did not simply vanish in the face of Euro-American onslaught. Many adjusted and endured, rebuilding
new economies and identities from the fragments of the old ones. Indians fought and resisted, but they also cooperated and coexisted with the newcomers, creating new hybrid worlds that were neither wholly Indian nor European. By fore-grounding indigenous peoples and their intentions in the story of early America, recent scholarship has reinvigorated a field that only a generation ago was suffocating under its parochial and mythologizing tenets.⁷
Significant as this revisionist turn has been, it is not complete. Too often the alterations have been cosmetic rather than corrective. Historians have sanitized vocabularies and updated textbooks to illuminate the subtleties of colonial
encounters, but the broad outlines of the story have largely remained intact.
Outside a cadre of Native and early American specialists, the understanding of Indian–Euro-American relations is still limited by what Vine Deloria, Jr., called
“the ‘cameo’ theory of history”: indigenous peoples make dramatic entrances, stay briefly on the stage, and then fade out as the main saga of European expansion resumes, barely affected by the interruption. With too few exceptions, revisionist historians have limited themselves to retelling the story of colonial conquest from the Indian side of the frontier. They have probed how Native peoples
Introduction
7
countered and coped with colonial expansion and have largely overlooked the
other side of the dynamic—the impact of Indian policies on colonial societies.
Such an approach reinforces the view of European powers as the principal driving force of history and tends to reduce indigenous actions to mere strategies of subversion and survival. To recover the full dimension of Indian agency in early American history, we must once again reevaluate the intersections among Native peoples, colonial powers, frontiers, and borderlands. We have to turn the telescope around and create models that allow us to look at Native policies toward colonial powers as more than defensive strategies of resistance and containment.⁸
This book offers new insights into that effort, and it does so by questioning some of the most basic assumptions about indigenous peoples, colonialism, and historical change. Instead of perceiving Native policies toward colonial powers simply as strategies of survival, it assumes
that Indians, too, could wage war, exchange goods, make treaties, and absorb peoples in order to expand, extort, manipulate, and dominate. Instead of reading Indian dispossession back in time to structure the narrative of early America, it embraces the multiple possibilities and contingency of historical change. At its most fundamental level, it promotes a less linear reading of Indian-white relations in North America. After the initial contacts, when Indians usually held the upper hand over the invaders, the fate of indigenous cultures was not necessarily an irreversible slide toward dispossession, depopulation, and cultural declension. As the history of the Comanches illustrates, almost diametrically opposite trajectories were possible. Before their final defeat in the canyonlands of the Texas Panhandle in 1875, Comanches had experienced an astounding ascendancy from the margins of the colonial world
into imperial prominence as a dominant people who thrived and expanded in
the midst of Euro-American colonies for over a century.
The history of Indian–Euro-colonial relations, as we today understand them,
is inseparable from the history of the frontier, which forms another theoretical thread of this study. Over the past fifteen years or so, the frontier has made a forceful reentry into the very center of North American historiography. Recast as a zone of cultural interpenetration, the frontier is finding new relevance among historians who not so long ago had rejected Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis as an ethnocentric and narcissistic rendition of the European takeover of North America. Instead of Turner’s binary dividing line between civilization and savagery—or as seedbed of American virtues—historians have reenvisioned
the frontier as a socially charged space where Indians and invaders competed for resources and land but also shared skills, foods, fashions, customs, languages, and beliefs. Indian-white frontiers, new work has revealed, were messy, eclectic
8
Introduction
contact points where all protagonists are transformed—regardless of whether
the power dynamics between them are evenly or unevenly balanced. This has
brought the frontier closer to its rival concept, the borderland, which Herbert Eugene Bolton, the pioneering historian of Spanish North America, coined
to challenge Turner’s constricted Anglo-centric vision. Skepticism toward the nation-state as the main unit of historical analysis, a hemispheric vision, an appreciation of cultural and political mutability, and an emphasis on indigenous agency are the traditional strengths of borderlands history; today they are the strengths of frontier studies as well.⁹
This book makes use of several insights of new frontier-borderland studies. On a macrolevel, it shows how Comanches moved goods, ideas, and people across
ecological, ethnic, and political boundaries, creating transnational (or trans-imperial) networks of violence and exchange that defied the more rigid spatial arrangements Euro-American powers hoped to implement in the Southwest.
On a microlevel, it shows how Comanches forged intimate small-scale, face-
to-face markets with Euro-Americans, creating nascent versions of what Daniel Usner has called “frontier exchange economies,” self-sufficient trade systems that mostly existed outside of the burgeoning transatlantic economy. It describes how Comanches forced the colonizers to modify their aggressive ways and at
the same time recalibrated some of their own practices to adjust to the EuroAmerican presence, engaging in the kind of process of mediation, mutual invention, and cultural production Richard White has called “the middle ground.”
Geopolitically, Comanches’ Southwest would seem to fit into Jeremy Adelman’s and Stephen Aron’s recent redefinition of a borderland: it was a place where interimperial rivalries enhanced Native peoples’ strategic options by permitting them to play off colonial powers against one another.¹⁰
And yet the new frontier-borderland studies can explain the world I am de-
scribing only partially. The Southwest depicted in this book is a violent and trau-matic place where Natives and newcomers saw one another more as strangers
and adversaries than as co-creators of a common world; it was only incidentally a place where frontier exchange economies or middle grounds could flourish.
When Comanches and Euro-Americans met to discuss such contentious and
conceptually slippery matters as war, peace, reciprocity, loyalty, and justice, they sometimes relied on creative and expedient misunderstandings that were
so fundamental for the creation of middle grounds, but more often than not,
they understood each other all too well and generally did not like what they saw. Euro-Americans deemed Comanches needy, pushy, oversensitive, and ob-stinate in their pagan beliefs, and in turn appeared greedy, arrogant, bigoted, and grotesquely boorish to Comanche sensibilities. In the end, most attempts at
Introduction
9
meaningful cross-cultural mediation crumbled against the insolence of Euro-
Americans and the impatience of Comanches. Negotiating from a position of
growing physical and political power, Comanches adopted an increasingly as-
sertive stance toward colonial powers. Their foreign policy became less a matter of accommodating Euro-American expectations than rejecting, reforming, or
simply ignoring them.¹¹
Viewed broadly, the Southwest under the Comanche regime becomes a
case study of alternative frontier history. From a Comanche point of view, in fact, there were no frontiers. Where contemporary Euro-Americans (as well as later historians) saw or imagined solid imperial demarcations, Comanches saw multiple opportunities for commerce, gift exchanges, pillaging, slave raiding, ransoming, adoption, tribute extracting, and alliance making. By refusing to accept the Western notion of sovereign, undivided colonial realms, they shredded Euro-American frontiers into their component parts—colonial towns, presidios, missions, ranches, haciendas, Native villages—and dealt with each isolated
unit separately, often pitting their interests against one another. In the colonial Southwest, it was Comanches, not Euro-Americans, who mastered the policies
of divide and rule.
Similarly, Comanches’ assertive and aggressive policies toward Euro-
Americans were only secondarily a borderland product. Comanches certainly
benefited from their location between competing colonial regimes, but they had little in common with the Indians found in most borderland histories. Rather than marginalized people balancing between rival colonial regimes to enact minor
alleviations in imperial policies, Comanches were key players who often forced the would-be colonizers to compete for their military support and goodwill and navigate their initiatives and intentions. In character and logic, the eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Southwest was unequivocally a Comanche cre-
ation, an indigenous world where intercolonial rivalries were often mere surface disturbances on the deeper, stronger undercurrent of Comanche imperialism.
In popular imagination, the American Southwest before the United States
takeover in 1848 is a study in imperial failure. The overstretched and stiflingly bureaucratic Spanish empire, with its North American headquarters in Mexico
City, had spread its resources too thinly across the Western Hemisphere to affix its northernmost provinces firmly into its imperial structure. The French, while more resourceful than their myopic Spanish rivals, were too erratic and too preoccupied with Old World power politics, the British colonies, and Canadian
fur trade to do anything imperially impressive with Louisiana or the western interior. The fledgling Mexican Republic was so fragile and fractious that it lost
10
Introduction
both New Mexico and Texas in less than three decades. Reduced to a caricature, the Southwest of the mainstream view appears a medley of politically weak and isolated Native tribes, exhausted empires, and dysfunctional republics, a fragm
ented world ripe to be absorbed by Anglo Americans who alone possessed the
imagination, drive, and means to subjugate and control vast regions.¹² If weighed against such a background of imperial indifference and political impotence,
Comanches’ accomplishments would seem to diminish in significance: their
ascendancy intersected with exceptional Euro-American vulnerability, and they became a dominant power by default.
I start with a different premise—far from an imperial backwater, the South-
west was a dynamic world of vibrant societies, and Comanches had to suppress and absorb vigorous imperial projects to achieve dominance—and draw on a
string of pathbreaking studies that have given the history of the early Southwest a new look. Dismantling the long-standing stereotype of reactionary and unimaginative Spanish colonists, David Weber has demonstrated how high-ranking au-
thorities in central Mexico and local officials in New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana constantly and creatively modified the empire’s frontier policies to extend Spanish claims and power into the heart of North America. That same political and strategic dynamism, Weber has further shown, defined the Mexican
Southwest, although the infant republic lacked the resources and expansionist ambitions of the Spanish empire. Ross Frank has demonstrated that Bourbon-era New Mexico was more tightly integrated into New Spain’s imperial centers and consequently more dynamic and prosperous than has been assumed, and
Andrés Reséndez has revealed a robust Mexican nation-building project in the north after 1821. Ned Blackhawk has drawn attention to the Spaniards’ enormous capacity to employ—and endure—violence in advancing their imperial
interests. In revisiting the history of the Comanches, ethnohistorians like Morris Foster and Thomas Kavanagh have dispelled the stereotype of a simple hunting society by uncovering elaborate political systems, social institutions, trade networks, and pastoral herding economies. Together, these and other new studies have demolished the old image of the Southwest as a world of innately passive peoples, frozen in time and disconnected from the main currents of American