The Comanche Empire Read online

  history.¹³

  Historians have also begun to create new syntheses that illustrate how this

  rediscovered human ambition, energy, and ingenuity shaped the evolution of

  cross-cultural relations in the Southwest. Gary Clayton Anderson has examined the region as a contested and culturally elastic meeting ground where many

  Native groups resisted conquest through ethnogenesis, by constantly reshaping their economies, societies, and identities. In a seminal study, James Brooks has

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  recast the region as an ethnic mosaic connected by an intercultural exchange network that revolved around “kinship slavery” and blended indigenous and

  colonial traditions of servitude, violence, male honor, and retribution into a distinctive borderlands cultural economy. With such insights, the Southwest is now emerging as a vigorous world of enduring social subversion where Natives and newcomers remained roughly equal in power and where familiar dichotomies of

  Indians and Europeans, or masters and victims, often became meaningless.¹⁴

  I also take a broad long-term look at intercultural relationships in the Southwest but draw a distinctive, two-pronged conclusion. I show how Comanches

  cooperated and compromised with other peoples but also argue that their relations with the Spaniards, Mexicans, Wichitas, and others remained grounded in conflict and exploitation. Comanchería’s borders were sites of mutualistic trade and cultural fusion, but they were also sites of extortion, systematic violence, coerced exchange, political manipulation, and hardening racial attitudes. The key difference between the existing studies and this book centers on the question of power and its distribution. According to Brooks’s landmark Captives and Cousins, for example, the intricate patterns of raiding, exchange, and captive-seizure knitted disparate peoples into intimate webs of interdependence, equalized wealth distinctions among groups, and worked against the emergence of

  asymmetrical power relations. The Southwest he—and others—portrays was a

  place of nondominant frontiers where neither colonists nor Natives possessed the power to rule over the other. My argument, in a sense, is more traditional: such actions as raiding, enslaving, ethnic absorption, and even exchange generally benefit some groups more than they do others. In the Southwest, moreover, that process toward inequality was a cumulative one. Once the Comanches

  secured their territorial control over the southern plains in the mid-eighteenth century, they entered into a spiral of growing power and influence that stemmed from their ability to extract political and material benefits from the urban-based societies in New Mexico, Texas, and the Great Plains.¹⁵

  The conspicuous differences between earlier studies and this book rise

  from different conceptual framing and scaling. Recent works on Indian–Euro-

  American relations in the Southwest—as in North America in general—share

  a particular focus: they look at events through a local lens, stressing individual and small-group agency over the larger structural forces. Suffused with subaltern interpretations, they tend to focus on the fringe peoples living on the frontiers’

  edges and trace how they engaged in cross-cultural dialogue and came together to form new hybrid communities, gradually shading into one another. Occupied with the local, the specific, and the particular, they are less concerned with the broader political, economic, and cultural struggles. Hierarchies of power, privi-

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  lege, and wealth, while not ignored, are relegated to the background of the central story of cross-cultural cooperation and assimilation.¹⁶

  In this book, in contrast, I examine the inhabitants of the Southwest in larger aggregates. While recognizing that ethnic and cultural boundaries were often porous, I look at those peoples as they identified and understood themselves: as distinct groups of Apaches, Comanches, Spaniards, French, Mexicans, and

  Anglo-Americans. With this shift in frame and focus, local arrangements may

  become somewhat blurred and lose some of their primacy, but the broader

  panorama opens a clearer view to the governing macroscale dynamics. It shows that the American Southwest, for all its wide-ranging cultural mixing, remained a polarized world where disparate ethnic groups clashed and competed bitterly with one another, where inequities of wealth and opportunity remained a tangible fact of life, and where resources, people, and power gravitated toward Comanchería.¹⁷

  Besides adjusting the analytical scale, the reconstruction of Comanche power has entailed a basic visual reorientation. Instead of looking at events from colonial frontiers inward—a traditional approach that inevitably ties explanations to contemporary Western biases—this book looks at developments from Comanchería outward. Viewed from this angle, Comanche actions take on new shape

  and meaning. Acts that previously seemed arbitrary or impulsive fall into coherent patterns with their own internal logic and purpose. A foreign policy that previously appeared an opportunistic search for microlevel openings on white-controlled imperial frontiers now emerges as planned, synchronized, and domineering. We see how Comanches did not merely frequent colonial markets; they fashioned an imposing trading empire that mantled much of the Southwest and

  the Great Plains. They did not merely respond to political initiatives dictated from abroad, but actively sought and stipulated treaties. Far from being situa-tional opportunists, they fused exchange, organized pilfering, and targeted destruction into a complex economy of violence, which allowed them to simulta-

  neously enforce favorable trade agreements, create artificial demand for their exports, extort tribute payments from colonial outposts, and fuel a massive trade network with stolen horses, captives, and other marketable commodities. Seen from Mexico City, the far north often seemed chaotic and unsettling; seen from Comanchería, it appears nuanced, orderly, and reassuring.

  Understanding Comanches’ rise to power requires more than unearthing

  previously veiled patterns and structures: it also requires describing events and developments on Comanche terms. To capture the fundamental nature of the

  Comanche empire, we need to uncover meanings behind words, motives behind

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  actions, strategies behind policies, and, eventually, the cultural order that drove it all. This, however, is a daunting task because the available sources do not readily lend themselves to deep cultural analysis. Euro-American colonial records, the documentary spine of this book, address virtually every aspect of Comanche political economy from warfare, exchange, and diplomacy to material production, slavery, and social relations, but although the records are rich in depiction and detail, the picture they yield is nevertheless the one-dimensional view of an outsider. Government reports, captivity narratives, travelers’ journals, and traders’

  accounts tell us a great deal about Comanche actions but rarely shed light on the cultural motives behind those actions. Few contemporary observers possessed

  the analytical tools to understand the subtleties between Native and non-Native cultural logic, and even fewer possessed the ability—or the inclination—to

  write down what they learned. The available sources are thus almost invariably infected with gaps, accidental misreadings, and intentional misconstructions, leaving historians to work with material that is fragmentary at best and outright erroneous at worst.

  In my endeavor to recover Comanche motives and meanings from the flawed

  evidence, I have employed an array of historical and ethnohistorical methods.

  I have prioritized accounts that recount, even in a mutated form, Comanche

  voice—while keeping in mind that that voice is recorded through a cultural

  colander and that it belongs often to privileged headmen, seldom to the poor and deprived, and virtually never to women and the young. I have cross-checked Spanish, French, Mexican, and A
nglo-American documents against one another

  to create more stereoscopic and, arguably, more accurate portrayals of Comanche intentions and objectives. Throughout the writing process, I have compared historical documents to ethnographic data, processing Euro-American-produced materials through an ethnohistorical filter. This has involved a cautious use of

  “upstreaming” whereby one works back from more recent and more complete

  ethnological observations to decipher practices and behaviors of earlier periods.

  Even more reluctantly, I have sometimes relied on “side-streaming,” deducing interpretations about Comanche cultural values from generalized models of

  Native societies of the Great Plains and other regions.¹⁸

  This kind of methodological layering and rotation of viewpoints helps out-

  line the broad contours of Comanche cultural order, but the resulting picture is still only an approximate one. Regardless of their origin, all colonial records are marred with similar deep-seated biases, while upstreaming runs the risk of presentism, tainting analysis with a sense of static timelessness; it assumes that Native peoples and their traditions have somehow been immune to modernity

  and have somehow remained unchanged through centuries of dispossession,

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  population loss, and cultural genocide. Side-streaming threatens to submerge unique Comanche traits under crude blanket definitions of Indians in general and Plains Indians in particular. Shortcomings like these can produce what historian Frederick Hoxie has called “cookbook ethnohistory”: complex cultures

  are collapsed into shorthand recipes, human behavior is reduced to a culturally or genetically determined reflex, and individual impulses become irrelevant.

  As an antidote against this kind of trivialization, Hoxie urges historians to describe societies in their own, inherently asymmetrical terms and create less linear stories that leave room for the surprising and the puzzling.¹⁹

  Taking a cue from Hoxie, I have embraced rather than downplayed the

  contradictory aspects of Comanche behavior. The Comanches depicted in this

  book were empire-builders who did not possess a grand imperial strategy and

  conquerors who saw themselves more as guardians than governors of the land

  and its bounties. They were warriors who often favored barter over battle and traders who did not hesitate to rely on lethal violence to protect their interests.

  They were shrewd diplomats who at times eschewed formal political institutions and peacemakers who tortured enemies to demonstrate military and cultural supremacy. They were racially color-blind people who saw in almost every stranger a potential kinsperson, but they nevertheless built the largest slave economy in the colonial Southwest. Their war chiefs insulted, intimidated, and demeaned colonial agents with shockingly brutal words and gestures, but their peace leaders spoke eloquently of forgiveness, pity, and regret, using elaborate metaphors and ritual language to persuade their Euro-American counterparts. Above all, the Comanches were not a monolith obeying an unyielding cultural code but rather an assemblage of individuals with different and sometimes conflicting personalities, interests, and ambitions. They shared certain core values and objectives, but they also disagreed and quarreled over the methods, goals, and costs of their policies. The Comanche society, in short, was a complex one in which several standards of conduct coexisted simultaneously.

  Historian Bruce Trigger has explained Native American behavior from a

  slightly different angle than Hoxie by focusing on the underlying mental processes of learning, judging, and reasoning. Assuming a middle course in the

  long, drawn-out debates over cross-cultural variations in human motivations, Trigger argues that while traditional cultural beliefs continued to shape Native American responses to European contact and colonialism, in the long run more universal pragmatic assessments and calculations came to play a dominant role.

  This kind of cognitive reorganization, Trigger maintains, occurred at all levels of behavior but was most visible in those areas that relate more directly to Indians’

  material well-being—technology and power. For Trigger, the outcome of colo-

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  nial contact was not a makeover of Native Americans into “universal economic men,” nor was it an unyielding persistence of otherness.²⁰

  Following Trigger, I pay particular attention to the changes that occurred over time in the underlying principles of Comanche behavior. The introduction of

  horses, guns, and other Old World technology arguably prompted Comanches

  to view their place and possibilities in the world in a different light, while close political and commercial interactions with colonial powers exposed them to the logic and laws of European diplomacy and the market. Comanches may have

  initially perceived European goods through the mold of their idiosyncratic traditions, but that did not prevent them from grasping the tremendous military and material advantages of horses, firearms, and metal—or from employing those

  advantages against Euro-Americans themselves. Similarly, like many other in-

  digenous peoples, Comanches may have at first viewed the mounted, gun-using

  newcomers as all-powerful otherworldly beings, yet within years they learned to manipulate the Spaniards’ all-too-human weaknesses to their own advantage.

  Within a generation or so after the first contact, Comanches had learned to

  distinguish between the motives and methods of the different colonial powers and to exploit those differences to advance their own political and economic agendas. Grounded in utilitarian calculations of self-interest, such behavior was rational in the sense most contemporary Euro-Americans and later historians

  would have understood the term.

  And yet the yawning gulf separating Comanche and Euro-American cultural

  and mental worlds never disappeared—far from it. Regardless of their universal features, the actions and policies of Comanches remained embedded in a system of reality that was distinctly non-Western in nature. To the limited extent that it is possible to unveil the intentions that went into the actions of eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century Indians, it seems plain that the rationale of Comanche behavior remained worlds apart from that of Euro-Americans.

  On the face of it, Comanche actions fell into unambiguous categories—trad-

  ing, raiding, enslaving, and so forth—that were easily recognizable and understandable to contemporary Euro-Americans and modern historians alike. But

  the similarities are only skin deep; a more focused look reveals how Comanche actions time and again transcended familiar categories and defied easy labeling.

  Unlike Euro-Americans, Comanches did not separate trade from larger social

  relations but instead understood it as a form of sharing between relatives, either real or fictive. They considered theft a legitimate way of rectifying short-term imbalances in resource distribution rather than an antagonistic act that automatically canceled out future peaceful interactions. They killed, waged war, and dispossessed other societies, not necessarily to conquer, but to extract ven-

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  geance and to appease the spirits of their slain kin through dead enemy bodies.

  Capturing people from other ethnic groups did not necessarily signify a passage from freedom into slavery but a move from one kinship network to another.

  Even gift giving, the leitmotif of American Indian diplomacy, contained what appears at least on the surface a striking contradiction. Like most American Indians, Comanches considered gift exchanges a prerequisite for peaceful relations, yet they demanded one-sided gift distributions from Euro-American colonists, readily relying on violence if denied.²¹

  Like many other imperial powers, then, Comanches employed aggressive

  power politics without necessarily considering their actio
ns as such. They built a hierarchical intersocietal system with policies that were often geared toward securing gifts, conciliation, reciprocal services, and new relatives from peoples whom they may have considered as much kin and allies as strangers and enemies. Indeed, the fact that Comanches did things differently may well have been one of their greatest political assets. Their ability to move nimbly from raiding to trading, from diplomacy to violence, and from enslaving to adoption not only left their colonial rivals confused; it often left them helpless. Western insistence upon uniformity in principle and action, a disposition that manifested itself most clearly in centralized state bureaucracies, rendered their policies slow and heavy-handed in comparison to Comanches’ strategic fluidity. Euro-Americans

  compartmentalized foreign relations into distinct, often mutually exclusive categories and found it exceedingly difficult to deal with peoples who refused to recognize such categories. Unable to dissect, classify, and comprehend the Comanches and their actions, colonial agents were also unable to contain them.

  Herein lay the ultimate paradox. While initially Comanches adjusted their

  traditions, behaviors, and even beliefs to accommodate the arrival of Europeans and their technologies, they later turned the tables on Europe’s colonial expansion by simply refusing to change. By preserving the essentials of their traditional ways—and by expecting others to conform to their cultural order—they forced

  the colonists to adjust to a world that was foreign, uncontrollable, and, increasingly, unlivable.

  The chapters that follow tell two intertwined stories. The first story exam-

  ines cross-cultural relations on the southern plains, in the Southwest, and in northern Mexico from the perspective of Comanches, exploring how this nation rose to dominance and how it constantly reinvented itself to sustain external expansion. The other story looks at events from the standpoint of the Spaniards, Mexicans, Apaches, and others who variously competed and cooperated with

  the Comanches but ultimately faced marginalization and dispossession in the

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  Comanche-controlled world. These two stories are woven into a single narrative thread, which in turn is embedded within the broader framework of Europe’s