The Comanche Empire Read online

Internal strength translated into external expansion. On the central plains, the Cuartelejo and Paloma Apaches kept the Pawnees out of western hunting

  ranges, and farther south, around the Big Bend of the Arkansas and the forks of the Red River, the Jicarillas, Carlanas, and Sierra Blancas forced the Wichitas to move their villages out of prime bison range. The main course of Apache expansion was south of the Red River, where the Lipans clashed with the Jumanos,

  ethnically diverse seminomadic hunters and farmers who had built a bustling

  long-distance trade network between the Río Grande and the Caddo villages on the southern prairies. Apache-Jumano wars raged until the mid-1710s when the Jumanos, weakened by disease and droughts, moved into Spanish missions or

  joined the Lipans. From then on, the Apaches possessed a virtual monopoly over

  Conquest

  31

  the western hunting ranges below the Platte as well as on the Spanish markets in eastern New Mexico and western Texas. Their various bands traded regularly at Taos, Pecos, La Junta, and San Antonio, bringing in hides, skins, and Caddo captives. During the dry spells that repeatedly scourged the Southwest, interrupting trade and diplomacy, they raided the same settlements for maize and livestock.

  Spanish officials responded with punitive campaigns, which were frequently

  transformed into slave raids, and Franciscan priests pleaded with the Apaches to embrace Catholicism and mission life, but both met with little success.²⁶

  By entering the southern plains, therefore, Comanches set themselves on

  a collision course with another expanding people, entangling themselves in a war that raged for more than half a century across the entire southern plains.

  Comanche-Apache wars are often depicted as a primal Hobbesian struggle for

  land fueled by ethnic hatred, but they began as a strategic contest over specific locations and resources. The main contention point was the control of river

  valleys. Both groups needed these precious zones for their survival, which gave rise to a war over microenvironments. During warm seasons, Apaches needed the stream bottoms for their maize fields and irrigation systems while Comanches needed them for the grass and low-saline water they provided for their growing horse herds. The contest became even fiercer in winters when both groups became utterly dependent on the river valleys, the only places on the open plains that offered relief from the harsh elements. The bluffs and cutbanks gave shelter against blizzards, the dense groves of cottonwood yielded fuel for heating and supplementary forage for horses, and the streams provided reliable water at a time when the rains often dwindled almost to nothing.²⁷

  Intertwined with this conflict over river bottoms was a commercial rivalry over New Mexico’s markets and food exports. After committing to full-time hunting on the plains, Comanches could no longer concentrate on gathering with the

  same intensity they had maintained in the mountains. They continued to col-

  lect berries, nuts, fruit, and root vegetables, but gathering no longer formed a major economic activity; one estimate suggests that Comanches lost two-thirds of their plant lore upon moving to the grasslands. The corollary of this economic streamlining was a chronic nutritional imbalance: the new bison-based diet was high in protein but desperately low in carbohydrates. An extremely high-protein and low-carbohydrate diet can be hazardous for pregnant women and fetuses,

  causing miscarriages, lowered birth weight, and cognitive impairment. If the protein intake exceeds 40 percent while the intake of both carbohydrates and fat drops—as could easily happen on the plains during late winters when bison’s body fat plunged—the entire population could become susceptible to protein

  poisoning.²⁸ Comanches had two basic options in solving such dietary dilemmas.

  32

  Conquest

  One was to follow the Apache example and undertake streamside gardening,

  but this option was unfeasible because it would have tied them to a place and compromised their mobile military effectiveness. The second, and strategically sounder, alternative was to further intensify their hunting economy, eliminate the Apaches from New Mexican markets, and then exchange their surplus meat,

  fat, and hides for maize and other carbohydrate products at the Pueblo fairs. In essence, then, the Comanche-Apache wars were fought over carbohydrates.

  It was because the conflict revolved around life’s essentials—food, water, shelter—that the fighting became so unforgiving. By the late 1710s an all-out war had engulfed the upper Arkansas basin and was rapidly spilling over to the adjacent areas. Comanches soon dominated the war and kept up the pressure until

  the last Apache villages disappeared from the southern plains. They often operated as a single unit with their Ute allies, relying on combined force, whereas the numerous Apache villages tended to act independently. The Apaches were

  also divided. The Jicarilla, Carlana, and Sierra Blanca bands were caught in an on-and-off war with the Faraone Apaches, who had specialized in the late seventeenth century in captive and livestock raiding, attacking in all directions from their homelands in the Sandia Mountains. But the Apaches’ main weakness was

  their mixed hunting and farming economy, which now, when they were at war

  with the Comanches and Utes, turned from an economic asset into a military

  liability. Tied to the soil at exact times of the year, Apache farmers were defenseless against their mounted rivals who turned the once-protective farming villages into deathtraps. Capitalizing on their long-range mobility, Comanches and Utes concentrated overwhelming force against isolated Apache villages, raiding them for crops and captives or obliterating them with devastating guerrilla attacks. As organized as they were mobile, Comanches were also proficient in defensive

  warfare, as one observer reported in the 1720s: “the nation of the Comanches

  . . . conserves such solidarity that both on the marches which they continually make, wandering like the Israelites, as well as in the camps which they establish where they settle, they are formidable in their defense.”²⁹

  Comanches and Utes also used their mobility and range to sever Apaches’

  trade links. They attacked New Mexican fairs during Apache visits, disrupting the seasonal pattern of the commerce. In 1719 one Spanish official deplored how Comanches and Utes “go about together for the purpose of interfering with the little barter which this kingdom has with the nations which come in to ransom.

  They prevent their entrance and communication with us.” At the same time on

  the opposite side of their shrinking domain, Apaches lost touch with Louisiana’s French merchants, whose western operations were undercut by the monopolistic trade policies of the formidable Osages and the Wichita confederation—the

  Conquest

  33

  Tawakonis, Taovayas, Iscanis, and Kichais—who controlled the lands between

  the Mississippi valley and the Apache territory. The collapse of Apaches’ trade network not only weakened their ability to repel the Comanche-Ute onslaught; it also left them vulnerable in their old rivalries with the Wichitas and Pawnees, rivalries that had intensified markedly around 1700 when Wichitas and Pawnees began to sell Apache captives to French traders.³⁰

  Caught between two violent fronts and cut off from their economic lifelines, Apaches lost their ability to muster effective resistance. Facing imminent collapse, Jicarillas fled to Taos where they asked for protection and, for the first time, pledged to accept Christianity. “I am, Sir, in a mission called San Gerónimo de los Taos,” an astonished Father Juan de la Cruz wrote to the viceroy in 1719, “so close to heathenism, that, as is commonly said, we are shoulder to shoulder. A tribe of heathen Apache, a nation widely scattered in these parts . . . have come to ask for holy baptism.” The Apache offer, exactly because it mixed strategic and religious elements, appealed to Spanish authorities, who in August held

  a war council in Santa Fe and decided to sid
e with the Apaches and declare

  war on the Comanche-Ute bloc. A stronger Apache nation on the plains, the

  council reasoned, would shield New Mexico from Comanche and Ute raids,

  which had grown increasingly destructive during the preceding years. Above all, a Spanish-Apache coalition would protect New Mexico and the mining districts of northern Mexico against the anticipated French invasion—an old threat that had become acute with the outbreak of a European conflict, the War of the

  Quadruple Alliance, in late 1718. “It is necessary to hold this [Apache] nation,”

  the viceroy instructed from Mexico, “because of the hostilities which the French have launched” and because “the Apache nation aided by ourselves could inflict considerable damage on the French and block their evil designs.”³¹

  So, in fall 1719, New Mexico Governor Valverde personally led an expedition

  of some six hundred presidial troops, militia, and Pueblo auxiliaries into the Arkansas valley, hoping to “curb the boldness” of Comanches and Utes and pun-

  ish them for the “hostilities, murders, and robberies they have made upon this realm.” Rather than curbing the momentum of Comanche-Ute expansion, however, the campaign revealed that the Spaniards had already missed their window of opportunity. Signs were ominous from the start. On their way to the Arkansas war zone, the Spaniards encountered several fleeing Jicarilla and Sierra Blanca bands. One group told the governor that Comanches and Utes “had killed many

  of their nation and carried off their women and children captives until they no longer knew where to go to live in safety,” and another depicted an episode of an indigenous total war: “the Comanche and Ute enemies had attacked a ranchería of their nation, causing sixty deaths, carrying off sixty-four women and children,

  34

  Conquest

  burning and destroying a little house in the shape of a tower which was there, and even the heaps of maize. There were none of their possessions that were

  not destroyed.” Eager to obtain Spanish assistance, Jicarillas agreed to “receive the water of holy baptism” and loyally serve the governor whom they accepted as their “father.” On his part, Valverde handed chocolate and tobacco to the refugees and recruited them as auxiliaries for his march toward the Arkansas.

  Adhering to long-standing Spanish laws, he did not even consider giving guns to Spain’s new Indian allies.³²

  As the expedition drew closer to the river, they entered a wasteland of deserted Apache villages and burned maize fields the Comanche-Ute invasion had left in its wake. Apaches, Valverde noted, “live in constant alarm and at night they leave their houses and retire to the hills to insure their lives.” Comanches and Utes, however, were nowhere to be found, and Valverde’s idle expedition transformed into a mobile ritual ground where the Spaniards and Apaches tried to buttress their tentative alliance through Catholic ceremonies and ritual killings of mountain lions, wildcats, and bears. After weeks of futile search, the expedition learned from a band of several hundred Apache refugees that Comanches and

  Utes had sacked El Cuartelejo, a fabled Apache settlement a few miles north of the Arkansas valley. It was a devastating blow, for El Cuartelejo—“fortified building”—had become a key seat of Apache power in the late seventeenth century,

  when disgruntled Pueblo apostates escaped there and introduced the Apaches

  to horses and new farming techniques. A few days later a wounded Paloma chief brought more bad news. Along the Platte River, “on the most remote borderlands of the Apaches,” the French had built “two large pueblos, each of which is as large as that of Taos,” among the Pawnees. The French and Pawnees had

  then attacked the Palomas “from ambush while they were planting corn” and

  seized their lands. Adding insult to injury, the French had called the Spaniards

  “women” and encouraged the fleeing Palomas to bring them into Pawnee coun-

  try to fight them. Valverde’s expedition returned to Santa Fe after having spent some two months on the plains. By the year’s end, as rumors transformed into reports, Spanish officials in Mexico City found themselves dealing with dispatches stating that there were six thousand Frenchmen within 180 miles of Santa Fe.³³

  In a roundabout way, the French penetration onto the central plains also af-

  fected the outcome of Comanche-Ute-Apache struggle over the Arkansas basin.

  Fearing that New Mexico was threatened by an imminent French invasion,

  Spanish officials redirected their efforts against the French-Pawnee coalition on the central plains, ignoring the Apache situation farther south. In June 1720, Lieutenant General Pedro de Villasur led forty-five presidial soldiers and sixty Pueblo auxiliaries north to oust the French from Pawnee country. The campaign

  Conquest

  35

  was a fiasco: thirty-two soldiers, a third of the strength of the Santa Fe garrison, perished at the hands of the Pawnees and their Otoe allies. The Villasur catastrophe, coupled with a peace between Spain and France in Europe later that year, made Spanish officials reluctant to invest men and money to help the Apaches in what appeared more and more to be a lost cause. The officials debated for several years whether to build a presidio at El Cuartelejo or closer to New Mexico among the Jicarillas, but they took no action.³⁴

  As Spain’s support faded so too did Apaches’ hopes of maintaining a foothold in the Arkansas valley. By 1723 a series of Comanche attacks had eliminated

  what remained of their resistance. In November of that year a delegation of Jicarilla and Sierra Blanca chiefs reported at the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe that Comanches “had attacked them with a large number” and “with such daring

  and resolution that they killed many men, carrying off their women and chil-

  dren as captives.” Desperate to obtain Spanish help, Apache chiefs made an unprecedented offer. While earlier only an occasional Apache band had accepted Christianity and vassalage to Spain, the chiefs now spoke of a sweeping political, religious, and cultural conversion, “pleading that the sacrament of holy baptism be administered to them together with all those of their rancherías,” and promising “to come together to live in their pueblos in the same form in which the Christian Indians of this kingdom dwell.” In return for their “entire docility,” they petitioned the Spaniards to build a garrison at La Jicarilla, a large Sierra Blanca, Paloma, and Jicarilla village on the Canadian River, some 110 miles northeast of Santa Fe. The offer sent Spanish imaginations running. A belt of loyal sedentary Indians on New Mexico’s eastern front, a rapidly convened war council concluded, would “serve as a bulwark for this kingdom, for its greater security from French arms.” Moreover, the colonization of Apachería would allow Spain to

  extend its authority to the plains and create a barrier against the Comanches. “It will be wise to continue the conquest until all the enemy be exterminated,” Juan de Olivan Revolledo, a royal inspector in Mexico City, wrote.³⁵

  In November 1723 Governor Juan Domingo de Bustamante rode out with

  fifty soldiers—more than half of Santa Fe’s presidial troops—to inspect La Jicarilla. Apaches welcomed him with engravings of the Virgin Mary and renewed

  pledges of subordination. But the Comanches, alarmed by the possibility of a double war with both the Spaniards and the Apaches, stormed La Jicarilla in

  January of 1724 with the intention to destroy it. They besieged the village for four nights and five days and demanded that the Apaches give up all their women and children. When the Apaches relented, they opened fire on the men and threatened to eat their bodies, forcing them to flee. In March, upon learning about the battle, Bustamante led an expedition deep into Comanche territory and re-

  36

  Conquest

  trieved sixty-four captives. But whatever momentum Bustamante had managed

  to create evaporated when the officials in Mexico City failed to decide whether or not to colonize La Jicarilla. While
Mexico City hesitated, Comanches lashed the Apache villages with relentless attacks, which culminated in a ferocious nine-day battle at El Gran Sierra del Fierro in the present-day Texas Panhandle.³⁶

  Beaten by the Comanches and Utes and abandoned by Spain, the Apaches

  vacated all the lands north of the Canadian River, which became the southern border of the Comanche-Ute domain. Some Jicarilla bands crossed the Sangre

  de Cristo Range to seek protection among the Navajos, while others crossed the Cimarron and Canadian rivers to the south, hoping to find refuge in the Llano Estacado, an extensive tableland of trackless plateaus, deep canyons, and playa lakes that encompasses modern-day eastern New Mexico and western Texas.

  Some Jicarillas also settled on the Río Trampas near Taos, where Franciscans built them a mission in 1733. When Governor Gervasio Cruzat y Góngora “cut

  off their trade in hides,” however, the Jicarillas abandoned the mission. Some of their members reportedly “dispersed themselves among the Utes and Comanches.”

  The Palomas, Cuartelejos, and Sierra Blancas survived a while longer on the

  grasslands, buoyed by a short-lived truce that the French mediated in 1724 between them and the Osages, Pawnees, Iowas, Otoes, and Kansas. Three years

  later the French were reported to be moving with “a great force of Apaches of the nations Palomas, Cuartelejos, and Sierra Blancas to look for the Comanches (a people widely scattered because of the numerousness of their nation) to see if they could force them to leave these regions.” Nothing came of that effort, however, and by the decade’s end the Palomas, Cuartelejos, and Sierra Blancas had given up resistance and dispersed. Some sought shelter in the Pecos River valley beyond the Mescalero Escarpment, which still fell outside of Comanche reach, and by the 1730s the Apaches had developed close ties with Pecos. Others crossed the Canadian River and pushed deep into the Llano Estacado, following Jicarilla refugees who had fled before.³⁷

  If there was a pivotal event in Apaches’ defeat, it was Spain’s decision not to colonize La Jicarilla. The final decision on the colonization scheme had fallen on Brigadier General Pedro de Rivera who in 1724 had been sent as a special