The Comanche Empire Page 7

  crown official to inspect northern New Spain’s formal defenses. A newcomer to the frontier, Rivera took a critical look at New Mexico’s Indian policy and found it lacking. Adopting a panoramic strategic view while at the same time making every effort to cut spending, he concluded that Spanish settlers and resources were already too thinly spread for launching further colonizing projects. “If every proposal for the foundation of presidios for reduction were acceded to,” he

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  warned, “the treasury of Midas would not suffice,” and he urged New Mexicans rather to “conserve that which is acquired, to enjoy the fruit which has been cut, than to augment the dominions without any hope.”³⁸

  Rivera’s report had a lasting legacy in New Mexico, prompting the authorities to suspend further colonizing efforts on the plains and cut off military support to the Apaches. Turning inward, Spanish New Mexico focused on consolidating its hold over the Río Grande valley, its demographic, economic, and political heart.

  But for all its fiscal and strategic acumen, Rivera’s report contained a massive miscalculation. By withdrawing from the plains, Spain left the door wide open for the Comanches, who within a generation would sweep through the southern

  plains and press against the entire length of Spain’s far northern frontier from New Mexico’s northern tip down to central Texas.

  The conquest of the upper Arkansas basin in the 1720s marked the end of the

  first phase of Comanche expansion. Instead of riding the momentum into the

  Llano Estacado to pursue the already dislodged Apaches, Comanches halted

  their conquering campaign. The relentless war had sent the Apaches fleeing, but it had also fulfilled the Comanches’ immediate territorial ambitions and economic needs. Temporarily satisfied, they concentrated on solidifying their hold on their new plains homeland for nearly a decade.³⁹

  Stretching from the Arkansas valley in the north to the Cimarron River in the south and from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the west to the plains-prairie ecotone at the ninety-eight meridian in the east, that home range provided a superb setting for Comanches’ emerging equestrian hunting-based way of life.

  The sprawling, gently rolling meadows proliferated with pasture and bison, and the broad valleys of the Arkansas and Cimarron rivers provided water, firewood, and shelter for Comanches and their herds. The most valuable portion of the

  nascent Comanchería was the Big Timbers of the Arkansas, a thick grove of

  cottonwood trees stretching over some sixty miles downriver from the Purgatoire junction. Known to Spaniards as La Casa de Palo, “the house of wood,” the Big Timbers was a winter haven for horses. The trunks of the cottonwoods formed

  sheltering walls against cold breezes and their bark and twigs provided an alternative source of food when grasses failed or were buried under snow. These were crucial advantages, for the plains winters could be vicious even in the south, exposing horses to hypothermia and starvation.⁴⁰

  With their herds flourishing in the shelter of the Big Timbers, Comanches

  completed the conversion to full-blown equestrianism with remarkable speed.

  They were still only partially mounted in the late 1720s, using both horses and dogs to move their belongings, but within a decade they had accumulated so

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  many horses that they had to break into numerous small bands to accommodate

  their herds’ foraging needs. A local residential band of one or more extended families, nʉmʉnahkahnis, became the basic social unit. These bands—or rancherías as Spaniards called them—could include anywhere from one to a few dozen nʉmʉnahkahnis, and their size ranged from twenty or thirty to several hundred people. Regardless of size, kinship was the fundamental unifying force: a ranchería was a social extension of a single headman, paraibo, whose kinship ties, political influence, and personal charisma held the unit together.⁴¹

  By the 1730s, the Comanches had accumulated enough horses to put all

  their people on horseback, thus reaching the critical threshold of mounted

  nomadism. They adopted bigger travois and tipis and developed a practice of

  seasonal migrations conditioned by the availability of bison, horse pasturages, wood, and water. It was also the period when Comanches began to employ the

  mounted bison chase, which would later become the quintessential symbol of

  the material prosperity and cultural flamboyance of Plains Indian cultures. In its fully matured form, the chase was as dramatic as it was effective. Riding in full speed alongside a fleeing herd and firing arrows into selected animals, a group of hunters could bring down two to three hundred bison in a single chase that took less than an hour. It was enough to keep several hundred people sheltered, clothed, and nourished for more than a month.⁴²

  Comanches also seized the vacant trading niche that had opened in northern

  New Mexico after the Apache retreat. They restored their war-worn ties with

  Taos and established new links with the villages in the Chama district west of Taos. The villages soon became sites for closely regulated trade fairs, which attracted large numbers of Comanches who traveled annually to the mountain-

  nestled settlements, following the sheltering Purgatoire valley. The main hub of the burgeoning exchange was Taos, where Comanches came to barter during

  summer months under “peace of the market.” Comanches found in the pueblo

  a ready clientele for their bison hides, tanned skins, dried meats, salt, and, above all, captives. Sitting in New Mexico’s far northeastern corner, Taos lay beyond the effective reach of Spain’s colonial authority, allowing its inhabitants to engage relatively freely in the officially prohibited captive trade. Slave traffic was well established by 1730, and in 1737 Governor Henrique de Olavide y Michelena tacitly approved it by ordering that the citizens should notify the proper officials before engaging in ransoming. Taoseños designated specific dates for the rescate, and Comanches brought in vast numbers of captives they had taken during long-distance slaving expeditions. By 1740 the human traffic had become so extensive that former Indian captives, genízaros, were granted permission to form their own community on the border because the Spaniards could

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  not absorb all the captives into their households as laborers. In exchange for captives, Taoseños supplied Comanches with crucial necessities for their newly conceived plains life—carbohydrates, horses, metal tools, and guns. Comanches responded by quelling their raids everywhere in New Mexico, giving the colony a much needed respite from violence.⁴³

  The peace lasted on the plains until the closing years of the 1730s, when

  Comanches pushed onto the Apache lands south of the Cimarron valley. The

  immediate impetus for the renewed expansion was probably demographic.

  Comanches’ successful shift to mounted hunting and nomadism, together with

  their practice of incorporating captive women and children into their families, sustained a rapid population growth, which may have exceeded the carrying

  capacity of their bounded territory. In 1740 one observer reported that the

  upper Arkansas valley alone was dotted by fifty to sixty Comanche camps, which together must have contained some ten thousand people. Those camps, moreover, had to live “scattered about, caring for the many horses they get from New Mexico.” Comanches, it seems, had become too prosperous for the confines of

  the Arkansas basin.⁴⁴

  The reactivation of Comanche expansion was also tied to the borderlands’

  increasingly intricate requirements of exchange, production, and raiding. To sustain their lucrative trade in northern New Mexico, Comanches needed, first of all, a steady access to Apache slaves. Equally important, they had to refrain from plundering New Mexico for horses, lest they jeopardize their access to the colony’s slave markets. Raiding Apache vil
lages in the south brought a solution on both counts, yielding captives for exchange and horses for domestic use.

  But warfare was never a purely material affair for Comanches whose motives

  to fight ranged from material and strategic to cultural and social; accordingly, it is likely that the new round of expansion had an internal sociocultural element.

  The consuming wars of the 1710s and early 1720s had probably accentuated the martial aspects of the Comanche culture, fostering a process that would in the late eighteenth century culminate in a rank society in which men could gain

  considerable social status through war exploits. Increasingly, the inner workings of the Comanche society required violent external action, creating a compelling dynamic that may have come into play in the late 1730s. With the cessation of the Apache wars more than a decade earlier, there had emerged a cadre of young warriors who lacked the military records of the previous generation and consequently found their road to social prestige closed. For those men the resumption of fighting may have been a welcome development that unlocked the frozen

  social hierarchy.⁴⁵

  Before the late 1730s, Comanche war parties were assaulting the Jicarillas and

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  other Apache groups across the northern Llano Estacado, relying on the same

  tactics that had earlier served them so well farther north. Often cooperating with Utes, they overran Apache villages with quick surprise attacks, seizing women and children, destroying everything from dwellings to crops, and disrupting the carefully orchestrated farming cycle. The odds were tilted against the Apaches even more heavily than before, since Comanches had by now developed an advanced equestrian war machine. They fought with long metal-tipped spears and short bows that were specially designed for mounted warfare and shielded their mounts and their own bodies with thick leather armor. They moved flexibly between small-scale guerrilla raids aimed at plundering and massive frontal attacks aimed at destroying the enemy.⁴⁶

  Unable to hold off the Comanche onslaught on their own, the Apaches fled

  toward New Mexico, seeking protection in the vicinity of Taos, Picurís, Pecos, and Galisteo. Spanish officials, however, were unwilling to reenter Comanche-Apache wars, in part because they were following Rivera’s advice of nonparticipation and in part because the first Family Compact between Spain and France seemed to have given New Mexico a measure of safety against French encroachments from Louisiana. Many Spanish colonists also profited handsomely from

  the rekindled Comanche-Apache wars, which brought more captives to their

  slave markets: the number of Apache baptisms in the colony more than doubled from the 1730s to the 1740s, jumping from 136 to 313. Yet, little by little, New Mexico was drawn into the conflict. Spanish officials avoided direct involvement, but the fact that they harbored Apache refugees near Pecos and other

  border towns put the colony on a collision course with the Comanches, who

  must have regarded the Spaniards as anything but neutral. Spanish authorities further alienated Comanches when they started to enforce the hitherto often

  ignored laws that prohibited Pueblo Indian trade with unconquered Indians.

  Their apparent aim was to exclude the Pueblos from the increasingly lucrative slave business, but their efforts also interrupted the critically important food trade between New Mexico and Comanchería, pushing Comanches to rely on

  raiding.⁴⁷

  On a more abstract level, Comanches and Spaniards clashed over the proper

  way of doing things on the frontier that both connected and separated them.

  When the two groups had first come in contact, their ideas of basic forms of cross-social interaction—cooperation, exchange, violence, loyalty—were nearly incomprehensible to one another. In the Comanche worldview, gifts, trade,

  and kinship were inexorably linked; they formed a central cultural metaphor

  that made peaceful relations and material exchange possible. Exchanges of gifts transformed strangers into fictive kinspeople and brought them into the familial

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  circle where people provided for each other’s needs and where goods circu-

  lated relatively freely, flowing from affluence toward deficiency. Trade was not a mechanism to create wealth but a means to seal attachments and a way to build social and political networks that protected their members against poverty and need.⁴⁸

  Spaniards, in contrast, made a clear distinction between social and economic ties. They, too, framed trade with social rituals but insisted that the actual mechanics of exchange should be governed by the logic of the market; the balance between supply and demand—not the buyer’s relationship with the seller—

  should determine what was exchanged and at what rates. Spaniards believed

  that bargaining and fluid exchange rates were an essential part of trade for they helped determine the balance between supply and demand, whereas Comanches saw trade as a form of sharing between kinspeople who took care of each other’s needs and therefore did not haggle. These were more than semantic differences. If Spaniards bargained for better prices, they acted as strangers, placing themselves outside the circle of kinship where sharing and exchange took place.

  And if they refused to participate in gift giving, they did not merely strip exchange from a decorative, trivial framing; they negated the very rationale that enticed Comanches to trade in the first place.

  This cultural chasm narrowed in the 1720s and 1730s as Comanches met with

  Spanish merchants at Taos and other border towns, but a genuine, mutual com-

  promise was still remote in the 1740s. For example, the practice of distributing political gifts had not been coded into New Mexico’s official policy, which meant that the colonists’ adherence to Native forms of diplomacy shifted from one governor and one alcalde mayor (district magistrate) to another, leaving Comanches variously confused, frustrated, and furious. At the fairs, Spanish traders exchanged gifts with Comanche visitors and participated in ceremonies and rituals, but they also violated Comanche codes of proper behavior by haggling over prices, pushing inferior commodities, and refusing to sell certain goods, such as guns.⁴⁹

  The tensions arising from disputes over political neutrality, trading privileges, and exchange protocols erupted into open hostilities in the early 1740s. Comanches and Utes launched a fierce raiding war on New Mexico, plunging the frontier above Albuquerque into a steep decline, and Spanish officials responded with sporadic punitive expeditions. The war took an unexpected twist in 1746, when Governor Joachín Codallos y Rabál learned about a startling threat: despite the escalating violence across the frontier, the inhabitants of Taos were rumored to be informing Comanches of the movements of Spanish troops. While

  shocking to Spanish authorities, this kind of collaboration was quite plausible

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  in the fluid social milieu of Spain’s far northern frontier. Having reaped great profits from Comanche commerce for years, many Taoseños may have concluded that maintaining close ties with the powerful Comanches was a better

  policy than yielding to the controlling measures and tribute demands of the

  provincial center. Betraying his anxiety over the alleged collaboration, Governor Codallos banned the Comanches from the Taos fairs in 1746 and decreed

  a mandatory death penalty for any Taoseño venturing more than a league from

  the pueblo without a license. The next year, after a flurry of Comanche attacks that nearly “destroyed the region of Abiquiú,” Codallos finally put together a large-scale punitive expedition. Riding out with more than five hundred soldiers and Indian auxiliaries, he overpowered a large Ute and Comanche camp along

  the Chama River, slaying 107 people, carrying 206 into captivity, and seizing nearly one thousand horses.⁵⁰

  It was a shocking defeat, but the worst was yet to come. In the aftermath o
f the carnage, Comanches found themselves in a serious military crisis: routed by Spanish forces in the west, they faced mounting dangers in the north and east as well. In the north they had inherited the Apaches’ on-and-off border conflict with the Skidi and Chaui (or Grand) Pawnees along the Loup River, a conflict that by the late 1740s had escalated into a bitter raiding war in which Pawnees plundered horses from Comanche rancherías and Comanches raided Pawnee

  villages for slaves and retribution. Comanches also clashed on the northern border with the Arapahoes, who ventured south from their central plains homelands to raid horses. But the situation was even more perilous in the east, where the Comanches clashed with the Osages, a powerful nation of hunters and horticulturists that dominated the tallgrass prairie borderlands between the lower Missouri and Arkansas rivers and had a secure access to French markets in the Illinois Country, or Upper Louisiana. Driven by the French demand for bison

  robes and slaves, empowered by French guns, and propelled by a rapid popu-

  lation growth, Osages had launched in the early eighteenth century a forceful expansion to the west and south. By the mid-1740s, they had forced all Wichita communities save two adjoining Taovaya villages to relocate from the middle

  Arkansas southward to the Red River, and their path onto the western buffalo plains and into the Comanche range appeared wide open.⁵¹

  This was the Comanches’ most critical hour on the southern plains. Their

  half-century expansion had drawn them into disastrous multifront wars that engulfed them on three sides. But the mid-1740s also saw Comanches reconfigur-

  ing their overall foreign political strategy in a way that allowed them to maneuver out of the military crisis. Eschewing war for diplomacy and treaty-making, they fashioned in rapid order an elaborate alliance network that not only stabi-

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  lized their northern and eastern borders but also gave them access to weaponry with which they were able to turn their military fortunes in the west.

  The cornerstone of that alliance system was an accord they formed in 1746